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The Centrality of Human Freedom in Dostoevsky and Huxley

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The Centrality of Human Freedom in Dostoevsky and Huxley Hylton 1 The Centrality of Human Freedom in Dostoevsky and Huxley A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences In Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in English By Evelyn Hylton 1 May 2018 Hylton 2 Liberty University College of Arts and Sciences Master of Arts in English Student Name: Evelyn Hylton Carl C. Curtis, Ph.D. Date Thesis Chair Stephen Bell, Ph.D. Date Committee Member Nicholas Olson, MFA. Date Committee Member Hylton 3 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..4 Chapter 1 – Finding Freedom in a Dead House : Penitentiary and Paradox………………………19 Chapter 2 – The “Problem” of Freedom in The Brothers Karamazov ………………………….…45 Chapter 3 – Freedom as Enemy in Brave New World ………………………………………..…..73 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….94 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….100 Hylton 4 Introduction This thesis will examine the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Aldous Huxley for their shared arguments for the centrality of human freedom and the inextricable role of suffering in the exercise of freedom. Moreover, this thesis will attempt to argue that each author’s works affirm that, along with suffering as an adjacent reality, freedom from constraint and the freedom to strive towards a goal are essential for human wholeness. Each major work examined in this thesis uniquely demonstrates the centrality of human freedom. Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House, a semi-autobiographical account of his transformative Siberian imprisonment, places particular emphasis on the value of freedom from constraint and the redemptive power of suffering. His final novel, The Brothers Karamazov , not only presents suffering as a necessary component of human freedom, but also emphasizes the critical need for human beings to possess the freedom to strive towards a goal—particularly active love—and embrace suffering as the process through which one achieves freedom in its highest forms. In Brave New World, Huxley’s argument for human freedom’s centrality mirrors much of Dostoevsky’s belief in the necessity of freedom from constraint as well as the freedom to strive towards a goal, which often takes the form of a moral ideal. In addition, the critical role of suffering in the intellectual, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of the human life in Brave New World appears primarily in suffering’s absence within the novel’s dystopian World State; a circumstance resulting in “millions of happy babes” (Dostoevsky, The Brothers, 259), but also a few “misanthrope[s]” (Dostoevsky qtd. in Jackson 4) within the World State’s confines. The next two chapters will focus on the two major types of human freedom as well as suffering as an inextricable part of human freedom’s activation in Dead House and The Brothers , respectively, and the final body chapter will focus primarily on similar themes in Brave New Hylton 5 World . However, each major chapter will establish connections between the two authors’ arguments for the centrality of human freedom. Despite their chronological distance and differing religious beliefs, both Dostoevsky and Huxley stand in agreement that one cannot live as a full human being without individual freedom: freedom from excessive physical, psychological, and spiritual constraint, and the freedom to strive towards a chosen ideal—and suffer for it. Dostoevsky’s mature concept of human freedom arguably took its roots during his Siberian imprisonment. Although he is regarded today as one of the most compelling anti- utopian and anti-utilitarian authors of all time, his youth and earlier adulthood reflected a much different attitude from his mature views – an attitude that would send him to a place that in many ways represent an ironic fulfillment of his early socialist ideology. In April 1849, he was arrested by order of Nicholas I on charges of conspiracy against the government, allegedly because of his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle, a secret socialist society of young men who gathered to “discuss all those great issues of the day that the muzzled Russian press was forbidden to mention” (Frank, The Years , 4). After going through a mock execution designed to instill shock and terror in the convicts, Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia, where he would spend the next four years of his life in a hard labor camp with a menagerie of fellow prisoners vastly different from himself. It was here, as Dostoevsky later said, that his beliefs about the world slowly began to change from the liberal humanism of his early years to an embrace – not without struggle – of the Christian faith and its understanding of humanity. He wrote of this gradual transformation in a letter to his brother Mikhail shortly after his release from Omsk: “What was the most important to me in the recent past? When I reflect, I see that even to tell that, this sheet is far too small. How can I impart to you what is now in my mind Hylton 6 – the things I thought, the things I did, the convictions I acquired, the conclusions I came to? I cannot even attempt the task. It is absolutely impracticable” (Dostoevsky, Letters , 52). He does, however, shed slightly more light on his changing inner life later in the same letter: “I won’t even try to tell you what transformations were undergone by my soul, my faith, my mind, and my heart in those four years . Still, the eternal concentration, the escape into myself from bitter reality, did bear its fruit. I now have many new needs and hopes of which I never thought in other days” (59). Dostoevsky emerged from the prison fortress having passed through a furnace of suffering and self-confrontation—conditions under which his understanding of human nature and the need for individual freedom began to grow and mature. Indeed, this “inner transformation” appears to bring Dostoevsky a newly-developed awareness of his own soul’s unmet needs—and, moreover, of the agency required to fulfill them. One of Dostoevsky’s earliest books, Notes from a Dead House , is heralded by many as his first, and one of his most significant, commentaries on human freedom. Yet Dead House does not function as a straightforward treatise on freedom; rather, in Dostoevsky’s usual fashion, the work displays freedom’s role in the lives of the characters in a subtly complex manner. While much of Dead House focuses on the psychological and social consequences of denying people personal autonomy, the work also points to a higher ethical and moral freedom that serves as a major focus of Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov , as well as a significant point in Huxley’s Brave New World. Dostoevsky refrains from spelling out his reasoning for the centrality of human freedom in favor of allowing his characters to live out different experiences of freedom in both of his major works examined in this thesis. Although he never quite gives his readers a definitive answer to every question raised within his novels, his treatment of freedom Hylton 7 therein expresses the idea that personal freedom is a fundamental component of human nature and essential to spiritual maturity. Dostoevsky’s argument for the centrality of human freedom remained as relevant as it was compelling during the twentieth-century spike in the publication of dystopian fiction. One such work that echoes Dostoevsky’s ideas on human flourishing is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , a novel whose fictional government demands order and stability through the sacrifice of personal freedom and individuality. In addition, the World State of Brave New World, with some differences, mirrors the one presented in The Brothers ’ well-known chapter “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” The arguments in favor of individual freedom within these novels are strikingly similar due their fictional governments’ (specifically the Inquisitor’s state in The Brothers ) suppression of individual freedom under the guise of benevolence. Yet, Brave New World ’s moral and philosophical ties to The Brothers are not limited to “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” as questions surrounding personal freedom’s relationship to human nature surface throughout many parts of The Brothers as well as Dead House . Despite their chronological distance, the works of both Dostoevsky and Huxley ultimately affirm that freedom is central to the moral and psychological aspects of human life. The first body chapter of this thesis will focus on human freedom as a psychological necessity in Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House . During his four-year imprisonment in Siberia following charges of participation in a secret socialist circle, Dostoevsky underwent a long, painful spiritual transformation that would later influence his greatest novels as his faith continued to mature. In his essay “Socialism, Utopia, and Myth,” James P. Scanlan notes that “[t]he great irony of Dostoevsky’s four years in the Siberian prison is that a patriotic Russian, schooled in utopian-socialist values and plans, and seeking a more humane future for his fellow Hylton 8 countrymen, should find himself in leg-irons” (41) and stuck in the “hellish dystopia” (41) of the Russian criminal-exile system of his time. His experiences in prison, however, would inform major elements of his future novels as well as his view of humanity and human freedom (41-42). Through the perspective of Dead House ’s narrator, Alexander Petrovich, prison for Dostoevsky became a place where his views on the necessity of human freedom began to take shape. Over the course of his time in prison, the narrator—and the author—experiences life with minimal opportunity for physical autonomy, self-expression, and virtually every form of self-realization. Like his fellow convicts, he desires freedom from the oppression of confinement and forced communalism (among other prison deprivations). When unbridled, however, this desire to be free leads to chaos among the prisoners—a frequent consequence of their severely curtailed autonomy.
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