Manipulation of children in the prose of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell

The focus of this thesis are two of the most prominent specimen of utopian literature, namely George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Despite the fact that Brave New World, which was published in 1932, predates Nineteen Eighty-Four by seventeen years and was written in a quite different social and political climate, both these books share many important elements. While depicting vastly different societies with diverse structures of power distribution, they both express certain fears and worries that their respective authors had about the future of civilisation, which is why they were chosen as primary texts for this thesis. More specifically, the main area of discourse is going to be the treatment of children and their relation to the state as depicted in these books. In this field, both Orwell's Oceania and Huxley's World State share the same objective, which is to turn children and the young generation in general into an obedient tool to be at the system's disposal. This aim is very prominent for many reasons in both books, but the results are the same; children willingly submit themselves fully to the state and become one of the major means the state possesses to achieve its goals. The degree of control over children both in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty- Four is..