Comparing Dystopias:
Why You Should Read “Brave New World” After Watching “The Handmaid’s Tale”
A good dystopian story is one which presents you with a world in which a particular idea has been brought to its ultimate conclusion, and asks, “Is this what you wanted?”
It’s important to always be asking this question. It is not enough merely to progress; we must always be checking ourselves (and each other) and asking what we are progressing towards, and whether it’s a destination we will actually be happy with once we get there.
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel Handmaid’s Tale has been making fresh waves with the Hulu television series that began last week. Most people by now are familiar with the basic premise, which pictures a world where a fundamentalist Christian group re-organizes society, stripping women of their autonomy and reducing the fertile ones to their sexual/reproductive function.
Atwood, picking up on an underlying premise of fundamentalism — that women’s sole function is to meet men’s sexual needs and bear their children — poses a world that brings this notion to its inevitable conclusion, and asks, “Is this what you wanted?”
There has been a tendency (as noted around the web and highlighted in Iron Ladies’ collection picks last week) for viewers to take The Handmaid’s Tale even more literally than perhaps even Atwood intended, insisting that we are heading toward a real-life Gilead, or even that we are already living in it.
Perspective is a good antidote for hysteria, so I think it’s worth remembering that Gilead is one dystopia among many. If you’re beginning to see The Handmaid’s Tale every time you turn on the news or walk out your door, you might try balancing your perspective with the perfect counterpoint: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The philosophy of Huxley’s imagined future society can be summed up in a quote by one of its characters, who says, “There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant.”
In this society, life is ordered around avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure. It is a world that is engineered on every level; production, consumption, and most especially, social conditioning, is ordered by a group of elites called World Controllers. The human race is no longer propagated by the random, unpredictable method of human procreation, but in the sterility of a lab, where population can be regulated and each individual can be genetically engineered to fit a preordained social position. Children are conditioned through osmosis to accept and even prefer whatever caste they are assigned to, so that they not only are willing to serve their intended function, but are happy to do so.
In Atwood’s dystopia, women are bound to their reproductive function and their relationships to men. In Huxley’s dystopia, procreation has long since been divorced from sexuality, and exclusive romantic relationships (let alone marriage) have become a relic of the primitive past. The World Controllers have done away with the concept of family relationships completely, because individual loyalties present a threat to social conformity. Atwood portrays a world with a Puritanical concept of sex with a set of rigid rules; in Huxley’s world, there is only one rule about sex: everyone belongs to everyone else. The only thing that can bring a blush to the cheek of these citizens of the future is a mention of the smutty word, “mother”. Procreation and exclusivity are the only taboos left. One can’t help but laugh at a scene in which Lenina, a girl who is developing a troubling tendency to stick with one man for too long, is chided prudishly by her friend: “ . . . you really ought to be more promiscuous.”
There isn’t much about Gilead that tempts you to understand why anyone would actually want a world like that, but Huxley, even though he initially horrifies the reader with depictions of babies grown in test tubes and lower-caste foetuses denied oxygen to stunt their growth and brain development, cruel social conditioning practices, etc., also succeeds in creating a world that is admittedly attractive. A world with no difficulties, no poverty, hardly any disease. A world where the only sin is self-denial. No need to fight sexual impulse to be faithful to any one person. No need for women to bear the hardships of pregnancy and childbirth. No need to deny oneself anything, ever. And if ever any unpleasantness does creep into your world, you can always drown it out with a dose of soma, an opium-like drug which allows the user to escape into a blissful dreamworld.
Where Atwood’s Gilead relies on fear and religious indoctrination to impose order on its subjects, in Brave New World, there is little need for coercion because the World Controllers have set their citizens on the path of least resistance; they conform because they want to conform. Where before, natural impulses were often at odds with moral intuitions, social conditioning has re-written moral intuitions to match natural impulses so that they are no longer in conflict: it’s all the fun of virtuousness with none of the discomforts of self-denial. The World Controllers are not evil overlords; they are more or less benevolent dictators who are simply trying to organize a world in which humans are as happy as they possibly can be. If a non-conforming individual must be sacrificed here and there for the greater good, so be it; why should society suffer for the sake of one person? As the Director of the Hatchery says at one point:
Murder kills only the individual-and, after all, what is an individual?… We can make a new one with the greatest ease- — as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.
As different as the Handmaid’s Tale is from Brave New World, both Huxley and Atwood present futures where the individual is lost in the name of some allegedly greater good or urgent need. The value of reading both is to see that there is more than one way to get there.
