BIOLOGY, CULTURE, AND PERSISTENT LITERARY DYSTOPIAS: Nanelle R. Barash and David P. Barash

...Literary dystopias have this in common: They are imagined societies in which the deepest demands of human nature are either subverted, perverted, or simply made unattainable. ...

In Huxley's world, sex has been separated from reproduction: The former takes place quickly, easily, and without commitment or emotional involvement; the latter, in gigantic, highly technological hatcheries wherein embryos are created and fertilized, and babies are "born." The horror of this society is so great that an outsider, John the Savage, eventually kills his lover and hangs himself in a frenzy over its lack of poetry, insensitivity to love, and indifference to death.

No outlet here for anything approaching a normal biological urge; in fact, the use of the words "father" and "mother" is cause for scandal. The human need for affection is denied, and with it, much of human nature itself. The Director of Hatcheries describes any "emotional" and "long-drawn" interactions with the opposite sex as "indecorous," his lack of interest in romance contrasting with the novel's title, which was inspired by the rapturous words of Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest, after she falls head-over-heels, humanly in love: "Oh brave new world, that has such people in't!"

It is precisely this exultant, hormonally charged intoxication that is anathema in Huxley's Brave New World, where there are no parents to love children, or sons and daughters to return the sentiment. Indeed, there is no genuine love at all. In what many might perceive as a positive departure from human nature, sexual jealousy is also abolished, since "everyone belongs to everyone else." Yet love, sex, and jealousy are primal aspects of the human psyche; to deny them is to deny our biological selves. ...

Through the Party's obsession with "chastity and political orthodoxy," 1984 is almost a textbook account of how to organize Homo sapiens in ways that contradict their most basic biological needs. Not just sexual desire, but even genetic continuity is placed at risk. The prospect of staying alive through time via future generations is the motivation underlying sex, love, and indeed everything in the organic world. Accordingly, Orwell's dystopia recognizes the biologically induced terror of genetic erasure. The Party's preferred response to opponents is simple elimination: "Your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word." That is precisely what genes -- experts as they are in self-perpetuation -- do not want.

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