Analyzing the Historical Setting in Novel V for Vendatta - Essay Example

The novel, thus, by charting the future of the world, talks about the future as something that is not a mystery. However, the novel was written keeping in mind the political currents of the present and as such, a historical analysis of the novel should include the details of the present as well as it is intended for the audience of the present. The novel V for Vendetta talks of a future when the political centre of the world has shifted back to Britain. The country however, experiences one of the worst regimes that it has ever done so.

Moore depicts a society where people do not act as a result of a regime that punishes any form of criticism that is leveled against it. Apart from this, it also does not value the lives of its own citizens highly. This can be seen from the past of the character of V. The major and immediate reason for the transformation of who was once a normal citizen of Britain to the masked character V is the use of his body for experiments that were carried out by the party Norsefire that ruled Britain. The leader of this party employs brutal methods to suppress revolution or any other form of dissent arising from the masses.

The novel seeks to parody the future that it expected for Britain from the 1980s to the 1990s. The age that the novel expects is one that has many diseases and monopolized drug firms. To summarize this, one may say that the world that the Moore seems to be envisioning is one that is dystopic- a world where the monopoly over the production of a drug would lead to political power. In this world, the very basic fears of mankind are employed to create vote banks. One of the most brutal methods that the party Norsefire employs is one where the citizens of the country are constantly under surveillance.

These fears regarding a lack of privacy surged during the time that the concept for this novel was developed and also during the time that the novel was published. The publication of the novel was during a period when people were worried about the intrusion into their lives by governing agencies. This took the government to the level of an omnipotent power that had knowledge of everything and thus the power to do anything. Coupled with this, the novel depicts the government to have the power to invent the very few drugs that had the power to cure certain diseases.

During the eighties, the scare that was related to AIDS had started and this could be one of the reasons as to why the novel portrays a world that is gripped by a fear of diseases that are incurable. Apart from this, the aspect of the monopoly of the government shows the fears that people of the modern age have about the fact that the government seems to be an all-powerful organization. By the time the eighties had arrived, people had in many parts of the world become disillusioned with the concept of democracy and the fact that power was something that existed everywhere.

This made accountability impossible and a citizen of any democracy wouldn’t be able to know where the power of the society was invested in. As a result of this, a monopoly that a government would have in an area such as healthcare would be disastrous as it would invest the government with a power that is limitless. Another aspect of the people who constitute modern society that the eighties had accepted was the fact that multiculturalism was a way of life that was irrevocable. The art of this age demonstrates the growing resentment