The Wanting Seed Themes

When The Wanting Seed begins, we discover a world that seems like the warped mirror image of our own. Discrimination based on gender and sexuality is rampant in Beatrice-Joanna and Tristram's world...

In The Wanting Seed, the people of England no longer think of themselves as the heart of the British Empire, but instead as one group among the larger "Enspun"—the English-Speaking Union. Just as...

Shmoopers, we're not gonna lie: The Wanting Seed has some pretty strong ideas about the ladies. If you happen to be a woman who doesn't mind being told that you think with your nerves and your inne...

Distinctions between classes are subtle in The Wanting Seed. At first glance, it might seem like everyone in England is living with the same meager food rations, itty bitty living space, and limite...

Which would you prefer: a repressive police state where anyone who steps out of line gets beaten to a pulp or hauled off to prison, or a state that maintains order by funneling law-breakers and dis...

Time may be linear in The Wanting Seed, but human social history isn't. Like some historians and social theorists before him, Tristram believes in a cyclical model of history: a never-ending, recur...

Any way you slice it, The Wanting Seed is obsessed with sex. The novel represents the act—in its heterosexual forms in particular—as a natural, instinctive urge that society thwarts or represse...

War! What is it good for? According to the men running the show in the second half of The Wanting Seed, war isn't just good for something, it's GREAT for two things: keeping the population down, an...