The Two Landscapes of Desecrated Sexuality: 1984 and Brave New World

Abstract

This paper explores how the two famous dystopias, George Orwell’s1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, draw on, among otherthings, the landscape of sexuality in a negative way and how thesewarnings and indictments concerning desecrated sexuality can be takenas a constant signifier in the modern wasteland.This paper is composed of four parts for convenience’s sake, the firstpart proposing the relative lack of research on this topic; the second partexplaining the landscape of sexuality in 1984;the third part focusing onanother landscape of sexual dystopia in Brave New Worldcompared tothe former work; and the last part concluding the implication that suchliterary imagination provides for the reader transcending time and place.Part I of this paper concerns the importance of the topic and explainshow the two dystopias can be compared in terms of literary depiction ofstandardized and institutionalized sexuality. Part II minutely discussesthe ways that George Orwell describes oppressed sex in a totalitariansociety called “Oceania.” The strategy of controlling sex in the societyis, characteristically, double-standard and accordingly hypocritical. Inthe terror-society banning and encouraging sexuality coexist based on