Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

English

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Adam Rzepka

Committee Member

Alexios Lykidis

Committee Member

Laura Nicosia

Abstract

This paper examines the temporal nature of libidinal control in the totalitarian systems represented in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Arguing that the most enduring forms of domination operate through the reorganization of desire, the essay explores how regimes intervene in familial, romantic, and social attachments to redirect affective energy towards the state. Orwell depicts a primitive, reactive phase of control in which attachments are violently ruptured, whereas Huxley imagines an advanced system that operates through preemption, never allowing attachments to form. Drawing on Freud’s theory of redirected libido, Berlant’s theory of Cruel Optimism, Marxist perspectives on social structure, and Klein’s Shock Doctrine, the paper traces how these novels illustrate the monopolization of love as a central tool for the consolidation of power. By clarifying the mechanisms of power that are otherwise hidden, the analysis shows that the political stakes of affective control form the basis of both literary and historical understandings of totalitarian authority.

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