Aldous Huxley And Octavia Butler's Brave New World And Kindred

For more than a thousand years, writing has been used to communicate ideas and inspire people to think differently. In their respective novels, Brave New World and Kindred, Aldous Huxley and Octavia Butler both argue that reading and writing can cause rebellion from a dissatisfied group through the spread of ideas and information. The authors do this by creating leaders that deprive a group of people of reading and writing in order to maintain control over them, having the protagonists use their literacy to challenge their societies, and making the protagonists fail at changing their societies.
Brave New World’s Mustapha Mond, one of ten World Controllers, and Kindred’s Tom Weylin, a slave owner, restrict literacy, so they can keep their inferiors …show more content…
John, a ‘savage’, learns how to read in his childhood and his only book is a collection of works by Shakespeare. When John enters the World State, he refers to it as a ‘brave new world’, a phrase used in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but is thoroughly disappointed when it does not meet his expectations. Later, when John encounters a line to hand out soma, an antidepressant, he is reminded of this disappointment. John notes that the phrase ‘brave new world’ now “mock[s] him through his misery and remorse”, but then his view suddenly changes to see the phrase as “Miranda [a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest] proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble” (Huxley 190). John then proceeds to throw the soma out of a window. Through reading Shakespeare, John knows there is a better way to live and he desires to share that idea with the citizens of the World State; therefore, John’s act of defiance is inspired by The Tempest. He wants to change the World State into the world Shakespeare writes about which would free the citizens from the confines of the World State’s rules. Unlike John, Dana in Kindred uses her literacy directly by teaching slave children how to read and write. The slaves being able to read and write allows them to read a …show more content…
When John reads his friend, Helmholtz, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and they get to a scene about Juliet being heartbroken because she is being forced to marry Paris even though she loves Romeo, Helmholtz breaks “out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing” because he believes that it is absurd to care “about a boy having a girl or not having her” (Huxley 168-169). John fails at opening the eyes of the World State’s citizens because they have been conditioned to only listen to what the World State tells them, usually through hypnopaedia. They have been conditioned to not have any emotional connections with anything, and nothing can change their minds. The lack of creativity and imagination, harbored in reading and writing, blocks their minds from making any original thoughts, therefore they can not rebel. However, in Kindred, the slaves are very aware that they can rebel, but they are afraid of being killed or separated from their families. Sarah’s, a slave, “husband [is] dead, three children [have been] sold, the fourth [is] defective, and [she] thank[s] God for the defect” because otherwise she would have been sold, too (Butler 76). However, this makes Sarah obey Tom Weylin because she knows he will sell her child if she tries to defy him. This fear and the fear of being killed restrain the slaves from escaping. Whereas if the slaves were able to read about how to get North and what life is