Warning!: If you are consulting this paper for a school assignment on The Giver, it will not help you. If you are planning to plagiarize part of this--don't. This writer has a Ph.D. Your teacher will never believe it is you, and you will be caught. In fact, the only reason this post has not been taken down is so that your teacher will know if you plagiarize. This writer has also used Turnitin.com, and knows how it works. Trust her. That is all.
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This is more a reminder than an actual post. My son's 6th grade English class is reading The Giver by Lois Lowry, which I have never read, and after his mention that a few things seemed "inappropriate," I decided to see what I could find out about the book. Well, I learned that the part he found inappropriate was an erotic dream in which the (male) protagonist imagines trying to convince his friend (a girl) to remove her clothes so he can bath her. His accompanying feelings are his first "Stirrings"--of puberty, of sexual feelings, which are too strong to be permitted in a perfectly ordered society, and so must be suppressed with medicine. There are a few interesting things here, the point that I'm not really ready for him to be reading this notwithstanding. . . First, this is pretty standard stuff for dystopia. But it seems to me that the minimization of difference, the promotion of sameness, is associated with a different area of the political spectrum than the suppression of sexuality. This probably means that, like most dystopian novels, The Giver critiques not one particular form of government, but all the dehumanizing tendencies of society. Is Brave New World a critique of Marxism or Fascism? Exactly. The thing I find interesting is that there is a pill taken to suppress sexual urges. This stands in stark contrast to Brave New World, in which women take a "Malthusian" regimen of contraceptive pills to enable sexual availability at all times, the theory being that if the sexual urges are released at will, they will not erupt, resulting in social disorder. Of course, the sexual urges of a non-civilized individual do erupt, resulting in social disorder in Brave New World, so perhaps the eunuch pill (my term) really is a better strategy than compulsive, institutionalized sexual availability. The Giver is also a children's book. What I find interesting is the contrast between the birth control pill and the sexual urge control pill. Both are uses of hormones that regulate sexuality. One acknowledges--while suppressing--fertility. The other does not. The message of The Giver seems to be that suppression of sexual urges is dehumanizing. Brave New World suggests that the separation of sexuality from fertility is dangerous in some way, and also dehumanizing. The Giver does not, as far as I can tell, link sexuality and fertility in any way. Now, this is a feature of the society, but it is also a feature of the novel. After all, separation of sexuality from fertility is a feature of the society of Brave New World, but the novel emphasizes that the separation is unnatural. How to remedy this in a children's novel, I'm not sure. However, the author chose to address sexuality in the first place, and the production of children is a separate issue. Completely. Separate. (As far as I can tell.) This is by way of reminding myself to verify this impression whenever I am able to read the novel myself.
Literacy becomes relevant because, as is common in dystopia, access to books is restricted. Only the individual who is the keeper of memories of the past, including emotion, unique experiences, and pain, has unrestricted (it seems) access to books. Now, I am not completely sure why this is--for consolation, perhaps? To allow the individual to cope with his/her knowledge of pain? (Very Freudian, btw) Or possibly to supplement the memories by providing records of other experiences and provide knowledge to use as the basis for important decisions. At any rate, books are seen as unnecessary and possibly dangerous for the populus, who have access only to the dictionary, community volume, Book of Rules--decidedly utilitarian volumes. That there is an association between the Receiver of Memories (who is permitted to feel and think deeper than anyone else) suggests an association between literacy and introspection. I'm not sure where Lowry takes this association, or whether she carries the implied literacy discourse any further, but it will be interesting to see if she does anything further with this dystopian theme. . .
