MASARYK UNIVERSITY

97 Pages·2010·0.98 MB·English

by  Jitka Komárková

MASARYK UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF EDUCATION
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Brainwashing as a “solution” for a (post)modern hero
in the works of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Anthony Burgess

Diploma Thesis

Brno 2010

Supervisor: Written by:
Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D. Bc. JitkaKomárková
Prohlášení

Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou diplomovou vypracovala samostatně, s využitím pouze
citovaných literárních pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem
pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o
právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů
(autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů.

Souhlasím, aby práce byla uložena na Masarykově univerzitě v Brně v knihovně Pedagogické
fakulty a zpřístupněna ke studijním účelům.

V Pardubicích dne 20. dubna 2010 Bc. Jitka Komárková

Declaration

I hereby declare that this diploma thesis is my own work and that all the sources of
information I have used are listed in the references, in compliance with the Penalty Code for
students of the Faculty of Education of the Masaryk University and Act No. 121/2000 Coll.
on Copyright and Rights Related to Copyright and on Amendment to Certain Acts (the
Copyright Act) as amended.

I approve that this diploma thesis is stored and available for study purposes in the library of
the Faculty of Education at the Masaryk University Brno

Pardubice, 20 April 2010 Bc. Jitka Komárková
Acknowledgement:
I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., for giving me her
support and guidance throughout the writing process.
I would also like to express thanks to all my family and friends who manifested great patience
with me throughout the process of writing the diploma thesis.
Contents

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 5
2. Introduction into the twentieth century .................................................................................. 8
3. Brainwashing .......................................................................................................................... 9
4. Brave New World ................................................................................................................. 12
5. Nineteen Eighty-Four ........................................................................................................... 36
6. A Clockwork Orange ........................................................................................................... 65
7. Reaching for Dystopia .......................................................................................................... 82
8. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 86
Resumé ..................................................................................................................................... 88
Summary .................................................................................................................................. 89
Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 90
Attachments .............................................................................................................................. 95
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1. Introduction
Following the Victorian era with its population growth, urbanization and Industrial
Revolution, the beginning of the 20th century might have anticipated further progress of the
civilisation, improvements in living conditions and growing justice in distribution of freedom.
It witnessed revolutionary scientific discoveries of the theory of relativity and quantum
physics, dissolution of great empires and an increasing concern about human rights. Advances
in medicine had led to rapid acceleration of population growth, having Europe's population
more than doubled during the 19th century, only to sacrifice 16 million and 60 million people
during the First World War and the Second World War, respectively. ―The First World War
marked the end of the romantic-idealistic utopian dream in literature, just as several real-life
utopian plans were about to be launched with disastrous effects‖ (Atwood x). Indeed, new
ideologies intended to bring liberty and equal access to resources to all individuals but failed
and turned out to be unfeasible and their coercive enforcement set off violence, injustice and
massive denial of human rights.
Many of the pre-World War II writers sought an alternative to the condition in which
the world found itself. They either wished for an ideal version of the future through utopias or
foresaw frightening prospects for the civilisation in dystopias. Beside writers who produced
both utopian and dystopian fiction, such as H. G. Wells in his first dystopia When the Sleeper
Wakes in 1899 and his 1905 A Modern Utopia, there were writers who did not retain much
hope. Their dystopian novels were loaded with pessimism and disastrous visions. Within the
period of thirty years, spanning from 1932 to 1962, three dystopias of great importance were
created. The messages of the dystopias reflected personalities of their creators, their critical
views and the actual status of society at the point of their creation. Huxley's 1932 Brave New
World brought ―a scathing criticism of the values implicit in the myth of social salvation
through technological expertise‖ (Ousby 113). Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
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showed much of the anxiety of post-war Britain blended with frustration from Stalin's Russian
totalitarianism. Burgess's 1962 A Clockwork Orange exploring violence and conformity both
of an individual and the society directly addressed the issue of the free will. The novels were
saturated with gloomy visions of future deprived of human autonomy, dignity and humanity
itself. In their novels, total control of physical movement is not sufficient anymore and control
of free will becomes essential, employing various manipulation and mind control techniques.
The protagonists undergo a substantial change ranging from Bernard, an imperfect
individual yearning for emancipation from submission determined by biological engineering
and psychosomatic drugs, and Winston Smith, a fatalistic individual in desperate resistance to
oppression by the Establishment reaching limits of his power and abilities who is eventually
revealed and paralysed into resignation, to a violent and evil teenager Alex who is exposed to
conditioning and yet reasserts that it is the free will that distinguishes humans from animals.
The qualities of the protagonists do not resemble antique heroes anymore. They become much
closer to ordinary people surviving within the society, failing, unable to resist the pressure
imposed upon them by the society, surrendering and ending up on the verge of waiving their
inalienable rights.
The historical development, the political and philosophical tendencies, the real
condition of society and hopeless concerns about the future events to come were all elements
that significantly contributed to emergence of dystopian literature. The dystopian literature of
the period worked as if the omens already appearing in the society were looked upon through
a magnifying glass. The dystopian literature aimed at emphasizing such omens and warning
against them. Thus brainwashing, mind control and conditioning as threats to human freedom
and autonomy became main themes of the dystopian literature.
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The title of this diploma thesis may suggest that it is aimed at dealing specifically with
brainwashing. Nevertheless, the term brainwashing in the title is used as a hyperbole to
symbolize influence and mind control techniques in general.
This diploma thesis deals with the novels Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four,
and A Clockwork Orange which represent in their own and specific way a bleak vision of the
world where the freedom of the individual, with all its potential risks and errors, has been
restricted or eliminated for the sake of the uniform stability of the society. Such societies
exercise a complete control over the life and choices of an individual. This thesis attempts to
examine mind control techniques, brainwashing in particular, as they appear in the three
novels, and define how such methods are used in order to achieve the transformation of a
conscious individual into a mechanism deprived of free will.
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2. Introduction to the twentieth century
The reality of the beginning of the twentieth century differed distinctively from the
reality perceived by our contemporaries. As Roberts (2004) suggests, a member of European
culture would then distinguish three categories of world cultures: the civilised world, the
world in progress of being civilised, and the non-civilised; the first and the second being
overwhelmingly controlled by the ―white man‖1, which was largely based on colonialism and
imperialism of the previous centuries. At its height, the British Empire was the largest empire
in the history. Although the United States and Germany exceeded the British industrial
production in some aspects, the United Kingdom in the beginning of the twentieth century
still held the position of the dominant trade power supported with the largest sea freight and
merchant fleet. The prevailing form of government systems was a monarchy, the British
constitutional monarchy being a model for many European countries. ―[T]he twentieth
century was almost certainly the first which opened with many people believing that what
they might expect from life was change, rather than a continuation of things as they had been‖
(Roberts 29). Moreover, recent progress and improvements in everyday lives led people to
―the complacent assumption that the benefits they enjoyed would be more and more widely
shared (which they were indeed to turn out to be), and that this must be ultimately beneficial
to mankind (which was by no means to be so unambiguously the case in the next 100 years)‖
(Roberts 36). The optimism of the turn of the twentieth century can hardly be compared to the
early twenty-first century concerns about environmental, economic and social sustainability
of civilisation. Throughout the twentieth century, the optimistic expectations were severely
corrected by wars and frequent conflicts, economic crises, emergence of totalitarianism, the
Cold War, equivocal consequences of technological progress, manifestations of worldwide
religious and ideological intolerance, racism and xenophobia.

1 referring to a person of European origin
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3. Brainwashing
In her book Brainwashing: The Science of Mind Control, Kathleen Taylor defines
brainwashing as a malignant idea of total control of a human mind, the ultimate invasion of
privacy, which threatens the loss of freedom and even identity (Taylor ix).
The term itself was coined by Edward Hunter in 1950, during the Korean War; it is a
literal translation of a Chinese concept representing a process of thought reform, which was
enforced upon prisoners of war (Taylor 3-5). The term was also used retrospectively to label
alarming events of the ―Soviet show trials of the 1930s, in which discredited former leaders of
the Communist Party stood up and publicly denounced their entire careers, policies and belief
systems with apparent inexplicable sincerity‖ (ibid. 6). Therefore brainwashing is often
understood as being tightly linked to totalitarian regimes and totalitarian individuals in
general. The term may be interpreted ―as a collective noun for various . . . techniques of non-
consensual mind change‖ (ibid. 23). Its near synonyms could be coercive persuasion, thought
reform, mind control, and re-education.
Taylor further specifies four important features of brainwashing. First, brainwashing is
intentional, carried out on purpose in order to change the object's mind. Secondly, there is a
feature of ―the cognitive difference‖ of previously held beliefs and beliefs acquired through
brainwashing; the former and the latter may be in mutual contradiction. Thirdly, the change of
beliefs occurs in a relatively short period of time and cannot thus be attributed to natural
cognitive development. Finally, brainwashing is a ―concept of last resort‖ referred to in case
no other rational explanation is available (ibid. 10-12).
Taylor introduces eight psychological themes of thought reform identified by Lifton2,
who asserts that they are also characteristic of totalitarian ideologies in general (qtd. in Taylor
16-17). The first of the psychological themes is milieu control, which represents ―control of
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an individual's communication with the external world, hence of his or her perceptions of
reality‖ (Taylor 17). Mystical manipulation is based on ―evoking certain patterns of behaviour
and emotion in such a way that they seem to be spontaneous‖ (ibid.); it often refers to a higher
authority, the authority in control. Another theme is the demand for purity which results from
the ―binary oppositions inherent in totalist thought‖ (ibid.), e.g. Party/non-Party, i.e. elements
non-complying with the ideology are not acceptable and should be eliminated. Then, there is
the cult of confession, which ―rejects individual privacy and glorifies confession as an end in
itself‖, which enables the controller to exploit and control the individual (ibid.). The fifth
theme, sacred science, brings into effect ―viewing the ideology's basic dogmas as both
morally unchallengeable and scientifically exact, thus increasing their apparent authority‖
(ibid.). ―Loading the language is the mind-numbing process by which ʻthe most far-reaching
and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-
sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressedʼ, whose aim is to shut down
independent thinking‖ (ibid.). Another theme highlighted by Lifton is the primacy of doctrine
over person, which asserts that ―a dogma is more true and more real than anything
experienced by an individual human being‖ (qtd. in Taylor 17). Finally, the theme of the
dispensing of existence represents ―the right to control the quality of life and eventual fate of
both group members and non-members‖ (ibid.).
One of the beliefs of thought reform is that the ―non-person can be converted into a
person‖ (ibid.), just as a heretic may be changed into a devoted believer, a non-conformist
may be converted into a conformist, adopting the desired beliefs and giving up the original
ones.
Brainwashing is often understood as coercive; however, the ―deliberate and
manipulative changing of belief, need not require force‖ (Taylor 52), instead it may rely on

2 Lifton, R. J. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a study of ʻbrainwashingʼ in China. London:
Victor Gollanz, 1961. 420-435. Print.