Terry Eagleton's Brave New World

Terry Eagleton’s quote compares the nature by which we structure our society with the way in which novelists create entire worlds within their works. When he writes “the only rules which are binding are those which we invent for ourselves,” he means that the codes we live by are defined by the values and ideologies that we subscribe to. For much of the United States’ history, for example, African Americans were legally segregated from the rest of society. Why? Because the ideology of the ruling class dictated that African Americans were inferior to Caucasians. There is no natural law that mandates this separation, but it was put in place nonetheless. This is as a result of the decades upon decades of bigoted values held by the majority of
Brave New World, for instance, is a novel crafted with the purpose of critiquing a world Huxley found troubling. He took issue with what he saw as expanding control of the state in the lives of its citizens, and in response wrote a novel in which this control or manipulation was taken to the extreme. The rapid technological improvement of the era concerned him, and so the society of Brave New World was designed to exemplify the dangers of allowing technology to control our lives. He viewed a world in which people all too often pull the wool over their own eyes, blinding themselves to the reality of their situation, so the people in his creation would take soma in order to convince themselves of their own happiness. In much the same way as groups of people have used their beliefs to build the structures of their societies, the civilization that Huxley created in Brave New World is shaped by his personal system of beliefs, albeit in a way which directly contradicts them, in order to convey his messages to his audience. This is not a phenomenon unique to Huxley’s Brave New World, indeed it is present in many, if not all, novels. The England portrayed in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was created in the same way. In the moral code of her time, for someone such as Lydia Bennet to run off with a man like Wickham and not get married would result in becoming a social pariah. This lead Austen to