Explore the Role of Religion in Dystopian Fiction with Regards to the Children of Men and Brave New World.
“Religion plays a key role in dystopian fiction.” With reference to The Children of Men and Brave New World, how far do you agree with this statement?
Sixty years separate the publication of the dystopias The Children of Men and Brave New World, but both authors express their depictions of a future world in which religion is drastically changed, and not for the better. Religion and spirituality serve a number of purposes in the two novels, most notably to illustrate the difference between our society and their dystopian society, and also to show the importance of faith in overcoming the difficulties which human beings face.
The plot of The Children of Men centres around the struggle of a dissident group to help one of their number give birth to a child in a society suffering from mass infertility and a tyrannical leader. The idea of religion features prominently in the novel, and a religious reading of this tale echoes that of the nativity tale and the birth of Christ: that the hope for society is a child born to an unwed mother in a shack, reflecting the birth of Jesus in a stable. The religious elements of this novel are far more prevalent than in Brave New World, but both novels use the changes to the society’s faith as a means of illustrating quite how warped and horrifying the dystopian society is.
While religion as we know it is an idea repressed in The Children of Men by the despot warden, Xan Lypiatt, early on in the novel the dissident group meets Theo Faron in an isolated church, immediately linking them with the notion that spirituality could provide the hope for the seemingly doomed society. However it is clear that their struggle will be an extremely difficult one as the “religion” of the year 2021 is a truly haunting one for the reader. Due to the lack of babies being born, kittens are christened in their place; dolls are wheeled about in prams and buried in consecrated ground when they are broken. Churches are now mostly abandoned or used for
Sixty years separate the publication of the dystopias The Children of Men and Brave New World, but both authors express their depictions of a future world in which religion is drastically changed, and not for the better. Religion and spirituality serve a number of purposes in the two novels, most notably to illustrate the difference between our society and their dystopian society, and also to show the importance of faith in overcoming the difficulties which human beings face.
The plot of The Children of Men centres around the struggle of a dissident group to help one of their number give birth to a child in a society suffering from mass infertility and a tyrannical leader. The idea of religion features prominently in the novel, and a religious reading of this tale echoes that of the nativity tale and the birth of Christ: that the hope for society is a child born to an unwed mother in a shack, reflecting the birth of Jesus in a stable. The religious elements of this novel are far more prevalent than in Brave New World, but both novels use the changes to the society’s faith as a means of illustrating quite how warped and horrifying the dystopian society is.
While religion as we know it is an idea repressed in The Children of Men by the despot warden, Xan Lypiatt, early on in the novel the dissident group meets Theo Faron in an isolated church, immediately linking them with the notion that spirituality could provide the hope for the seemingly doomed society. However it is clear that their struggle will be an extremely difficult one as the “religion” of the year 2021 is a truly haunting one for the reader. Due to the lack of babies being born, kittens are christened in their place; dolls are wheeled about in prams and buried in consecrated ground when they are broken. Churches are now mostly abandoned or used for