Family Structure In Brave New World, Anthem, And The United States

Affects of Family Structure in Brave New World, Anthem, and the United States

To many people family is a very important part of their lives, but it involves more than emotions. Brave New World, Anthem, and the United States exhibit different family structures and views on relationships; this effects the political, economical, and social aspects of the societies.

In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley there is very little family structure. On the Reservation, most people carry out their lives similar to modern day societies. They get married, have kids, and have typical relationships. On the other hand, the “Other Place” thinks of marriage and natural childbirth as disgusting and unnatural. Seventy percent of the population’s women have their

The Director’s son, John, was born from a natural childbirth and raised on the reserve by his mother Linda. When everyone learned about John “Laughter broke out, enormous, almost hysterical, peal after peal, as though it would never stop” (Huxley 151). This shameful experience caused the Director to resign. Without the Director there is an empty position for someone who can administrate at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. This small problem disrupts the society’s political motto, “Community, Identity, and Stability” (Huxley 3). However Anthem’s political views are that all people live and work for the benefit and good of everyone else, which is why they have no family structure or relationships. They could create biased opinions in the houses and disrupt the harmony created by the World

The National Commission on America's Urban Families states, "The family trend of our time is the deinstitutionalization of marriage and the steady disintegration of the mother-father child raising unit. This trend of family fragmentation is reflected primarily in the high rate of divorce among parents and the growing prevalence of parents who do not marry. No domestic trend is more threatening to the well-being of our children and to our long-term national security" (Skolnik, "Politics of Family Structure"). Recent studies have shown the growth of one-parent families to be the likely cause of the nation's most serious problems including crime, drugs, gangs, violence and failing schools. These studies bring light to the effect of family structure.

Similarly, economics are greatly affected by family structure. In Chapter three of Brave New World, Mond and the Director have an economic discussion. It does not refer to the economy of money and goods like many would think. In Brave New World, everything operates to the logic of supply and demand. Citizens are taught to view one another, and themselves, as commodities to be consumed like any other manufactured good. With this view of themselves, citizens are not able to have families or relationship for the sake of