Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Sexual Aggression
Sex in A Clockwork Orange is not an expression
of love or intimacy, but rather an exhibition of power and violence.
The vast majority of sex scenes in the film are violent, including
the attempted gang rape of the “weepy devotchka,” Alex’s rape of
Mrs. Alexander, and the on-screen rape scene the doctors show Alex.
Other less explicit scenes of sexual repression and aggression appear
as well. For example, Deltoid, Alex’s probation officer, grabs Alex’s
testicles. In A Clockwork Orange, most human relationships,
including sexual ones, revolve around the question of control: who
will control and who will be controlled. The minister of the interior
sees Alex as a guinea pig for his experiment in law and order. Mr.
Alexander sees Alex as an instrument he can use to bring down the
minister of the interior and his party. Alex himself wields power
not only over the victims of his crimes but also over his other
gang members. Even the economy turns people into objects to be controlled
or used. Alex’s mother goes to work in a factory, presumably functioning
as just one piece of the machine. In this depersonalized world of
users and used, sex ceases to be an act of intimacy and instead
becomes an act of brutality and an assertion of power.
Music
A Clockwork Orange challenges traditional
ideas about music’s fundamental function, and here music taps into
what is most dominant in Alex’s nature: violence. Throughout the
film, classical music moves Alex to a version of ecstasy, and he
imagines hangings, bombings, and other acts of violence. However,
music remains valuable as a signal of his freedom of choice. Alex
lives violently, brutally, and without compassion, but what initially
sets him apart from adults is that he has so much more vitality.
While his weary mother trudges off to her factory job, Alex sleeps
all day, then wakes up to have sex, take drugs, and perpetrate more
violence—only because he wants to and because it is exciting. He
also listens to music, which for him is an ecstatic and liberating
experience that expresses both the brute and the rebel in him. When
the doctors condition Alex’s body to become ill from his own violent
impulses, they simultaneously condition his body to reject music.
Though this is an unintentional result of the conditioning, it is
symbolically significant. Music connects to Alex’s drives and desires,
and stripping him of his ability to enjoy it is equivalent to stripping
him of his humanity.
The role music plays in both the novel and the film of A
Clockwork Orange is Burgess and Kubrick’s nod toward history.
All governments, particularly totalitarian regimes, have used music
to heighten their citizens’ patriotic fervor. For example, Adolf
Hitler was moved by music and used it as a tool of state control.
In Alex’s case, the elimination of music from his life is how this
control manifests itself, and the consequences are just as dire.
Slang
Alex uses a slang spoken only by young people. Adults
don’t understand the language, which highlights the emotional and
ideological distance between the generations. Burgess invented the
language for the novel and called it Nadsat,which
is the Russian suffix for teen. Nadsat is a language
that, like Alex himself and like youth more generally, overflows
with energy. Sex, for instance, is called “the old in-out in-out.”
In contrast, the language the adults speak is far drier and more
predictable. Alex’s parents speak in clichés. The prison guards
speak the language of law and order. The doctors speak in medical
lingo. Only the youths’ language transcends these linguistic categories
and barriers.
In Nadsat, high and low forms of language coexist. Street
words, baby talk, and rhyming slang accompany grammar and syntax
that sometimes follow formal Shakespearean English. The most dominant
linguistic influences on Nadsat besides English are Russian and Slavic.
Before Burgess wrote his novel, he spent time in Soviet Russia,
where he witnessed youth gangs running wild, just like the ones he’d
seen in England. He decided to create a language that incorporated
both English and Russian, the two most powerful political languages
in the world at that time. The fact that Alex, a completely apolitical
youth, speaks it also makes it a language of rebellion. The youths
who use the language don’t care about the politics that divided
the world at the time that Burgess wrote his novel.
