Adolphus Huxleys Hyperion to a Satyr :: Adolphus Huxley Hyperion Satyr Essays

Adolphus Huxley's "Hyperion to a Satyr" Throughout the ages, there have been many ways to identify a person's social standing. Possessions such as homes, cars, and others, help to establish a person's place insociety. There are other ways also. Education, and a person's speech patternsare other ways to do this. But in "Hyperion to a Satyr," Adolphus Huxleypresents his view that hygiene also played an integral part. Clearly, thisdoesn't hold as true in these times, but perhaps in an earlier era thiswas an accurate measurement of wealth. But what role did hygiene play tosegregate peoplethroughout history? This question will be analyzed byapplying the meaningof metaphors used by Huxley. This article contains Huxley's views on many controversial subjects and their relationship todirt. But the most prominent comparison was between the social classesand the level of hygiene associated with each one. Mr. Huxley goes on toillustrate this difference with a variety of metaphors. He talks abouthow this view changed throughout history, and how great people tried toinfluence social changewith implementation of their plans for widespreadequality in cleanliness. This paper willbegin analyzing the relationship between social classdistinctio n and hygiene using the metaphoric analysis method. Thiswill be done by first analyzing Huxley's piece as a whole, by analyzingboth text and metaphors. Hopefully this will reveal his true meaning ofthe piece. Next will be the identification of various metaphors that pertainto the research question. Then the metaphors will be broken down into thetenors and vehicles. After that, they will be analyzed and sorted by meaning.By doing this, hopefully the research question will be better explained,and the relationship between cleanliness and upper class will be clarified. Huxley's " Hyperion to a Satyr" is a piece that discusses the class separation system and how the concept of cleanliness and uncleanliness has helped to increase thegap between the different social classes. Huxley feels that, because therichwere able to afford the luxuries of living "clean" lives and the poorcouldnot, that this helped to further separate the classes. He uses manymetaphorsto prove this point and expound on the relationship between socialclassesand hygiene. Now, to understand Huxley’s view on the research question, we need to isolate the different metaphors used: bathing was a badgeof class distinction, the gulf between rulers and ruled, from the peakof their superior... cleanliness, they were creatures of an entirely differentspecies, it was only the blessed pigs, and a tithe of their populationto untouchability.