Unit 3 - Activity 3: Reflective Journal
The Parallels between Brave New World and Shakespeare’s The Tempest
The Tempest by Shakespeare gives a significant parallel to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The play and the novel relate to one another on various levels. In The Tempest, Prospero and his
daughter are banished to an island and left to die by his brother who grassed him to gain political
power. There are no people on the island except for a native, Caliban, in which the island
belonged to his deceased mother. Prospero takes over the island, and with the intention of
civilizing Caliban, he raises him as a slave. Caliban has been described by Shakespeare as a
violent and angry figure and is portrayed as less human. He is ruled by inhuman appetites rather
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than developed instincts.
After the arrival of a ship on the island, Caliban is introduced to liquor by two stewards, and
immediately, the liquor becomes his “God.” Caliban resents Prospero for colonizing his home,
but the motive of Prospero is to civilize him. Prospero perceives his resentments as evidence of
inhuman nature and baseless, which prompts him to treat Caliban more inhospitably. Caliban
responds to this treatment violently thus making Prospero believe he is an animal. In this play,
Caliban is both noble savage and savage, as he is absolutely exiled in all communities, similar to
John is on the reservation, as seen in the World State.
Both Brave New World and The Tempest can be perceived as fables of colonization. The
European colonial strived to civilize Native American, Asian, and African cultures the same way
Prospero attempts to civilize Caliban. For the European colonizers, the civilization of the savages
was a procedure of switching innate languages and cultures with that of the colonizers. Such
colonizers proceeded to separate the culture and history of the civilized people from their own,
which made it hard for the natives to rebel against the newly inserted cultures. The whole World
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State has colonized everyone and is established on such a premise, wiping out the past and its
cultural and historical legacies.
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Both texts have explored the theme of the nature of sleep and men. Sleep is usually defined as
the state of natural deferral of the state of consciousness in which the abilities of the body are
reestablished. However, in these two texts, sleep is perceived differently. In the Brave New
World, sleep entails the life of John after he took his own life or the possibility of characters
disappearing in the soma. In The Tempest, sleep has a hidden meaning, which is the life activities
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of characters after passing. In addition, Shakespeare may be using sleep to symbolize an illusion
or a dream.
The relations between The Tempest and Brave New World is controversial after highlighting the
element that John makes a reference to Miranda. John Savage is portrayed as the naïve Miranda,
and Mondi plays the role of Prospero, who is the controller and dictator of the world.
Nonetheless, I believe Brave New World is a straight imitation to the plot idea but in a dystopian
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society, of The Tempest.
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