Literature has often, maybe always, been a mirror to the world it’s created within. The societal rules, the collective anxiety, and the dreams of one and many during a particular time are projected through fiction written during it. Authors seamlessly delve into the collective psyche to produce ideas or themes relevant both in depth and across. Or they simply seek within, as a part of that era too, and write what holds them still in the shadows at their desk. For every era has a fear, or many, that demands release.
A story cannot be without a storyteller, and the writer is, therefore, the culmination of the world around them when they began and finished weaving the threads of a story. But the storyteller cannot be without the world around them, either—that is, or they are, what sows the seed of an idea. Sometimes these seeds are ripe fruits plucked off a tree, like the tales the Grimm Brothers collected from many women, including the girl who had grown up next door to them and another who Wilhelm Grimm marries. Even when writers claim to have dreamt of a monster [Mary Shelley or Robert Louis Stevenson], how the story births or breaks this monster is influenced by the world a writer lives in. Basically, no story exists only as a reflection of a writer’s “idea.” It always is a reflection of many things around, especially the cultural fears of a particular time.
Interestingly, such reflection has even bred new genres or distinct styles of narration in sync with the times. Gothic literature created in Victorian England or the rise of Greek retellings by women writers in these “changed times” where a nuanced viewpoint can be put forth, both prove the influence of the ‘present’ on a writer’s creation.
Gothic Fiction in Victorian England
Victorian England was a time of strict societal repression, in terms of moral behaviour, sexuality, idealistic adherence, etc. With the growing Industrial Revolution, a middle-class began coming up and with light at home, evenings could be spent inside, indulging in reading or writing. Escapism is an evergreen motivation for reading and then, longing for something crude or risky, novels breaking through the rigidness of the world around were sought. Dracula, the gruesome 1897 novel by Bram Stoker, was everything that people of Victorian England were fearing: the emerging medical science, the progressing technology, the rise of spiritual mediums, and the prison of rigid morality.
Before modern medicine, plagues were common and the cause always birthed fear for they were unknown. Stoker’s vampire is a manifestation of such disease, or all disease in its horrifying entirety. The spread of a contagious disease is similar to the string of attacks characterised by a common wound, akin to the similarity of symptoms among those met with a contagious illness. Also, the vampire bites its victims and leaves them with what it carries [Lucy in Dracula, rises from her grave, undead, and feeds on a child,] much like a mosquito leaving a human with a malarial parasite.
Along the same lines, there was a vivid otherness that such outbreaks breathed against England’s colonies. Dracula steps off a ship and walks into London, an outbreak from the colonies reaching the colonisers—and the vampire hunters must destroy this invader, this other. Victorian fascination with the supernatural also rose with mediums claiming celebrity status, and Dracula gave the people an entity so close, right among them, walking through their streets. The vampire reflects the murderous zeal boiling through the caged Victorian population whose morality was demanded to be one-dimensional. This is not to say people then were craving for blood or longing for a knife-stabbing in broad daylight, but to throw a lid over boiling water would only raise the pressure through steam.
Two wild news headlines in years prior to Dracula’s release show the collective or individual psychopathy that Stoker must’ve projected through his vampire. One was the infamous “Jack the Ripper” that terrorised London with a spate of bloody murders that were sexually motivated. The other was five years prior: the exhumation of Mercy Brown, the nineteen-year-old who was thought to be preying on the living—she inspired the character of Lucy in Dracula.
Monsters like the vampire were more literal manifestations, but the fears of the Victorian Age were shown through less obvious creations, more ‘within’ a human too. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde focused on the contrast within a man, the appearance of civility and the savagery within. Charlotte Bronte, in her 1847 novel Jane Eyre, concentrated the societal norms for women and the dangerous divergence from such expectations into a wife’s imprisonment at the hands of her husband for being a “madwoman.” This is especially reflective of the time because Bronte’s publisher had advised her to write under an androgynous pen-name.
Looking into the Future During the 20th Century
The twentieth century marked key events that changed trajectories: World Wars, a global economic crisis, rise of concentrated ideologies, and desires, dreams, or wins that carried immense cost. All of this was bound to churn stories predicting the future. While literature in the previous centuries were largely reflective of the current state and expanded on ideas in the present, the 20th century provided such upheavals, writers used it all as fuel for predictions. The suffering, and consequent changes, on a global level made many look outward, contrary to the usual notion of writers looking inward in literature that moves. Wars, economic crises, independence of many countries, political ideologies becoming stronger, and the heightened relevance of the West—everything functioned to predict futures in the form of dystopian fiction.
There would be no dystopia without the utopia, and this genre of hope was easy to abandon as the First World War ignited despair among common folk. With the rise of Nazism that lead to the breakout of the Second World War and the irreversible use of atomic bombs, the perspective on humans as saviours wildly changed. The brutality and savagery of human beings seemed inevitable and inescapable, especially when raised to a regime or an empire. With nuclear power showing horrific outcomes of innovation, this mistrust in human nature was poured into a distrust for modern inventions too. The fear of man in power and the fear of misused power, both breathed life into the alarming genre of dystopia.
Before the limelight is taken by the highly recommended “Big Brother” novel, let’s focus on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) that opened doors to a homogenised world that refuses distinction—an utopia that chokes you to be the same. It’s structures for stability and demands the sacrifice of truth in return. While they’re asleep and while they’re awake, the population is told, “Everyone’s happy now.” To which, The Savage in a conversation with The Controller says he’d rather live in a world with the right to be unhappy. Huxley took the ideal society and showed it through the death of disruption. Entropy is needed for spontaneity, the primal desire for a human, and the death of disruption is thereby death of this desire, death of being human in whole.
The grey bleakness of George Orwell’s 1984 is vividly different, and more thought-provoking, with totalitarianism in its world of Oceania leaving no hope. In Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, Lynskey tells of the author’s introduction to totalitarianism during his volunteering days in the Spanish civil war where lies fabricated by Soviet Union’s agents to discredit the Spanish government were accepted for ideological causes. The erase of truth affected him with such rage, he was determined to finish the novel as a tuberculosis patient running out of time. The fear of government surveillance, loading of unreliable information packaged as trustworthy, and losing freedom to a slavery wrapped in saviourism gave rise to the dreadful future in this dystopia.
Critic Neil Postman made an appreciative distinction between the two dystopia when he said, “Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” As the decades are passing by of the twenty-first century, it seems like 1984 would seep into our world slowly with the rendition of a Party or the Ministry of Truth. Right now, Brave New World seems to be pouring into reality faster, with its idea of what should be relevant must become irrelevant for the ideal world to emerge. While the messages of 1984 can be seen across the world on a broader plane, propaganda worded like godsend messages and censorship justified for survival, Brave New World‘s prediction of people applauding the authorities for the very restrictions placed on them can be seen unravelling on an individual level. But this is a topic to be tackled later.
Postmodernist literature of the 20th century walked the lanes of dystopia too, but the premise and purpose shifted. With major technological advances, especially the Space Race between the USA and the USSR in a Cold War, dystopian novels dipped into more science fiction, like Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) where a man grows confused while differentiating between people and androids he must kill—the cultural fear of losing the meaning of life or the necessity of empathy. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury infuses a tension between knowledge and ignorance, asking you which side you would be: one who would care if the books are burning, or one who would conform?
As three-fourth of the century passed away, the decline in global tensions gave way to less prominent suffering. With the rise in corporations, gender equality, and climate emergencies, the focus of dystopia shifted once again, but the ultimate message remained same: the future must be warned about. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) showed women being treated as nothing more than reproductive machines at the hands of powerful men. While women rights were well received by the 80s, the fear of this grant being fragile in a world that has historically undermined the role of women in a society sparked the horrors of this tale. The Giver in 1993 was faraway from the dread of wars and global upheavals, and so it turned inward, expanding on what we can learn from the past, the memories.
Self-exploration was a prominent theme, letting the reader morally drive through this world free of crime and sadness. With a more ambiguous ending, The Giver lets you be more hopeful than the older dystopias. An oppressive government does exist but its violence is subtle; regulation exists but at the cost of important human experiences, like a drug that restricts sexual urges, no music, the removal of colour, and a forced expectation to be busy with work. Lois Lowry changed the trajectory of dystopian novels by lowering down the warning signals—it opened doors for dystopian fiction that feels more present, completing a cycle of “looking into the future” because the future is here and we’re in it.
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