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| Cover of Brave New World's 1st edition |
Just as a utopia is a literary work that
describes a perfect society, from the point of view of its author, a dystopia
is the description of a society where certain characteristics of the world in
which the author lives, which he considers unacceptable, are exaggerated and
carried to the extreme, with a satirical or denouncing intent.
The two world wars caused a feeling of
disillusionment in the West that gave rise to the two most famous dystopias of
recent history: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
(written in 1931, published in 1932) and Nineteen-Eighty-Four
by George Orwell (written in 1948, published in 1949). These two works are
original in another sense: while other earlier dystopias (such as Samuel
Butler's Erewhon, 1872) were located in
remote places, such as the Antipodes, the two modern dystopias take place in
the future.
The feeling of oppression that seizes the
reader of these two novels is almost unbearable. In both cases, the very few
nonconformists in society are excluded: in the first, they
are banished to an island; in the second, the exclusion is only
temporary: the rebel is submitted to brainwashing
so as to destroy his spirit and turn him into a mental waste, raw material on
which the social planner can act, remodel and educate until he is recovered and
adapted to society. The two dystopias are horrible, but they have a very great
power of conviction and verisimilitude.
