1995. Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a
society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society
because of gender, race, class, or creed. Choose a novel or a play in which
such a character plays a significant role and show how that character’s
alienation reveals the surrounding society’s assumptions or moral values.
Helmholtz
Watson may not be the main character of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,
but his headstrong opinions and indefatigable will make him one of the most
admirable; unfortunately, it is these very characteristics that the government
is interested in excising from society, the very characteristics that forced
Watson into exile. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley characterizes Watson
through omniscient narrative and dialogue in order to emphasize that Watson can
think for himself, revealing, as he is exiled for this capability, that the New
World society is determined to suppress free, individualist thinking.
Much
of what is revealed about Helmholtz is reliant on the omniscience of the
narrator, Huxley, who analyzes and draws conclusions based on the events
occurring within the novel. Watson is introduced by Huxley as “a little too
able”, a member of the highest caste whose intellect surpassed even that of his
Alpha Plus counterparts (Huxley 67). This superior intelligence allowed Watson
to “become aware of being himself and all alone”, a quality that forces Watson
into isolation; no one else in the New World is able to grasp the concept that
they are an individual, instead praising the community above all else (Huxley
67). It is because Watson recognizes himself as himself, not as one member of a
collective body, that he can no longer connect to the rest of society. Watson
is not separated from his peers and colleagues because of his mental excess,
but rather because this mental excess resulted in the understanding that he is
his own person. Able to differentiate between the community and the individual,
what society believes and what he believes, Watson draws a definitive line
between his own opinions and those his peers attempt to force on him, marking
him as significantly different from the ideals of conformity the rest of
society reveres.
Huxley’s
narrative continues to characterize Watson as alienated from the others of the
New World society through his refusal to take the drug soma, and his consequent
clear-headedness because of this. Soma is the hallucinogenic drug in Brave
New World, and acts as an inhibitor of negative thoughts and feelings; New
World citizens take a few half-grammes of the drug to forget any unpleasant
situation they may have experienced and come back from the effects just as
happy as they’re programmed to be. Watson, however, is different. Huxley
comments after Watson forgave his friend that “it was the Helmholtz of daily
life…not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday”, signifying that Helmholtz did
not smooth things over simply to avoid a negative confrontation but because he
truly wanted to make amends with his friend (Huxley 180). In a society where
every other citizen depends on the effects of soma to move on from traumatic
events of the past, and takes that soma without hesitation, it is Watson who
refrains from doing so, because he refuses to allow a drug to make decisions
for him. Watson is capable of understanding that meaningful actions can’t stem
from a drug-induced haze but from one’s true emotions. Because Watson does not
take drugs where the rest of society does, Huxley provides a glaring criticism
of the rest of the society: unable to produce feelings of remorse or
forgiveness on their own, society must submit to the drug soma to make the
decision of happiness and repentance for them.
The
characterization of Watson as an independent thinker culminates in the contrast
of dialogue Huxley crafts between Watson and the other characters. The dialogue
from most of the other speakers revolves around hypnopaedic phrases—short,
catchy proverbs repeated thousands of times to every New World citizen while
they’re asleep, until each citizen believes these statements are facts. Many of
these statements are, in fact, opinions that the government wants its citizens
to believe, such as “Everybody’s happy now” (Huxley 75) a statement that
different characters repeat to one another on multiple occasions. Every
character is conditioned to believe these hypnopaedic statements, and as such,
can only make assertions based on these statements; all, that is, except for
Watson. Unlike the other characters, Watson speaks his own opinion. When speaking
to a government official about what location he would prefer for his exile,
Watson definitively states, “I should like a thoroughly bad climate…I believe
one would write better’”, an opinion that was not given to Watson by
hypnopaedia but from his own human experience (Huxley 229). Watson is able to
draw on his own perceptions to formulate thoughts, a radical behavior in the
New World society, and it is this very quality that the government wants exiled
from the rest of society. These government officials believe order can only be
maintained if every citizen is conditioned to believe what the government tells
them to. Free thinkers like Watson, who assert their own opinions without the
influence of the government, must be cast out, before their influence spreads
to others.
Through
omniscient narrative and dialogue, Huxley marks Helmholtz Watson as one of the
only characters in Brave New World capable of using their voice, and using that
voice for a purpose. Because Watson is characterized as such a strong-willed
member of society, however, he must be cast out, revealing that the rest of
society is afraid of independent thinkers like Watson, that, in essence, the
rest of society cannot think for itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment