Examples Of Villianity In 1984

ehavior is confusing and backwards to The Savage, another main character, who has lived his life on the outskirts of a quite different society. Familial relationships are also incomprehensible to him, as he has an extremely close relationship with his mother. The result of total promiscuity within society is that sex becomes meaningless. It is an act that holds no other significance than fulfilling a need, similar to drinking and eating. For Orwell, sex is depicted adversely. Sexual activity is taboo, and disassociated from pleasure. Winston considers sex to be a political act, an expression of freedom, while his wife's outlook was to withstand it for the sake of the Party, in order to reproduce. She explains that sex makes people relaxed and happy, the opposite of what the Party wants.
The Party believes it is in everyone’s best interest to channel those energies elsewhere, in ways that will better the society. Privation increases tension, and can be forced into such activities as 'Hate Week' and so forth. With the extinction (or at least considerably distorted) of familial and sexual relationships, it is not surprising that both consider death to be trivial and inconsequential. In Brave New World, individuals barely exist in the first place: their lives are so mundane and identical that death should be considered meaningless. The members of the World State do not develop and mature, and they never really come to terms with the concept of death. This stance is ingrained at an early stage, as children are 'conditioned' by visiting wards of the dying and are fed chocolate éclairs afterwards. In 1984, people simply cease to exist. One day, Winston comes to work to find that all traces of a former colleague gone—Symes has ceased to exist. He may well not be physically dead as yet, but he has gone—and no one ever dares to address that he had existed in the first place. Yet Winston does preserve a normal human fear of actual death: imprisoned, and hoping to be delivered a razor blade, he nonetheless wonders whether he would be able to use it to commit suicide—it is a natural human instinct to keep on living. The Party succeeds in convincing its members that mere feelings are of no importance. Each society member is kept in a state of distressed fear and distrust of those around him—who in today’s world would be considered our nearest and dearest— who may turn out to be deceivers. In Brave New World, human interaction is diminished to the most superficial level possible, so that feelings become irrelevant because they are trivial. To both Huxley and Orwell, this lack of decent human feeling translates to the death of art. When explaining to John why the World State has sacrificed high art, Mustapha Mond states "...you can't make tragedies without social instability". Winston's thoughts take a similar direction: "Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason." In Orwell’s dystopia, novels are created by machines; in Brave New World, the 'feelies' intention is to satisfy the audience's need for immediate sensual gratification, not at their minds or their emotions. The unrelenting devaluation of human emotions had the effect of the people in both societies treating other members as objects and not as human, making decent “human” relationships impossible. The Savage attempts to create a world for himself, trying to extract himself from society as much as possible, but his privacy is invaded and a 'feelie' is made of his life. Then crowds of sightseers come to see him, and treat him like a caged circus attraction, chanting at him to use the whip, and turning his frantic behavior with Lenina into an orgy. Winston shows this kind of indifference when he writes about the war film he watched that depicts refugees being bombed in a lifeboat.
He presents the apathetic laughter of the audience as normal, and does not acknowledge his own lack of humanity either. Winston has basically been trained to behave only with regard to himself. Every facet of his life is regulated, Thoughtcrime makes original or rebellious thoughts forbidden, and the existence of the Thought Police makes it so that even if he did want to conjure rebellious thoughts, he knows he will be caught and severely punished. The conditioning in 1984 is more ambiguous than that of Brave New World, but still there are similarities, such as the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ and the ‘Solidarity Service’, which both facilitate feverish, animalistic emotions from the participants, and solidify their acquiescence to the state's imposed lifestyle. In Brave New World, the conditioning is done openly and for the widely recognized purpose of fitting different members to their different paths in life. The scene in which lower-caste babies are conditioned by terror and pain into a hatred of books and flowers exposes that under the smooth surface, this society can be as ruthless as the Party. Between the two texts, there is an interesting
difference in the treatment of the 'proles'. Both authors seem to make the distressing point that the masses are easily contented. Huxley's lower castes, the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, are easily content—they have non-challenging jobs, followed by relaxation, drugs and sex, and with those activities alone they are satisfied. They are so unimportant that they are not even individuals at all, but are bred in batches called Bokanovsky Groups, dozens of identical specimens at a time. The lower castes do not really have any influence in Huxley's book, and are simply the background to the doings of the upper-caste characters.