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Student 4 Mrs. Verenkoff English 2H, Period 2 13 September 2010
Happily Ever After? An Analysis of Happiness in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
QUOTE: Bernard Marx, one of the few dissatisfied members of utopian society, tries to make Lenina see the truth of his reasoning that the citizens in the community are always living in a shallow, and thus false, happiness: “Everybody’s happy nowadays. We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example…” (91).
ANALYSIS: In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley elaborates on the human tendency to accept a fabricated happiness over an oftentimes unpleasant reality. In his world, the citizens rarely face difficulties in their lives, largely due in part to the influence of the World State. Instead of succumbing to personal emotions, the people are encouraged to attend events like the feelies. These shows allow attendees to experience the feelings and thoughts of a different party, and thus forget their own troubling sentiments. If a person does become emotionally compromised, he can simply take soma, a drug that induces a stupor and has no negative symptoms. While in this stupor, people go though a happy hallucination, which makes them forget their own problems when they come back to reality. However, this happiness is completely unwarranted, because the person has done nothing to attain it. Thus, through tools like the feelies and soma, Huxley portrays the human preference for a false, but easy to achieve, happiness. That brave new world has much in common with our own society today, in which people grasp at the slightest possibility for happiness, no matter how shallow it may prove to be. Instead of focusing on long term, personal happiness, the modern populace readily accepts formulated and packaged happiness in the form of consumer products. In a way, they are just like the citizens of Huxley’s world. In order to experience the euphoric feeling of happiness, people turn to mass consumerism. Through the purchasing of new products, the citizens “achieve” happiness. However, after a week, month, or year, the item no longer has the appeal that it did when first bought. Then, consumers move on to a different, newer, better product. Also, movies, no matter the genre, provide a way to escape from personal feelings. Just like the feelies, observers can experience the glamorized and glossed over “reality” of the big screen, subsequently forgetting their own troubles. Drugs and alcohol provide relief from difficult situations, allowing people to “drink away their problems.” With each new superficial form of happiness that comes into existence, real, personal feelings become increasingly obsolete. As the world becomes a more troubling place, more and more people will enthusiastically accept fabricated happiness over the real thing. |
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