Language Control in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Abstract

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is one of three most famous dystopian fictions. In the fiction Huxley depicted a future new world where advanced science and technology are largely used to suppress human beings. By depicting differences against tradition and demonstrating inevitable conflict between old tradition and civilized culture, Huxley expressed his concern and fear for problems of the day like overpopulation and overwhelming scientific impact on human beings. In order to pursue happiness and stability, the controllers use a series of instruments like ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia to control human beings. Language plays a critical and irreplaceable role in the new world as a form of controlling.

The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters: language control of political consciousness, language control of moral education and language control of conventional finiteness. The conclusion of this paper is control from the new world to men’s ideology relies on language control to a large extent, in other words, without language control the new world Huxley structured in Brave New World cannot work. Therefore, language control ought to not be neglected in literary research on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.