1932 ALDOUS HUXLEY'S BRAVE NEW WORLD by Anthony Astrachan SERIES EDITOR Michael Spring Editor, Literary Cavalcade Scholastic Inc. (C) Copyright 1984 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. Electronically Enhanced Text (C) Copyright 1993, World Library, Inc.
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CONTENTS THE NOVEL The Plot................................. HBRAPLOT The Characters........................... HBRACHAR Other Elements Setting............................. HBRASETT Themes.............................. HBRATHEM Style............................... HBRASTYL Point of View....................... HBRAVIEW Form and Structure.................. HBRAFORM THE STORY................................ HBRASTOR Glossary................................. HBRAGLOS The Critics.............................. HBRACRIT Advisory Board........................... HBRAADVB Bibliography............................. HBRABIBL |
THE_PLOT
THE NOVEL
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THE PLOT (HBRAPLOT)
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Brave New World is partly a statement of ideas (expressed by
characters with no more depth than cartoon characters) and only partly
a story with a plot.
The first three chapters present most of the important ideas or
themes of the novel. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
explains that this Utopia breeds people to order, artificially
fertilizing a mother's eggs to create babies that grow in bottles.
They are not born, but decanted. Everyone belongs to one of five
classes, from the Alphas, the most intelligent, to the Epsilons,
morons bred to do the dirty jobs that nobody else wants to do. The
lower classes are multiplied by a budding process that can create up
to 96 identical clones and produce over 15,000 brothers and sisters
from a single ovary.
All the babies are conditioned, physically and chemically in the
bottle, and psychologically after birth, to make them happy citizens
of the society with both a liking and an aptitude for the work they
will do. One psychological conditioning technique is hypnopaedia, or
teaching people while they sleep- not teaching facts or analysis,
but planting suggestions that will make people behave in certain ways.
The Director also makes plain that sex is a source of happiness, a
game people play with anyone who pleases them.
The Controller, one of the ten men who run the world, explains
some of the more profound principles on which the Utopia is based. One
is that "history is bunk"; the society limits people's knowledge of
the past so they will not be able to compare the present with anything
that might make them want to change the present. Another principle
is that people should have no emotions, particularly no painful
emotions; blind happiness is necessary for stability. One of the
things that guarantees happiness is a drug called soma, which calms
you down and gets you high but never gives you a hangover. Another
is the "feelies," movies that reach your sense of touch as well as
your sight and hearing.
After Huxley presents these themes in the first three chapters,
the story begins. Bernard Marx, an Alpha of the top class, is on the
verge of falling in love with Lenina Crowne, a woman who works in
the Embryo Room of the Hatchery. Lenina has been dating Henry
Foster, a Hatchery scientist; her friend Fanny nags her because she
hasn't seen any other man for four months. Lenina likes Bernard but
doesn't fall in love with him. Falling in love is a sin in this
world in which one has sex with everyone else, and she is a happy,
conforming citizen of the Utopia.
Bernard is neither happy nor conforming. He's a bit odd; for one
thing, he's small for an Alpha, in a world where every member of the
same caste is alike. He likes to treasure his differences from his
fellows, but he lacks the courage to fight for his right to be an
individual. In contrast is his friend Helmholtz Watson, successful
in sports, sex, and community activities, but openly dissatisfied
because instead of writing something beautiful and powerful, his job
is to turn out propaganda.
Bernard attends a solidarity service of the Fordian religion, a
parody of Christianity as practiced in England in the 1920s. It
culminates in a sexual orgy, but he doesn't feel the true rapture
experienced by the other 11 members of his group.
Bernard then takes Lenina to visit a Savage Reservation in North
America. While signing his permit to go, the Director tells Bernard
how he visited the same Reservation as a young man, taking a young
woman from London who disappeared and was presumed dead. He then
threatens Bernard with exile to Iceland because Bernard is a
nonconformist: he doesn't gobble up pleasure in his leisure time
like an infant.
At the Reservation, Bernard and Lenina meet John, a handsome young
Savage who, Bernard soon realizes, is the son of the Director.
Clearly, the woman the Director had taken to the Reservation long
ago had become pregnant as the result of an accident that the citizens
of Utopia would consider obscene. John has a fantasy picture of the
Utopia from his mother's tales and a knowledge of Shakespeare that
he mistakes for a guide to reality.
Bernard gets permission from the Controller to bring John and Linda,
his mother, back to London. The Director had called a public meeting
to announce Bernard's exile, but by greeting the Director as lover and
father, respectively, Linda and John turn him into an obscene joke.
Bernard stays and becomes the center of attention of all London
because he is, in effect, John's guardian, and everybody wants to meet
the Savage. Linda goes into a permanent soma trance after her years of
exile on the Reservation. John is taken to see all the attractions
of new world society and doesn't like them. But he enjoys arguing with
Helmholtz about them, and about Shakespeare.
Lenina has become popular because she is thought to be sleeping with
the Savage. Everyone envies her and wants to know what it's like. But,
in fact, while she wants to sleep with John, he refuses because he,
too, has fallen in love with her- and he has taken from Shakespeare
the old-fashioned idea that lovers should be pure. Not understanding
this, she finally comes to his apartment and takes her clothes off. He
throws her out, calling her a prostitute because he thinks she's
immoral, even though he wants her desperately.
John then learns that his mother is dying. The hospital
illustrates the Utopia's approach to death, which includes trying to
completely eliminate grief and pain. When John goes to visit Linda
he is devastated; his display of grief frightens children being taught
that death is a pleasant and natural process. John grows so angry that
he tries to bring the Utopia back to what he considers sanity and
morality by disrupting the daily distribution of soma to lower-caste
Delta workers. That leads to a riot; John, Bernard, and Helmholtz
are arrested.
The three then confront the Controller, who explains more of the
Utopia's principles. Their conversation reveals that the Utopia
achieves its happiness by giving up science, art, religion, and
other things that we prize in the real world. The Controller sends
Bernard to Iceland, after all, and Helmholtz to the Falkland
Islands. He keeps John in England, but John finds a place where he can
lead a hermit's life, complete with suffering. His solitude is invaded
by Utopians who want to see him suffer, as though it were a sideshow
spectacle; when Lenina joins the mob, he kills himself.
THE_CHARACTERS
THE CHARACTERS (HBRACHAR)
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Because this is a Utopian novel of ideas, few of the characters
are three-dimensional people who come alive on the page. Most exist to
voice ideas in words or to embody them in their behavior. John,
Bernard, Helmholtz, and the Controller express ideas through real
personalities, but you will enjoy most of the others more if you see
them as cartoon characters rather than as full portraits that may seem
so poorly drawn that they will disappoint you.
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THE DIRECTOR OF HATCHERIES AND CONDITIONING
The Director opens the novel by explaining the reproductive system
of the brave new world, with genetically engineered babies growing
in bottles. He loves to throw "scientific data" at his listeners so
quickly that they can't understand them; he is a know-it-all impressed
with his own importance. In fact, he knows less and is less
important than the Controller, as you see when he is surprised that
the Controller dares to talk about two forbidden topics- history and
biological parents.
The Director comes alive only when he confesses to Bernard Marx that
as a young man he went to a Savage Reservation, taking along a woman
who disappeared there. She was pregnant with his baby, as a result
of what the Utopia considers an obscene accident. The baby grows up to
be John; his return to London leads to the total humiliation of the
Director.
The Director's name is Thomas, but you learn this only because
Linda, his onetime lover and John's mother, keeps referring to him
as Tomakin.
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HENRY FOSTER
Henry is a scientist in the London Hatchery, an ideal citizen of the
world state: efficient and intelligent at work, filling his leisure
time with sports and casual sex. He is not an important character
but helps Huxley explain the workings of the Hatchery, show Lenina's
passionless sex life, and explore the gulf between Bernard and the
"normal" citizens of Utopia.
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LENINA CROWNE
Lenina is young and pretty despite having lupus, an illness that
causes reddish-brown blotches to appear on her skin. She is, like
Henry Foster, a happy, shallow citizen, her one idiosyncracy is the
fact that she sometimes spends more time than society approves
dating one man exclusively.
Like all well-conditioned citizens of the World State, Lenina
believes in having sex when she wants it. She can't understand that
John avoids sex with her because he loves her and does not want to
do something that he thinks- in his old-fashioned, part-Indian,
part-Christian, part-Shakespearean way- will dishonor her. She
embodies the conflict he feels between body and spirit, between love
and lust.
Lenina is more a cartoon character than a real person, but she
triggers John's emotional violence and provides the occasion for his
suicide when she comes to see him whip himself.
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THE CONTROLLER, MUSTAPHA MOND
Mond is one of the ten people who control the World State. He is
good-natured and dedicated to his work, and extremely intelligent;
he understands people and ideas that are different, which most
Utopians cannot do. He has read such forbidden books as the works of
Shakespeare and the Bible, and knows history and philosophy. Indeed,
he resembles the Oxford professors that Huxley knew, and his
discussion of happiness with the Savage resembles a tutorial between
an Oxford don and his most challenging student.
Once a gifted scientist, the Controller made a conscious choice as a
young man to become one of the rulers instead of a troublesome
dissident. He is one of the few Utopians who can choose, who has
free will, and this makes him more rounded and more attractive than
most of the characters you'll meet in the book. It also makes him
concerned with morality, but he uses his moral force and his sanity
for the immoral and insane goals of the Utopia. You may decide that he
is the most dangerous person in Brave New World.
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BERNARD MARX
A specialist in sleep-teaching, Bernard does not fit the
uniformity that usually characterizes all members of the same caste.
He is an Alpha of high intelligence and therefore a member of the
elite, but he is small and therefore regarded as deformed. Other
people speculate that too much alcohol was put into his bottle when he
was still an embryo. He dislikes sports and likes to be alone, two
very unusual traits among Utopians. When he first appears, he seems to
dislike casual sex, another departure from the norm. He is unhappy
in a world where everyone else is happy.
At first Bernard seems to take pleasure in his differentness, to
like being a nonconformist and a rebel. Later, he reveals that his
rebellion is less a matter of belief than of his own failure to be
accepted. When he returns from the Savage Reservation with John, he is
suddenly popular with important people and successful with women,
and he loves it. Underneath, he has always wanted to be a happy member
of the ruling class. In the end, he is exiled to Iceland and
protests bitterly.
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HELMHOLTZ WATSON
Helmholtz, like Bernard, is different from the average Alpha-plus
intellectual. A mental giant who is also successful in sports and sex,
he's almost too good to be true. But he is a nonconformist who knows
that the world is capable of greater literature than the propaganda he
writes so well- and that he is capable of producing it. When John
the Savage introduces him to Shakespeare, Helmholtz only appreciates
half of it; despite his genius, he's still limited by his Utopian
upbringing. He remains willing to challenge society even if he can't
change it, and accepts exile to the bleak Falkland Islands in the hope
that physical discomfort and the company of other dissidents will
stimulate his writing.
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JOHN THE SAVAGE
John is the son of two members of Utopia, but has grown up on a
Savage Reservation. He is the only character who can really compare
the two different worlds, and it is through him that Huxley shows that
his Utopia is a bad one.
John's mother, Linda, became pregnant accidentally, a very unusual
event in the brave new world. While she was pregnant, she visited a
Savage Reservation, hurt herself in a fall, and got lost, missing
her return trip to London. The Indians of the Reservation saved her
life and she gave birth to John. The boy grew up absorbing three
cultures: the Utopia he heard about from his mother; the Indian
culture in which he lived, but which rejected him as an outsider;
and the plays of Shakespeare, which he read in a book that survived
from pre-Utopian days.
John, in short, is different from the other Savages and from the
Utopians. He is tall and handsome, but much more of an alien in either
world than Bernard is. John looks at both worlds through the lenses of
the religion he acquired on the Reservation- a mixture of Christianity
and American Indian beliefs- and the old-fashioned morality he learned
from reading Shakespeare. His beliefs contradict those of the brave
new world, as he shows in his struggle over sex with Lenina and his
fight with the system after his mother dies. Eventually, the
conflict is too much for him and he kills himself.
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LINDA
Linda is John's mother, a Beta minus who sleeps with the Director
and becomes pregnant accidentally, 20 years before the action of the
book begins. She falls while visiting a Savage Reservation, becomes
unconscious, and remains lost until the Director has to leave. She
is then rescued by Indians, gives birth to John, and lives for 20
years in the squalor of the Reservation, where she grows old, sick,
and fat without the medical care that keeps people physically young in
the Utopia. Behaving according to Utopian principles, she sleeps
with many of the Indians on the Reservation and never understands
why the women despise her or why the community makes John an
outcast. When she returns to London, she takes ever-increasing doses
of soma and stays perpetually high- until the drug kills her.
SETTING
OTHER ELEMENTS
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SETTING (HBRASETT)
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Setting plays a particularly important role in Brave New World.
Huxley's novel is a novel of Utopia, and a science-fiction novel. In
both kinds of books the portrayal of individual characters tends to
take a back seat to the portrayal of the society they live in. In some
ways, the brave new world itself becomes the book's main character.
The story opens in London some 600 years in the future- 632 A. F.
(After Ford) in the calendar of the era. Centuries before,
civilization as we know it was destroyed in the Nine Years' War. Out
of the ruins grew the World State, an all-powerful government headed
by ten World Controllers. Faith in Christ has been replaced by Faith
in Ford, a mythologized version of Henry Ford, the auto pioneer who
developed the mass production methods that have reached their zenith
in the World State. Almost all traces of the past have been erased,
for, as Henry Ford said, "History is bunk." Changing names show the
changed society. Charing Cross, the London railroad station, is now
Charing T Rocket Station: the cross has been supplanted by the T, from
Henry Ford's Model T. Big Ben is now Big Henry. Westminster Abbey, one
of England's most hallowed shrines, is now merely the site of a
nightclub, the Westminster Abbey Cabaret.
The people of this world, born from test tubes and divided into five
castes, are docile and happy, kept occupied by elaborate games like
obstacle golf, entertainments like the "feelies," and sexual
promiscuity. Disease is nonexistent, old age and death made as
pleasant as possible so they can be ignored.
Some parts of the earth, however, are allowed to remain as they were
before the World State came to power. With Bernard and Lenina, you
visit one of these Savage Reservations, the New Mexican home of the
Zuni Indians. It is a world away from civilized London: the Zunis
are impoverished, dirty, ravaged by disease and old age, and still
cling to their ancient religion.
The settings in Brave New World, then, seem to offer only the choice
between civilized servitude and primitive ignorance and squalor. Are
these the only choices available? One other is mentioned, the
islands of exile- Iceland and the Falkland Islands- where
malcontents like Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are sent. But
Huxley does not discuss these places in enough detail to let us know
whether or not they provide any kind of alternative to the grim life
he has presented in the rest of the book.
THEMES
THEMES (HBRATHEM)
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This novel is about a Utopia, an ideal state- a bad ideal state.
It is therefore a novel about ideas, and its themes are as important
as its plot. They will be studied in depth in the chapter-by-chapter
discussion of the book. Most are expressed as fundamental principles
of the Utopia, the brave new world. Some come to light when one
character, a Savage raised on an Indian reservation, confronts that
world. As you find the themes, try to think not only about what they
say about Huxley's Utopia, but also about Huxley's real world- and
your own.
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1. COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY- VERSUS INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
Community, Identity, Stability is the motto of the World State. It
lists the Utopia's prime goals. Community is in part a result of
identity and stability. It is also achieved through a religion that
satirizes Christianity- a religion that encourages people to reach
solidarity through sexual orgy. And it is achieved by organizing
life so that a person is almost never alone.
Identity is in large part the result of genetic engineering. Society
is divided into five classes or castes, hereditary social groups. In
the lower three classes, people are cloned in order to produce up to
96 identical "twins." Identity is also achieved by teaching everyone
to conform, so that someone who has or feels more than a minimum of
individuality is made to feel different, odd, almost an outcast.
Stability is the third of the three goals, but it is the one the
characters mention most often- the reason for designing society this
way. The desire for stability, for instance, requires the production
of large numbers of genetically identical "individuals," because
people who are exactly the same are less likely to come into conflict.
Stability means minimizing conflict, risk, and change.
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2. SCIENCE AS A MEANS OF CONTROL
Brave New World is not only a Utopian book, it is also a
science-fiction novel. But it does not predict much about science in
general. Its theme "is the advancement of science as it affects
human individuals," Huxley said in the Foreword he wrote in 1946, 15
years after he wrote the book. He did not focus on physical sciences
like nuclear physics, though even in 1931 he knew that the
production of nuclear energy (and weapons) was probable. He was more
worried about dangers that appeared more obvious at that time- the
possible misuse of biology, physiology, and psychology to achieve
community, identity, and stability. Ironically, it becomes clear at
the end of the book that the World State's complete control over human
activity destroys even the scientific progress that gained it such
control.
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3. THE THREAT OF GENETIC ENGINEERING
Genetic engineering is a term that has come into use in recent years
as scientists have learned to manipulate RNA and DNA, the proteins
in every cell that determine the basic inherited characteristics of
life. Huxley didn't use the phrase but he describes genetic
engineering when he explains how his new world breeds prescribed
numbers of humans artificially for specified qualities.
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4. THE MISUSE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONING
Every human being in the new world is conditioned to fit society's
needs- to like the work he will have to do. Human embryos do not
grow inside their mothers' wombs but in bottles. Biological or
physiological conditioning consists of adding chemicals or spinning
the bottles to prepare the embryos for the levels of strength,
intelligence, and aptitude required for given jobs. After they are
"decanted" from the bottles, people are psychologically conditioned,
mainly by hypnopaedia or sleep-teaching. You might say that at every
stage the society brainwashes its citizens.
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5. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS CARRIED TO AN EXTREME
A society can achieve stability only when everyone is happy, and the
brave new world tries hard to ensure that every person is happy. It
does its best to eliminate any painful emotion, which means every deep
feeling, every passion. It uses genetic engineering and conditioning
to ensure that everyone is happy with his or her work.
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6. THE CHEAPENING OF SEXUAL PLEASURE
Sex is a primary source of happiness. The brave new world makes
promiscuity a virtue: you have sex with any partner you want, who
wants you- and sooner or later every partner will want you. (As a
child, you learn in your sleep that "everyone belongs to everyone
else.") In this Utopia, what we think of as true love for one person
would lead to neurotic passions and the establishment of family
life, both of which would interfere with community and stability.
Nobody is allowed to become pregnant because nobody is born, only
decanted from a bottle. Many females are born sterile by design; those
who are not are trained by "Malthusian drill" to use contraceptives
properly.
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7. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS THROUGH DRUGS
Soma is a drug used by everyone in the brave new world. It calms
people and gets them high at the same time, but without hangovers or
nasty side effects. The rulers of the brave new world had put 2000
pharmacologists and biochemists to work long before the action of
the novel begins; in six years they had perfected the drug. Huxley
believed in the possibility of a drug that would enable people to
escape from themselves and help them achieve knowledge of God, but
he made soma a parody and degradation of that possibility.
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8. THE THREAT OF MINDLESS CONSUMPTION AND MINDLESS DIVERSIONS
This society offers its members distractions that they must enjoy in
common- never alone- because solitude breeds instability. Huxley
mentions but never explains sports that use complex equipment whose
manufacture keeps the economy rolling- sports called Obstacle Golf and
Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. But the chief emblem of Brave New World is
the Feelies- movies that feature not only sight and sound but also the
sensation of touch, so that when people watch a couple making love
on a bearskin rug, they can feel every hair of the bear on their own
bodies.
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9. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FAMILY
The combination of genetic engineering, bottle-birth, and sexual
promiscuity means there is no monogamy, marriage, or family.
"Mother" and "father" are obscene words that may be used
scientifically on rare, carefully chosen occasions to label ancient
sources of psychological problems.
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10. THE DENIAL OF DEATH
The brave new world insists that death is a natural and not
unpleasant process. There is no old age or visible senility.
Children are conditioned at hospitals for the dying and given sweets
to eat when they hear of death occurring. This conditioning does
not- as it might- prepare people to cope with the death of a loved one
or with their own mortality. It eliminates the painful emotions of
grief and loss, and the spiritual significance of death, which
Huxley made increasingly important in his later novels.
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11. THE OPPRESSION OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Some characters in Brave New World differ from the norm. Bernard
is small for an Alpha and fond of solitude; Helmholtz, though
seemingly "every centimetre an Alpha-Plus," knows he is too
intelligent for the work he performs; John the Savage, genetically a
member of the World State, has never been properly conditioned to
become a citizen of it. Even the Controller, Mustapha Mond, stands
apart because of his leadership abilities. Yet in each case these
differences are crushed: Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled; John
commits suicide; and the Mond stifles his own individuality in
exchange for the power he wields as Controller. What does this say
about Huxley's Utopia?
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12. WHAT DOES SUCH A SYSTEM COST?
This Utopia has a good side: there is no war or poverty, little
disease or social unrest. But Huxley keeps asking, what does society
have to pay for these benefits? The price, he makes clear, is high.
The first clue is in the epigraph, the quotation at the front of the
book. It is in French, but written by a Russian, Nicolas Berdiaeff. It
says, "Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly
believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us
with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real?"
By the time you hear the conversation between the Controller, one of
the men who runs the new world, and John, the Savage, you've learned
that citizens of this Utopia must give up love, family, science,
art, religion, and history. At the end of the book, John commits
suicide and you see that the price of this brave new world is
fatally high.
STYLE
STYLE (HBRASTYL)
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Although Huxley's writing style makes him easy to read, his
complex ideas make readers think. Even if you're not familiar with his
vocabulary or philosophy, you can see that, as the critic Laurence
Brander says, "The prose was witty and ran clearly and nimbly."
Huxley's witty, clear, nimble prose is very much an upper-class
tradition. Brave New World- like all of Huxley's novels- is a novel of
ideas, which means that the characters must have ideas and must be
able to express them eloquently and cleverly. This demands that the
author have considerable knowledge. In pre-World War II England such
novels were more likely to have been written by members of the upper
class, simply because they had much greater access to good
education. Huxley, we remember, attended Eton and Oxford.
Huxley, like other upper-class Englishmen, was familiar with history
and literature. He expected his readers to know the plays of
Shakespeare, to recognize names like Malthus and Marx, to be
comfortable with a word like "predestination." (Literally "predestine"
means only "to determine in advance," but it is most importantly a
word from Christian theology- describing, in one version, the doctrine
that God knows in advance everything that will ever happen, and
thereby decides who will be saved and who will be damned.)
Although Huxley was very serious about ideas, he never stopped
seeing their humorous possibilities. His biographer, Sybille
Bedford, says that in 1946 he gave the commencement speech at a
progressive school in California, where he urged the students not to
imitate "the young man of that ancient limerick... who
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....said "Damn,
It is borne in on me that I am
A creature that moves
In predestinate grooves;
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram!"
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To appreciate this joke, you have to remember how a tram or
trolley car moves on its tracks. It's a reminder that you'll have much
more fun with Brave New World and get much more out of it if you don't
let the language scare or bore you. Use the glossary in this guide and
your dictionary as tools. See how many of the words you know. See if
you can guess what some words mean from their spelling and the context
in which you find them. Look them up and see how close you are. Look
up the ones whose meaning you can't guess. If you put even a few of
the words you meet for the first time in Brave New World into your
vocabulary, you'll be winning a great game.
Games were an important part of an upper-class English education
in Huxley's day. Many elite students developed a readiness to make
jokes with words and ideas. You may find some of Huxley's jokes funny,
while you may think the humor has vanished from others. But you'll
have more fun with the book if you try to spot the humor. You'll
find big jokes like the Feelies, movies that you can feel, as well
as see and hear. You'll also find little jokes like plays on words- as
in calling the process for getting a baby out of its bottle
"decanting," a word ordinarily used only for fine wine. There is humor
in "orgy-porgy," a combination of religious ritual and group sex, a
parody of a child's nursery rhyme.
In Brave New World Huxley plays many games with his characters'
names. He turns Our Lord into Our Ford, for Henry Ford, the inventor
of the modern assembly line and the cheap cars that embodied the
machine age for the average man. He names one of his main characters
for Karl Marx, the father of the ideas of Communism. His heroine is
called Lenina, after the man who led the Russian Revolution. Benito
Hoover, a minor character, has the first name of the dictator of
fascist Italy and the last name of the President of the United
States who led the nation into the Great Depression, but he is
"notoriously good-natured." Look up any names you don't recognize.
VIEW
POINT OF VIEW (HBRAVIEW)
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Huxley's point of view in Brave New World is third person,
omniscient (all-knowing). The narrator is not one of the characters
and therefore has the ability to tell us what is going on within any
of the characters' minds. This ability is particularly useful in
showing us a cross section of this strange society of the future.
We're able to be with the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in
the Central London Conditioning and Hatchery Centre, with Lenina
Crowne at the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, with Bernard Marx at the
Fordson Community Singery. The technique reaches an extreme in Chapter
Three, when we hear a babble of unidentified voices- Lenina's, Fanny
Crowne's, Mustapha Mond's- that at first sound chaotic but soon give
us a vivid understanding of this brave new world.
FORM
FORM AND STRUCTURE (HBRAFORM)
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Brave New World fits into a long tradition of books about Utopia, an
ideal state where everything is done for the good of humanity as a
whole, and evils like war and poverty cannot exist.
The word "Utopia" means "no place" in Greek. Sir Thomas More first
used it in 1516 as the title of a book about such an ideal state.
But the idea of a Utopia goes much further back. Many critics consider
Plato's Republic, written in the fourth century B. C., a Utopian book.
"Utopia" came to have a second meaning soon after Sir Thomas More
used it- "an impractical scheme for social improvement." The idea that
Utopias are silly and impractical helped make them a subject for
satire, a kind of literature that makes fun of something, exposing
wickedness and foolishness through wit and irony. (Irony is the use of
words to express an idea that is the direct opposite of the stated
meaning, or an outcome of events contrary to what was expected.)
In this way two Utopian traditions developed in English
literature. One was optimistic and idealistic- like More's, or
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), which foresaw a mildly
socialist, perfect state. H. G. Wells, an important English writer,
believed in progress through science and wrote both novels and
nonfiction about social and scientific changes that could produce a
Utopia.
The second tradition was satiric, like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels (1726), in which both tiny and gigantic residents of distant
lands were used to satirize the England of Swift's day. Another
satiric Utopia was Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872; the title is an
anagram of "nowhere"), which made crime a disease to be cured and
disease a crime to be punished.
In Brave New World, Huxley clearly belongs in the satiric group.
(Though toward the end of his career he wrote a nonsatiric novel of
a good Utopia, Island.) He told a friend that he started to write
Brave New World as a satire on the works of H. G. Wells. Soon he
increased his targets, making fun not only of science but also of
religion, using his idea of the future to attack the present.
As in most works about Utopia, Brave New World lacks the
complexity of characterization that marks other kinds of great novels.
The people tend to represent ideas the author likes or dislikes. Few
are three-dimensional or true to life; most resemble cartoon
characters. As do many writers of Utopian works, Huxley brings in an
outsider (John the Savage) who can see the flaws of the society that
are invisible to those who have grown up within it.
As Huxley worked on his book, his satire darkened. The book became a
serious warning that if we use science as an instrument of power, we
will probably apply it to human beings in the wrong way, producing a
horrible society. Brave New World belongs firmly in the tradition of
Utopian writing, but the Utopia it portrays is a bleak one, indeed.
CHAPTER_ONE
THE STORY (HBRASTOR)
-
CHAPTER ONE
-
The novel begins by plunging you into a world you can't quite
recognize: it's familiar but there's something wrong, or at least
different from what you're used to. For example, it starts like a
movie, with a long shot of a building- but a "squat" building "only"
thirty-four stories high. The building bears a name unlike any
you've heard in real life- "Central London Hatchery and Conditioning
Centre"- and the motto of a World State you know doesn't exist.
The camera's eye then moves through a north window into the cold
Fertilizing Room, and focuses on someone you know is a very
important person from the way he speaks. He is the Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning, and he's explaining things to a group
of new students who still have only a very limited understanding of
what goes on here.
You may find the Director and his Hatchery strange, but you probably
know how the students feel as they try to note everything the Director
says, even his opening remark, "Begin at the beginning." You know
how anxious you can be to make sure you don't miss something a teacher
says, something that will be important later on.
In fact, the functions of the Hatchery are hard to understand
because Huxley has the Director throw large amounts of "scientific
data" at you without giving you time to figure out their meaning.
Huxley thereby undermines one of his intentions here- to use the
Director as a cartoon character who expounds some of the scientific
ideas that the author wants you to think about. He also wants to
satirize a world that makes such a know-it-all important and powerful.
Sometimes the real world gives such people power, too. You may meet
scientists like the Director in college or businesspeople like him
at work.
The Director talks about incubators and fertilizing, about
surgically removing the ovary from the female and keeping it alive
artificially. He talks about bringing together ova (the unfertilized
eggs of a female) and male gametes (the cells or spermatozoa
containing the father's half of the genetic material needed to make
a new being) in a glass container. He talks about a mysterious budding
process that turns one egg into 96 embryos. The Director mentions
all these things and more before Huxley tells you that the Hatchery
hatches human beings.
The Director takes that fact for granted, but Huxley surprises you
all the more by letting it sneak up on you. Do you think it's
frightening or disgusting to breed human beings like chickens on a
farm? In this Utopia, the price is worth paying to control the total
population; it breeds as many or as few people as the world
controllers decide are needed. Huxley's imaginary world is thus
dealing with a real world problem- overpopulation. You've probably
read or heard warnings about this, warnings that the world, or the
United States, or a developing country like Kenya, has more people
than it can feed. China is trying to reward families that have only
one child and penalize those that have more, but no country has yet
tried to do what Huxley's brave new world does.
The Director talks less about stemming overpopulation than he does
about increasing population in the right way. In the real world,
it's unusual for a woman to produce more than ten children, and the
average American family has two or fewer. In Huxley's world,
Bokanovsky's budding process and Podsnap's ripening technique can
produce over 15,000 brothers and sisters from a single ovary. You
may know this idea from the word "cloning," used in science fiction
and to describe look-alike clothing styles. Identical clones will make
a stable community, the Director says, one without conflict.
In the world of Bokanovsky and Podsnap, babies are not born. They
develop in bottles and are "decanted"- a word that usually refers to
pouring wine gently out of its bottle so that the sediment at the
bottom is not disturbed.
The Director takes you and the students to the bottling room,
where you learn that the clone-embryo grows inside the bottle on a bed
of sow's peritoneum (the lining of the abdomen of an adult female
pig). In the embryo room, the bottled embryos move slowly on belts
that travel over three tiers of racks- a total of 2136 meters (about 1
1/3 miles) during the 267 days before decanting. Huxley makes a
point of the distance because each meter represents a point at which
the embryo is given specific conditioning for its future life.
The 267 days are approximately equal to the nine months it takes a
baby to develop inside its mother in the real world, but neither
Director nor students mention that kind of birth. "Mother" is an
unmentionable and obscene word in this brave new world, as you'll
see in the next chapter. Although Huxley doesn't state it yet, if
you think about it you'll see that bokanovskifying and bottling mean
that nobody becomes pregnant. This gives you a hint of what will be
said concerning sex and family life.
In this world, a person's class status is biologically and
chemically engineered. The genes that determine brains and brawn are
carefully selected. Then, a bottled embryo undergoes the initial
conditioning that will determine its skills and strength, in keeping
with its destiny as an Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Epsilon.
These names are letters in the Greek alphabet, familiar to
Huxley's original English readers because in English schools they
are used as grades- like our As, Bs, etc.- with Alpha plus the best
and Epsilon minus the worst. In Brave New World, each names a class or
caste. Alphas and Betas remain individuals; only Gammas, Deltas, and
Epsilons are bokanovskified. Alpha embryos receive the most oxygen
in order to develop the best brains; Epsilons receive the least
because they won't need intelligence for the work they'll do, like
shoveling sewage.
Embryos predestined to be tropical workers are inoculated against
typhoid and sleeping sickness. Bottles containing future astronauts
are kept constantly in rotation to improve their sense of balance.
There's a conditioning routine for every function in this society.
Nobody complains about having to do hard, dirty, or boring work;
everyone is conditioned to do their job well and to like it.
In this chapter you meet two people besides the Director, though you
hardly notice them in the barrage of scientific information, and you
don't get to know them very well until later. One is Henry Foster, a
Hatchery scientist, one of the cardboard characters that Huxley pushes
to keep the plot moving. The other is Lenina Crowne, one of only two
women who are important in the story. She is as close as Brave New
World comes to having a heroine, but she is so completely a creature
of the system that she barely has any personality. She is a technician
in the embryo room, which like a photographic darkroom can be lit only
with red light. Everybody who works in this room has purple eyes and
lupus, a disease that causes large red or brown patches to appear on
the skin. Huxley doesn't tell you whether this is a result of the
red light or a way of matching the workers to the workplace, but
neither purple eyes nor blotched skin prevents Lenina from being
"uncommonly pretty." Thus, the author shows you that standards of
beauty and sex appeal are different in this world of the future.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Brave New World is a novel about a Utopia, an ideal state in
which everything is done for the good of humanity, and evils like
poverty and war cannot exist.
Perhaps you, too, have created stories about imaginary countries
in which everything happens the way you think it should, countries
that could be called ideal states if you looked at them closely. Or
you may have seen the television program, "Fantasy Island," which is a
modern, mass-audience twist on the theme of Utopia, a place that
grants you your fondest wishes.
Some aspects of Brave New World may seem attractive to you.
Everybody is happy, hygienic, and economically secure. There is little
sickness and no old age, poverty, crime, or war. But notice how the
Director emphasizes that bokanovskifying is "one of the major
instruments of social stability," and how he reminds his students that
the motto of the World State is "Community, Identity, Stability."
The most important events in this novel all center around conflicts
between people like the Director, who want to maintain stability,
and people whose actions might threaten this stability, even
unintentionally. The Director never questions what people have to give
up to achieve the World State's goals. Later in the book, other
characters do ask this question, and they provide some answers. As you
read Brave New World, keep asking yourself this question. What price
would we have to pay to live in this Utopia?
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CHAPTER_TWO
CHAPTER TWO
-
This chapter takes you from the biological and chemical conditioning
of embryos to the psychological conditioning of children in Huxley's
world of the future. The Director shows the students how Delta
infants, color-coded in khaki clothes, crawl naturally toward
picture books and real flowers, only to be terrorized by the noises of
explosions, bells, and sirens and then traumatized by electric
shock. The babies learn to associate books and flowers with those
painful experiences, and turn away from them.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: This section of the center is named the Neo-Pavlovian
Conditioning Rooms for the Russian scientist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
(1849-1936). In a classic experiment he trained dogs to salivate at
the sound of a bell that was linked to memories of food, proving the
theory of the conditioned reflex. You'll see how Pavlov's theories
have been used- and misused- throughout the brave new world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
The reason for making the infants dislike books is psychological- if
they read the wrong things, they might lose a bit of the
conditioning that guarantees stability. The reason for making them
dislike flowers is economic. If, as adults, they traveled to the
country, they would "consume transport." Here Huxley makes fun of
the way some economists use the word "consume." He means that when
they travel to the country, people use cars, trains, or helicopters.
Thus, "consuming transport" is good for an economy that sells
transport services and makes vehicles. But if they only went to
enjoy nature, they would "consume" nothing else. Instead, they are
conditioned to dislike nature and love sports, which have been
redesigned to involve elaborate mechanical and electronic equipment.
They therefore "consume" transport in traveling to the country to
"consume" sports equipment. This sounds as though they gobble it up,
but in reality they are using it and wearing it out, thereby
doubling the economic benefit.
In proceeding to the next kind of conditioning, the Director gives
you your first clue to this world's religion: the phrase "Our Ford,"
obviously used as religious people in the real world might say "Our
Lord." You learn that the calendar year is no longer A. D. (Anno
Domini, the year of our Lord) but A. F., After Ford. Instead of making
the sign of the cross, the Director makes the sign of the T, from
the Model T Ford.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: This is a parody of Christianity- not so much of its essential
beliefs as of the way organized religion can be used to control
society. In 1931 it seemed funnier and more daring than it does today,
especially in England, where the Anglican church is established
(linked to the state). Huxley made Ford the new Jesus because Ford
became the best-known symbol of modern industry after he invented
the automobile assembly line that produced cheap, basically
identical cars. Watch for further elaboration of the Ford religion
in later chapters.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
The next conditioning technique is hypnopaedia, sleep-teaching.
The Director tells the students it was discovered accidentally
hundreds of years earlier by a little Polish boy who lived with his
"father" and "mother," two words that hit the students' ears with much
more force than obscene words hit your ears today. Would you be
shocked if your high school principal, a middle-aged gentleman who
spoke correct English with a proper accent, used a carefully
enunciated obscene word during a school assembly? That's how the
students feel when the Director utters those unmentionable words.
In the Director's story, little Reuben Rabinovitch discovered
hypnopaedia by hearing in his sleep a broadcast by George Bernard
Shaw, the British dramatist, and sleep-learning it by heart though
he knew no English. Shaw thought himself a genius both as playwright
and political thinker, as did many of his followers. Huxley makes a
little joke at the expense of people who claim to recognize genius but
really know no more about it than a sleeping child who can't speak the
language it's expressed in.
The Director goes on to explain that hypnopaedia doesn't work for
teaching facts or analysis. It works only for "moral education," which
here means conditioning people's behavior by verbal suggestion when
their psychological resistance is low- by repeated messages about
what's good or bad, in words that require no intellectual activity but
can be digested by a sleeping brain. (This is Huxley's own explanation
in Brave New World Revisited, a book of essays written in 1958, a
generation after the novel appeared. He also found that in the real
world, sleep-teaching of both kinds shows mixed results.)
The Director gives you and the students an example of this kind of
moral education, a sleep-lesson in class consciousness for Betas. They
learn to love being Betas, to respect Alphas who "work much harder
than we do, because they're so frightfully clever," and to be glad
they're not Gammas, Deltas, or Epsilons, each more stupid than the
preceding. "Oh no," the tape suggests to them, "I don't want to play
with Delta children."
In other words, the Betas learn to love the system and their place
in it. The lesson, repeated 120 times in each of three sessions a week
for 30 months, seals them into that place. Huxley likens it to drops
of liquid sealing wax, which the English upper classes used to seal
envelopes, placing a drop of wax on the edge of the flap and
pressing a design into it as the wax hardened. The envelope couldn't
be opened without showing a break in the wax. Sealing wax is seen
infrequently in the U.S. today, but if you imagine a candle dripping
endlessly, you will understand the effect.
CHAPTER_THREE
CHAPTER THREE
-
This chapter switches back and forth from place to place and from
one set of characters to another in order to give you your first
view of sex, love, and the nonexistent family in the brave new world.
In the first scene, the Director and some almost embarrassed
students show you that sex is a game that children are encouraged to
play. Later scenes make plain that for adults, sex is a wholesome
source of happiness, rather like going to a health club. Nobody
lives with or is married to one person at a time. in fact, there is no
marriage. Everybody is expected to be promiscuous- to keep switching
sexual partners without any important reason for distinguishing one
partner from another.
Huxley expected his readers to be surprised or at least to giggle at
the idea of promiscuity as a virtue. Some of them surely thought
promiscuity meant happiness, as Huxley's characters do, but they had
grown up with the idea that it was wicked. Today, many teachers and
clergymen claim that high school and college students are promiscuous,
but Time magazine says that Americans in general are becoming less so.
"Promiscuous" is a word that can make you feel a connection between
the real world and Brave New World, and help you decide if you would
like the novel's world better than the one you live in.
In the first scene, the Director is upstaged by one of the ten men
who run the world, the Resident Controller for Western Europe,
Mustapha Mond. (Alfred Mond was a British chemist, economist, and
cabinet minister; for Huxley's original readers the name probably
had the same kind of ring that "Rashid Rockefeller" would for
Americans.) He tells the students, "History is bunk." This is an
anti-intellectual quotation from Henry Ford, who believed that a
person who wasted time studying history would never create anything as
revolutionary as an assembly line. But the Resident Controllers tell
people that "history is bunk" for another reason: people who know
history can compare the present with the past. They know the world can
change, and that knowledge is a threat to stability. (George Orwell
went a step further in 1984 and had the rulers of his state constantly
rewrite history because they knew that if they controlled people's
memories of the past, it would be easier to control the present.) This
quote shows Huxley to list the glories of history, from the Bible to
Beethoven, in a single paragraph, thus showing what his new world
has whisked away like dust.
Also whisked away is the family. The Controllers description of
traditional families links fathers with misery, mothers with
perversion, brothers and sisters with madness and suicide.
Mond says this is the wisdom of Our Freud, as Our Ford chose "for
some inscrutable reason... to call himself whenever he spoke of
psychological matters." This is another of the intellectual and
serious jokes that Huxley loves to make. Sigmund Freud
revolutionized psychology and invented psychoanalysis, but people
misuse his name and twist his ideas to fit their dogmas, just as
they do Christ's.
Mond compares love to a pipe full of water that jets forth
dangerously if you make just one hole in it. This is a metaphor for
individual motherhood and monogamy, which he believes produces
people who are mad (meaning "insane," not "angry"), wicked, and
miserable. The water only makes safe, "piddling little fountains" if
you put many holes in the pipe- a metaphor for the safety of growing
up in a group and for being promiscuous.
After the Controller repeats the Director's lessons about the need
for stability and population control, he adds something new- the
elimination of emotions, particularly painful emotions. When he asks
the students if they've ever experienced a painful feeling, one says
it was "horrible" when a girl made him wait nearly four weeks before
going to bed with him. Do you think that's real pain? Or is it part of
Huxley's satire?
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Even as satire, this idea is very important in Huxley's
book: the idea that people can live happily without emotional pain,
and that the way to achieve this happiness is to eliminate as many
emotions as possible, because even happy feelings carry the
possibility of pain with them. Huxley's Utopia is built on this
idea. Do you think it's true that human beings can live this way?
Would it make you happy in the long run? Make a note of your answer so
you can see if you change your mind after you finish the book.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
The Controller makes these points as the "camera eye" of the novel
switches back and forth from him to Lenina Crowne coming off work,
changing clothes, and talking to her friend Fanny; from them to
Henry Foster and other men, and back again. As the chapter
continues, it becomes more and more difficult to tell which scene
you're viewing because Huxley stops identifying the character who is
speaking at any given moment, and you have to decide that from the
nature of the remark.
Through Lenina and Fanny you learn more of the mechanics of
feeling good, as they turn different taps for different perfumes and
use a "vibro-vacuum" for toning up skin and muscles. In a world
where no woman bears a child, women need periodic Pregnancy
Substitutes- chemical pills and injections to give them the hormonal
benefits that pregnancy would give their bodies. And one fashion
item is a "Malthusian belt" loaded with contraceptives, rather like
a soldier's bandolier with magazines of bullets. Thomas Malthus was
a political economist who wrote in 1798 that population increases much
more rapidly than does subsistence; later groups that wanted to
limit population often invoked his name.
The two women also give you a closer look than the Controller's talk
did at personal relations in a world that prizes promiscuity and makes
monogamy impossible. Fanny reproaches Lenina for seeing nobody but
Henry Foster for four months. She calls Henry a "perfect gentleman"
because he has other girlfriends at the same time.
After the scene switches to Henry, you meet another very important
character: Bernard Marx, a specialist in hypnopaedia. He's unusual
in this world because he likes to be alone, and he despises Foster for
conforming to the culture of promiscuity, drugs, and "feelies"- movies
that appeal not only to your eyes and ears but also to your sense of
touch. (Brave New World was written only a few years after silent
films gave way to "talkies," as the first films in which audiences
could hear the actors speak were called.)
Bernard is on the verge of falling in love with Lenina, and he hates
Foster for talking about her as though she were a piece of meat.
Lenina is also interested in Bernard, if only because he is a bit
different in a world in which everybody conforms. Bernard is
physically small for an Alpha, and Fanny repeats a rumor that his
small stature was caused by someone adding too much alcohol to his
blood-surrogate when he was an embryo. Lenina says "What nonsense,"
but later she'll wonder if this is true.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: When Bernard becomes angry, Foster offers him a tablet of
soma. Although this is one of the most important concepts in the book,
Huxley doesn't signal it for you the first time he mentions it. A
voice that can only be that of the Controller reviewing the history
that produced the world state, says that five centuries earlier the
rulers realized the need for the perfect drug. They put 2000
pharmacologists and biochemists to work, and in six years they
produced the drug. The voice doesn't mention the name soma; Foster
does that when he offers Bernard the tablet, and Foster's friend the
Assistant Predestinator says, "One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy
sentiments." A bit later, the Controller says that half a gram of soma
is the same as a half-holiday, a gram equals a weekend, "two grams for
a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the Moon."
In other words, soma makes you high- like marijuana or LSD- but has
none of the dangerous side effects those drugs can have. This world
couldn't function without soma, because the world can't be kept free
of pain without a drug that tranquilizes people and makes them high at
the same time- and never leaves them with hangovers.
The word soma, which Huxley always puts in italics, is from the
Sanskrit language of ancient India. It refers to both an
intoxicating drink used in the Vedic religious rituals there and the
plant from whose juice the drink was made- a plant whose true identity
we don't know. Soma is also the Greek word for body, and can be
found in the English word "somatic," an adjective meaning "of the
body, as distinct from the mind." Huxley probably enjoyed his
trilingual pun.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
The Controller's description of soma is part of a scene scattered
over several paragraphs in which he explains that in this Utopia there
is no old age. People remain physiologically young until they reach
their sixties and die. Would you like to stay young and healthy
until you die, and know that you would die in your sixties? Many
people would say "yes" at first. But what price would you have to
pay for a lifetime of youth? Huxley wants you to answer that question,
too. If you never grow old, you never feel the pains of aging- but you
never feel the positive emotions of achievement or contentment with
the life you've lived, either. You never know the wisdom that comes
from changes in your body, mind, and life, from the knowledge that
death is approaching.
CHAPTER_FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
-
In this chapter, Huxley turns from building up his new-world
technology to telling his story, which gives more vivid life to
Lenina, Bernard, and a new character named Helmholtz Watson. Lenina is
still little more than the typical hedonist of the new world. (A
hedonist is someone who believes that pleasure is the highest good.)
In the first scene, Lenina makes sexual advances toward Bernard in a
crowded elevator and can't understand why he is embarrassed. Then
she goes to a suburban park with Henry Foster to "consume" sports
equipment. In some ways she is the book's heroine, but Huxley forces
you to see how shallow she is.
In the second scene, Bernard reveals himself as someone you can
understand more easily than most of the other characters you have
met so far- because he's more of an individual, more like you or
someone you know, and less like the instructional cartoon characters
of the Director and Controller or the always cheerful conformists
and clones.
By accident, Bernard is small for an Alpha. This makes it hard for
him to deal with members of lower castes, who are as small as he is,
but by design. He treats them in the arrogant but insecure way that
some poor whites in the old South treated blacks, or that
lower-class British people treated natives in Africa or India in the
days of the British Empire. Huxley's original readers knew such people
as friends or relations, or through the novels of Rudyard Kipling.
Americans might know them best through the novels of William Faulkner.
Bernard goes to meet his friend Helmholtz, a writer and emotional
engineer. Like Bernard, Helmholtz is unhappy in a world of people
who are always happy.
Like Bernard, he is different from most Alphas. He is different
not because he is short and feels inadequate, but because he is a
mental giant. He is successful in sports, sex, and community
activities- all the activities in which Bernard feels he is a failure.
But Helmholtz is still not happy because he knows he is capable of
writing something beautiful and powerful, rather than the nonsense
that he has to write for the press or the feelies.
While the two friends are talking, Bernard suddenly suspects someone
is spying on them, flings the door open, and finds nobody there.
This is surprising, because while you've been told that the state runs
everything in this new world, you haven't felt oppressed by the
rulers. You find nothing like the Big Brother of George Orwell's novel
1984 or the secret police in books about Nazi Germany or the Soviet
Union. The scene is a reminder that this world, too, is a
dictatorship.
CHAPTER_FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE
-
This chapter gives more dimensions to the familiar pictures of
Lenina as hedonist and well-trained citizen and Bernard as a
malcontent among contented comrades. In scene one, Lenina and Henry
return from their Obstacle Golf game. By now you know that Huxley
has a reason, which will be revealed in a later chapter, for
scattering bits of technological and ideological information along
their path- like Henry's telling Lenina that the dead are all cremated
so the new world can recover the phosphorus from their bodies. They
have dinner and go to a nightclub in what was Westminster Abbey 600
years earlier. There they listen to a kind of electronic pop music
that might describe what rock musicians play on Moog synthesizers 50
years after the book was written.
They get high on soma and go up to Henry's room for a night of
sex. Lenina is so well conditioned that despite her high, she takes
all the contraceptive precautions she learned in the Malthusian
drill she performed three times a week, every week for six years of
her teens. Huxley uses Lenina to underline the point that pregnancy is
a sin, a crime, and a disgusting ailment in the world of Hatcheries,
and that it almost never happens.
Scene two switches to Bernard, who attends a solidarity service, the
equivalent of a religious service, where he reveals new dimensions
of his difference from other brave new worldlings, and of his
unhappiness. The new world version of a church is a Community Singery.
The one Bernard attends is a skyscraper on the site a Londoner would
know as St. Paul's Cathedral.
Every solidarity service takes place in a group of twelve people,
six men and six women who sit in a circle, sing twelve-stanza hymns,
and take a communion of solid and liquid soma instead of wafers and
wine. The participants all go into a religious frenzy- except for
Bernard, who doesn't really feel the ecstasy, but pretends to.
The frenzy takes the members of the group into a dance and the
song that is one of the most remembered bits of this book, the
parody of a nursery rhyme:
-
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.
-
The group then does indeed fall "in partial disintegration" into a
real orgy, though it seems to be by couples rather than group sex.
Even that doesn't give Bernard the experience of true rapture that
his partners seem to feel. Huxley underlines that this rapture is
not the same as excitement, because if you're excited, you're still
not satisfied. This feeling is satisfying. Bernard is miserable that
he has not achieved it, and thinks the failure must have been his
own fault.
In this scene, Huxley satirizes both religion and sex, but still
shows how both serve one of the goals of the brave new world,
Community.
CHAPTER_SIX
CHAPTER SIX
-
Lenina and Bernard get together in this chapter, and travel from
England to North America to visit a Savage Reservation that is not
unlike today's Indian reservations. Huxley signals that he is bringing
you a step closer to a climax by stressing that he is taking you and
his characters to a place with none of the endless, emotionless
pleasures of this Utopia, a place with no running perfume, no
television, "no hot water even."
Lenina is troubled because she thinks Bernard is odd, and she
wonders if what she once called "Nonsense" might be true- that he
was given too much alcohol while he was still an embryo in a bottle.
He's odd because he hates crowds and wants to be alone with her even
when they aren't making love. He's odd because he'd rather take a walk
in England's beautiful Lake District than fly to Amsterdam and see the
women's heavyweight wrestling championship. He's odd because he
wants to look at a stormy sea without listening to sugary music on the
radio. Most of all he's odd because he is capable of wishing he was
free rather than enslaved by his conditioning.
But Bernard doesn't do many of the things he wants to do. He's odd
in his desires but not in his behavior. In the end he does just what a
brave new worldling should do: he leaves the choppy waters of the
English channel, flies Lenina home in his helicopter, takes four
tablets of soma at a gulp, and goes to bed with her.
The next day Bernard finds that even he, like Henry Foster, can
think of Lenina as a piece of meat. He hates that, but he realizes
that she likes thinking of herself that way. That doesn't stop him
from returning to his odd desires: he tells her he wants to feel
something strongly, passionately. He wants to be an adult, to be
capable of waiting for pleasure, instead of an infant who must have
his pleasure right now.
Lenina is disturbed by this, so disturbed that she thinks,
"Perhaps he had found her too plump, after all." In this throw-away
irony about her body weight, Huxley makes her shallowness plainer than
ever.
But she still wants to go with Bernard to America to see the
Savage Reservation, something that few people are allowed to do.
In the second scene, Bernard goes to get his permit for the trip
initialed. The Director stops acting like a caricature of a bureaucrat
and tells Bernard how he had gone to the same Reservation as a young
man, 25 years before. Bernard, for all his desire to be different,
is disturbed because the Director is being different: he is talking
about something that happened a long time ago, which is very bad
manners in this society.
The Director is obviously remembering events that affected him
very deeply. The girlfriend he had taken to the Reservation wandered
off and got lost while he was asleep. Search parties never found
her, and the Director assumed she had died in some kind of accident.
He still dreams about it, which means that even he has more individual
feelings than the system thinks is good for you.
The Director suddenly realizes that he has revealed more about
himself than is good for his reputation. He stops reminiscing and
attacks Bernard, who has been unlucky enough to be his unintended
audience. He scolds Bernard for not being infantile in his emotional
life, and threatens him with transfer to Iceland as a punishment.
His status as a rebel makes Bernard feel pleased with himself. But
when he goes to see Helmholtz, he doesn't get the praise he expects.
Helmholtz doesn't like the way Bernard switches back and forth from
boasting to self-pity, the way he knows what to do only after he
should have done it, when it's too late.
The third scene takes Bernard and Lenina across the ocean to Santa
Fe and into the Reservation, which resembles a real-world Navajo or
Hopi reservation. The Warden of the Reservation is a replica of the
cartoon-like Director, pumping an endless flow of unwanted
information. Bernard remembers that he left the Eau de Cologne tap
in his bathroom open, pumping an expensive flow of unwanted scent.
He calls Helmholtz long distance to ask him to go up and turn it
off, and Helmholtz tells him that the Director has announced that he
is indeed transferring Bernard to Iceland. Despite Bernard's
distrust of soma, he takes four tablets to survive the plane trip into
the Reservation. Huxley is setting the stage for the coming
confrontation.
CHAPTER_SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN
-
From the moment they set foot on the Reservation, Bernard and Lenina
are confronted with the differences between it and their familiar
world. Huxley shows the comfortable mindlessness of his Utopia by,
contrasting it to the startling, often ugly reality of primitive life.
This life clearly lacks the new world's stability, friendliness, and
cleanliness. The Indian guide is hostile, and he smells. The
Reservation is dirty, full of rubbish, dust, dogs, and flies. An old
man shows what aging does to the human body when it isn't protected by
conditioning and chemicals; he is toothless, wrinkled, thin, bent.
Lenina has left her soma in the rest-house, so she is deprived of
even that form of escape. She discovers that the Indians do have
some kind of community; at first, a dance reassures her by reminding
her of a solidarity service and orgy-porgy. The reassurance ends
when she sees people dancing with snakes, effigies of an eagle and a
man nailed to a cross, and a man whipping a boy until the blood
runs. She can't understand the sense of community that runs through
that kind of religion.
They then confront a man who will become the greatest threat to
their world's stability. He steps into their rest-house and they see
that, though raised an Indian, he has blond hair and white skin, and
they hear that he speaks "faultless but peculiar English."
Bernard starts questioning the Savage and soon realizes that he is
the son of the Director and the woman whom the Director had brought to
the Reservation from what the stranger calls the "Other Place," the
Utopia. The woman had not died. She had arrived pregnant with the
Director's child by an accident, a defect in a Malthusian belt. During
her visit she had fallen and hurt her head, but she survived to give
birth, and she had reached middle age. Her son had grown up in the
pueblo. Huxley tells you that the story excites Bernard.
The young man takes them to the little house where he lives with his
mother, Linda. Lenina can barely stand to look at her, fat, sick,
and stinking of alcohol. But the sight of Lenina brings out Linda's
memories of the Other Place that is Huxley's new world, and of all the
things she learned from her conditioning. She pours out what she
remembers in a confused burst of woe.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Linda's speech helps complete the portrait of the society
Huxley wants you to compare to the brave new world. Linda reveals
her shame at having given birth. She complains about the
shortcomings of mescal, the drink the Indians make (in real life as in
the novel) from the mescal plant, compared to soma, and about the
Indians' filth, their compulsion to mend clothes instead of discarding
them when they get worn, and worst of all, their monogamy. The
Indian women have attacked her for what she had thought of as the
virtue of being promiscuous. They were asserting their own values
and showing that their ideas of community, identity, and stability
were the opposite of the world controllers'. Huxley doesn't
romanticize these values or ideas, though. The Savage Reservation
may not suffer under the sophisticated oppression of London, but
neither is it paradise.
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CHAPTER_EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT
-
In this chapter John, Linda's son, the young Savage, tells Bernard
the story of his life. Huxley gives you broad hints that John will
have a unique perspective on the brave new world because he
inherited the genes and some of the culture of Utopia while growing up
in the primitive culture of the Reservation.
As a boy, John witnessed his mother's painful shift from the happy
sex life of Utopia to being the victim of both the Indian men who came
to her bed and the Indian women who punished her for violating their
laws. As her son, he, too, was an outsider- barred from marrying the
Indian girl he loved and from being initiated into the tribe. He was
denied the tribe's community and identity.
Instead, he went through the Indian initiation rituals of fasting
and dreaming on his own, and learned something about suffering. He
discovered time, death, and God- things about which the citizens of
Utopia have only very limited knowledge. He discovered them not in the
company of other boys his age, but alone. When Bernard hears this,
he says he feels the same way because he's different. Huxley wants you
to compare John's aloneness with Bernard's. Which do you think is more
complete, more painful? Is it possible to be truly alone in the
civilization of the Other Place?
John used Linda's stories of the Other Place as the first building
blocks of his own mental world. He added the Indian stories he
heard. And he crowned the mixture with what he found in a copy of
Shakespeare that somehow made its way onto the Reservation. The book
educated him in reading and in the English language. Shakespeare means
no more to Bernard and Lenina than to the Indians, because he is
part of the dust of history that the Controller whisked away in
Chapter 3. But John finds a reference in Shakespeare for everything he
feels.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Here we see where Huxley found the title for his book. When
Bernard comes up with a scheme to take John and Linda back to
London, John loves the idea. He quotes lines from The Tempest that
Huxley expects the reader to know even if Bernard doesn't. They are
spoken by Miranda, the innocent daughter of Prospero, a deposed duke
and functioning magician. She has grown up on a desert island where
she has known only two spirits and one human being, her father. She
falls in love with a handsome young nobleman who has been
shipwrecked on their island, and then meets his equally gracious
father and friends, and she says: "O, wonder! How many goodly
creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
that has such people in it."
John doesn't intend to be ironic when he uses the lines as he
contemplates plunging into his new world, but Huxley does. Bernard
enables you to see the irony, and Huxley's true feelings about his bad
Utopia, when he says to John, "Hadn't you better wait till you
actually see the new world?"
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CHAPTER_NINE
CHAPTER NINE
-
This short chapter sets up the steps from confrontation to climax,
the decisive point in the development of the story. Lenina goes on
an 18-hour soma "trip" to escape from the horrors she encountered on
the Reservation. Bernard helicopters to Sante Fe and puts in a
long-distance call to Mustapha Mond, the Controller, back in London.
He tells Mond the story of Linda and John- and presumably of the
Director. Huxley doesn't spell that out, but you know it's true
because you know that Bernard wants to protect himself from the
Director's threat of exile in Iceland, and because Huxley told you
in Chapter Eight that Bernard had been "secretly elaborating" a
strategy from the moment he realized who John's father must be. Mond
issues orders to bring them back to London.
Indeed Bernard is plotting his own advancement, as you can see
from the way he shows off to the Warden about the orders to take
John and Linda back with him. He likes to think he's different from
his fellows, but he also wants to be accepted or, better, looked up
to. Yet he is being different; most of the citizens of the brave new
world wouldn't dare to do what he's now doing. In this world, being
different may threaten community, identity, and stability. Do you
think Bernard's actions threaten those goals? Do you think he
intends to make such threats? He might endanger them without wanting
to.
Meanwhile John observes Lenina asleep. He has fallen in love with
her as quickly as Miranda with Ferdinand, or Romeo with Juliet, and he
quotes Romeo and Juliet to her as she sleeps. This sublime emotion
marks him as a Savage, in contrast to the civilized worldlings who
believe in their commandment to be promiscuous: "Everyone belongs to
everyone else." John believes instead in an idea he found among the
Indians but knows better in Shakespearean language, the idea of
"pure and vestal modesty." ("Vestal" is the name of ancient Roman
priestesses who had to be virgins.) He does have sexual feelings: he
thinks of unzipping Lenina and then hates himself for the mere
thought. Do you think she would understand this if she woke up and
heard him murmuring to himself?
John is aroused from his reverie by the return of Bernard's rather
un-Shakespearean helicopter. Huxley had not yet written any film
scripts when he wrote this book, but he is using a screenwriting
technique, making the helicopter prepare you visually for a change
of scene in the next chapter. Perhaps his poor vision made him more
conscious of the need to see things happen, and to make the reader see
things happen.
CHAPTER_TEN
CHAPTER TEN
-
The scene indeed shifts abruptly- back to the London Hatchery and
Conditioning Centre. The novel's first climax is about to occur:
John and Linda's plunge into the brave new Utopia, the thrusting of
unorthodox, emotional humans into the world of orthodox, emotionless
clones.
The Director, as the chapter opens, is working to maintain
orthodoxy. He is going to make a public announcement of Bernard's
transfer to Iceland as punishment for the "scandalous unorthodoxy"
of his sex life, his refusal to behave like a baby and seek instant
gratification. As far as the Director is concerned, Bernard's
emotional sins are all the greater because of his intellectual
eminence.
The Director doesn't know he is about to be confronted with a much
greater unorthodoxy from his own past. In the presence of all the
high-caste workers of the Fertilizing Room, he announces the
transfer and gives Bernard what is meant to be a purely formal
opportunity to make a plea for himself. Bernard replies by bringing in
Linda, "a strange and terrifying monster of middle-agedness," who
recognizes the Director as her lover of a generation earlier and
greets him with affection.
When he responds with disgust, her face twists "grotesquely into the
grimace of extreme grief," an emotion that of course is completely
foreign to civilized people in this world. She screams, "You made me
have a baby," which fills the Director and all the others there with
real horror.
Linda calls in John, who enters, falls on his knees in front of
the Director, and says, "My father!" That turns the horror into a
comic obscenity. The Director is humiliated. He puts his hands over
his ears to protect them from the obscene word- "father"- and rushes
out of the room. The listeners, almost hysterical, upset tube after
tube of spermatozoa, another example of Huxley's grimly appropriate
jokes.
CHAPTER_ELEVEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
-
All the important characteristics of the brave new world and its
people are visible in this chapter, though the action does not carry
the plot much further forward. After you finish reading it, decide
whether you regard the chapter as a peak or a plateau, an exciting
vision or a restful summary. Everybody who is important in London
wants to see John, the true Savage. Nobody wants to see Linda, who had
been decanted just as they had been, who committed the obscene act
of becoming a mother, and who is fat and ugly. Linda doesn't care,
however, because she has come back to civilization- which for her is a
soma holiday that lasts longer and longer- and that will kill her,
though she doesn't know it. Is Huxley really saying that everyone in
this Utopia is in the same fix, but doesn't know it?
As John's guardian, Bernard Marx is suddenly popular and
successful with women. Huxley shows you how hollow Bernard's success
is in two ways: he lets you see that Bernard's friend Helmholtz is not
impressed but only saddened because Bernard has revealed that he
really is like everybody else; and he tells you that people still
don't really like Bernard or the way he criticizes the established
order.
Bernard takes the Savage to see all the high points of the World
State, a literary trick from older, classical Utopias that enables
Huxley to satirize both the real world and the brave new world. One of
the simplest examples is the official who brags that a rocket
travels 1,250 kilometers an hour- not unlike an airline ad in one of
today's newspapers. John responds by remembering that Ariel, the
good spirit of Shakespeare's Tempest, could travel around the world in
40 minutes.
Bernard and John also visit a coeducational Eton, where Bernard
makes advances toward the Head Mistress. This is another joke that
Huxley aims at his English readers. He attended Eton, probably the
most elite school in England- then and now a school for boys only.
Huxley really wants you to notice the Eton students laughing at a
movie showing Savages in pain as they whip themselves for their
sins, and that with the help of toys and chocolate creams, the
students are conditioned to lose any fear of death. The Head
Mistress says death is "like any other physiological process."
Huxley follows her comment by saying that she and Bernard have a
date for eight that night at the Savoy. He does not have to actually
say that they plan to experience a different physiological process.
This is an example of Huxley's wit and elegance, the ability to say
much in few words.
The satire on both real and Utopian worlds continues when the
scene switches to Lenina and Fanny. Thanks to her new-found fame,
Lenina has slept with many very important people, like the Ford
Chief Justice (in England, the chief justice is a lord) and the
Arch-Community Songster of Canterbury (the Archbishop of Canterbury is
the chief clergyman in the Church of England). They all ask her what
it's like to make love to a Savage, but she still doesn't know; John
has maintained his purity against Utopia's promiscuity.
The highlight of this scene is the song that says, "Love's as good
as soma." This is an important variation on a theme; the people of
Brave New World use their promiscuity to escape dull routine, just the
way they use the drug.
John's purity even survives a trip to the feelies with Lenina.
Because she knows the celebrity Savage, Lenina has already been on the
Feelytone news. Huxley mentions television as a feature of the brave
new world, anticipating something that became available to the
public over 15 years after he wrote this book. However, he didn't
anticipate that television news programs would end movie newsreels.
"Feelytone" is a parody on Movietone News, one of the leading
newsreels of the 1930s.
The feely shows a black making love to a blonde, which reminds
John of Shakespeare's Othello. Huxley reminds you in this chapter,
as he does throughout the book, that the Utopian caste system
resembles real-world racial discrimination, though he takes pains to
show that Deltas and Epsilons, at the bottom of the pecking order, may
be white or black.
John's feelings about the feelies are not happy. He thinks the
erotic touch of the show is "ignoble," and he thinks he's noble for
not making love to Lenina as she expects and wants him to.
CHAPTER_TWELVE
CHAPTER TWELVE
-
The characters and their ideas come into conflict again in this
chapter. First Bernard invites important guests to meet the Savage,
but John refuses to leave his room. The guests immediately start to
feel contempt for Bernard, whom they had pretended to like only to
meet John. Bernard again becomes a victim of the system, and again
suffers the feeling of being different that plagued him before.
John likes Bernard better that way, and so does Helmholtz, who has
become John's friend. Helmholtz recites verses he wrote about
solitude, a sin against the Utopian system; John responds with some of
Shakespeare's verses on the self. Helmholtz is entranced, and is
annoyed when Bernard equates a Shakespearean metaphor with orgy-porgy.
But Helmholtz himself is a creature of Utopia. He thinks it absurdly
comical that Juliet has a mother and that she wants to give herself to
one man but not to another. He says a poet in the modern world must
find some other pain, some other madness to write well. Actually, he
says a "propaganda technician" must find these feelings, seeing no
difference between that label and "poet." The chapter ends with his
wondering what madness and violence he can find- a signal that
Huxley wants you to wonder, too, and to suspect that the answer will
soon become plain.
CHAPTER_THIRTEEN
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
-
In this chapter the conflict between John and Lenina reaches its
peak.
Lenina, distraught over John's failure to make love to her, goes
to his apartment determined to make love to him. At first he is
delighted to see her and tells her she means so much to him that he
wanted to do something to show he was worthy of her. He wants to marry
her. She can't understand either the Shakespearean or the ordinary
words he uses because the idea of a lifelong, exclusive relationship
is completely foreign to her. If she did understand it, it would be
either a horror or an obscene joke, like Linda's motherhood.
She does finally understand, however, that John loves her. Her
reaction is immediate: she strips off her clothes and presses up
against him, ready for the enthusiastic sex that is as close as this
system comes to love. John becomes furious, calls her a whore, and
tells her to get out of his sight; when she goes into the bathroom, he
begins to recite Shakespearean lines that say that sex is vulgar.
What do you think about this scene? Huxley has made plain throughout
the book that he doesn't like the promiscuity of the brave new
world. But is he taking John's side here? At one moment he seems to,
but at others he suggests that John's attitude is madness, and he
certainly brings John close to violence.
CHAPTER_FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
-
The book moves from sex and love in Chapter 13 to love and death
in this chapter. John rushes to the Park Lane Hospital for the
Dying, where his mother, Linda, has been taken. All the soma she has
been using has put her into a state of "imbecile happiness." Those
words seldom appear together; joining them creates a phrase of immense
strength that tells us Huxleys' real attitude toward his Utopia.
Seeing her makes John remember the Utopia she described to him when he
was a child, the brave new world in his head that contrasts so
painfully with the Utopia he now lives in.
A group of Delta children comes in for their weekly conditioning
in seeing death as a natural process, and John is furious at their
invasion of his grief. He is also furious when, in her delirium, his
mother fails to recognize him and thinks he is Pope, her chief lover
from the Reservation. Linda dies, and John collapses in tears. This
threatens to destroy the conditioning the Deltas are receiving, and
the nurse in charge has to give them chocolate eclairs to remind
them that death is a natural and happy event.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Huxley wants to show how monstrous it is to deny the
emotions of grief and loss. He hates a process that conditions
people not to feel those emotions, that sorrow can be erased with
gooey pastry. He doesn't mention any way of learning to experience
mourning without being destroyed by it, though. Perhaps he is
reflecting here his grief over the death of his own mother when he was
only 14.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER_FIFTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
-
John leaves Linda's deathbed and plunges into the midst of the daily
distribution of soma to the Deltas who work in the hospital. He thinks
again of Miranda's words- but mockingly this time- as he looks at
the Deltas, and says, over and over again, "O brave new world." He
feels a challenge in the words, a challenge to turn the nightmare into
something noble, so he tries to stop the distribution of the soma,
telling the Deltas that their precious drug is poison and imagining
that he can urge them to freedom. John is still the Savage, and he has
the savage idea that any person can be free; apparently he still can't
imagine the real nature of conditioning.
Bernard and Helmholtz learn that John is going mad at the Hospital
for the Dying. They rush to meet him and find they have to save him
from the mob of Deltas, maddened and frustrated because he has
thrown away their soma. The police restore order; although this new
world is one in which everyone is happy and hardly anyone breaks the
law, the police still come when they're needed. Like Bernard's
suspicion of spies at the door in Chapter 4, this scene anticipates
Orwell's 1984, though with a much gentler police state. Helmholtz,
Bernard, and John are arrested. In every stage of this scene,
Bernard seems to be trying to escape the consequences of the
difference between himself and other Utopians that in other moments he
is proud of.
CHAPTER_SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
-
This chapter begins the final climax of Brave New World, which
continues into Chapter 17. The friends who can't accept the system
confront the man who speaks for the system- the Controller, Mustapha
Mond. As usual, John and Helmholtz speak their minds, and so does
the Controller, as usual, only Bernard worries about the "unpleasant
realities of the situation."
The Controller knows Shakespeare, it turns out- knowledge
forbidden to the ordinary elite. He who makes the laws is free to
break the laws, he says. Huxley wants to remind you that many
real-life rulers have taken the same attitude.
The Controller explains that Shakespeare is forbidden both because
it's old and beautiful, qualities that might make people turn
against the synthetic beauty of the brave new world, and because the
people wouldn't understand it. In the new world, there can be no great
art because it's impossible to have both happiness and high art at the
same time; "you can't make tragedies without social instability." This
returns the scene (and you) to the basic theme of the book, the need
for stability.
The Controller acknowledges that stability has none of the glamour
or picturesque quality of a fight against misfortune or a struggle
against temptation. He says happiness and contentment are worth the
loss. Do you think Huxley agrees? Or is he saying that that fight,
that struggle, is necessary for a truly good life? The chapter doesn't
tell you what he thinks; you have to decide the issue for yourself.
The Controller also explains why society cannot function with
nothing but Alphas-they won't do the dirty work, the work Epsilons
like doing. The Controllers once tried to create an experimental
society composed only of Alphas, and it led to a civil war that killed
19,000 of the 22,000 discontented Alphas. The lower castes, he says,
find happiness in their work, happiness that guarantees stability.
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Here you see that the brave new world has stifled not only art
and religion but also the science that first gave it the tools of
control and that it still pretends to worship. Keeping the populace
stable prevents this society from using most of its scientific
knowledge. If it did use this knowledge, science would produce
inventions that would reduce the need for Delta and Epsilon labor; the
lower castes would then become unhappy and threaten stability.
Mustapha Mond knows the tragedy of this better than anyone else,
because he was a first-class scientist who gave up science to be a
ruler- a ruler of a society that constantly invokes the name of
science. Huxley was making fun of English and American society; in
1931, he couldn't have known how well he was describing the future
development of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which pretended to
worship science but actually crippled it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
The Controller has to deal with the three friends, who in his
terms are dissidents, like the people in the Soviet Union whom the
newspapers call dissidents- people who can't accept the wrongs they
see in their society. He sends Bernard to Iceland and Helmholtz to the
Falkland Islands. Bernard objects, pathetically; Helmholtz doesn't,
because he accepts the Controller's notion that a small island,
distant from the metropolis, is the right place for people who are too
individual to fit into community life in this Utopia. England is an
island, of course, but it's clearly too large, too central, and too
highly populated to be a good place for unorthodox individuals.
Huxley's love of and fantasy about islands, signaled here, later
inspired his novel of a good Utopia, Island.
CHAPTER_SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
-
After determining the fate of Bernard and Helmholtz, the
Controller still has to deal with John, the Savage, in the climactic
confrontation of the book. John insists the world has paid a high
price for happiness by giving up art and science. The Controller
adds religion to this list and quotes at length from two
19th-century religious figures in order to conclude that "God isn't
compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal
happiness."
-
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: This is one of the fundamental principles of the brave new
world, though only the controller knows that. Do you think it's
true? Does Huxley think it's true? You should be able to figure out
that he doesn't-by listening carefully for the tones of voice in which
John and Mond speak, especially in their exchange of ideas about God.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
John sees it as natural for people to believe in God when they are
most alone. Mond says they have made it almost impossible to be alone.
John knows he suffered equally from being shut out of the Indian
community and from being unable to escape the civilized community.
Do you feel that just by mentioning those two opposites, Huxley
suggests a third, a compromise, is possible?
John also sees God as one who manages, punishes, and rewards. Huxley
never says he agrees with John, and often he doesn't, but he keeps
using the Savage to point up the hollow quality of the Controller's
ideas, again using classic Utopian devices.
This is clear when Mond says that Edmund, one of the villains in
Shakespeare's King Lear, would not be punished in the new world,
only thrust into its "pleasant vices," and John says that that
itself would be a punishment for Edmund. It becomes even clearer
when the Controller tells John that passion means instability and
instability means the end of civilization, that a properly organized
society has no need of the noble or heroic. Huxley is telling you here
as plainly as he can that this is a bad Utopia.
But the Controller knows that passion is part of the definition of
humanity; even in the brave new world people take monthly treatments
of Violent Passion Surrogate, which floods their bodies with the
same hormone that would flow through them if they felt real fear and
rage. The Savage rejects this idea and claims the right to be unhappy,
the right to suffer illness, pain, and fear. The Controller tells John
he can have them. In one sense, Mond understands why John wants
them; in another, he can't really understand that anyone would make
that choice. You can read both reactions in the shrug of the shoulders
that ends the chapter.
CHAPTER_EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
-
John opens this chapter by making himself throw up- a crude but
brilliant metaphor for his claim to the right to be unhappy, and for
his need to purify himself after "eating" civilization and what he
sees as his own wickedness.
He tells Bernard and Helmholtz that he, too, asked to be sent to
an island, and that the Controller refused because he wanted "to go on
with the experiment." The Controller apparently didn't realize that
John was capable of refusing to go on with it.
Instead, the Savage sets himself up as a hermit in an abandoned
air-lighthouse once used to show helicopters their proper air route.
He is discovered by accident while whipping himself in a penitential
rite. Reporters soon descend on him and make a news story out of
everything, even the kick he delivers to one reporter's coccyx.
(Huxley wrote in a world and time when a civilized writer didn't put
certain phrases in print.)
One of the things John punishes himself for is his sexual desire for
Lenina. Huxley shows you that even an idealist can feel lust; John
is learning the truth that the Controller recognized in the previous
chapter, that passion is part of the definition of humanity.
A mob of tourists descends, much worse than the reporters. Worst
of all, one of them is Lenina. Like fans at a boxing match or hockey
game, they become crazed with fear and fascination when John starts to
whip Lenina as well as himself. He chants "Kill it, kill it"
(meaning "kill fleshy desire"), as Lenina writhes at his feet. An orgy
of beating possesses the mob and becomes an orgy-porgy. When John
wakes up the next morning, he hates himself with new intensity. Huxley
never says that he actually has sex with Lenina or that he kills
her, but it's not important; the thought that he might have done
either one is enough to make John want to kill himself. When a new
crowd arrives that evening, they find he has.
Why do you think John chooses death? Did he have to choose between
death and the stable, mindless happiness of the brave new world? In
the Foreword, Huxley says he gave John only two alternatives: what
he saw as an insane life for the Savage in Utopia, and what he
called the lunacy of a primitive life in an Indian village, "more
human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer or
abnormal." At the end of the novel, John could not tolerate either
alternative and found a third choice: suicide.
In the 1946 Foreword, Huxley said he could see a third choice that
would have made suicide unnecessary, a choice he hadn't seen when he
first wrote the book- a compromise in which science would serve man,
economics would be decentralized, and politics cooperative rather than
coercive. Much later he wrote Island, a novel about a good Utopia,
in which he developed some of those ideas.
GLOSSARY (HBRAGLOS)
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ANTHRAX An infectious, often fatal disease of sheep and cattle that
can also kill humans. The Utopian state was established after a war in
which anthrax bombs were used as a weapon of germ warfare.
-
BOKANOVSKIFY; BOKANOVSKY'S PROCESS Method to make a human egg bud
by arresting its growth, producing up to 96 identical people.
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CASTE One of the five groups into which all citizens of the brave
new world are divided by heredity and conditioning, each with its
own rank and intelligence range. They are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta,
and Epsilon, from the Greek letters that English schools use as
grades.
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COMMUNITY SING An observance of the Fordian religion for the
lower castes. The Arch Community Songster is the equivalent of an
Archbishop.
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CONDITION To put into a desired state by chemical, physical, or
psychological action.
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DECANTING Process by which embryos are removed from the bottles
in which they grow; equivalent of birth.
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ECTOGENESIS Reproduction outside the human body, for example in
bottles.
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EMOTIONAL ENGINEERING Designing propaganda for use on citizens. The
Utopia's closest equivalent to writing poetry.
-
FITCHEW A Shakespearean word that John uses to curse Lenina.
Literally a polecat, but in Shakespeare's day it also meant a
prostitute.
-
FLIVVER An old, small, or cheap automobile. Henry Ford's original
Model T was often called a flivver, so the word takes on religious
meaning in the Utopia.
-
FREEMARTIN A sterile person; the Utopia makes 70 percent of its
females freemartins by dosing the embryos with male sex hormones. They
still have female sex organs, but they also have beards that need
shaving.
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GAMETES General term for reproductive cells of either sex.
-
HYPNOPAEDIA Teaching people while they sleep. In the book, suitable
only for moral suggestion, not facts or analysis.
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OVA Female reproductive cells.
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PODSNAP'S TECHNIQUE Method to speed the ripening of human eggs,
making it possible to multiply the number a single ovary can produce.
-
PREDESTINATION The process of determining which embryos will grow
up to do particular jobs in particular places. The word has
religious overtones; it once meant God's decision as to who would be
saved and who would be damned.
-
PREGNANCY SUBSTITUTE A medical technique that floods a woman's body
with all the hormonal and other physical changes it would undergo
during pregnancy, which she will never experience.
-
SAVAGE A person who is born and raised outside the Utopia and
does not know how to behave according to its rules. Savages live on
Reservations surrounded by electrified fences. The Savages who
appear in the book resemble Indians of the Southwest United States.
-
SCENT ORGAN An instrument that plays smells the way a piano or a
pipe organ plays music.
-
SOLIDARITY SERVICE A Fordian religious observance for the upper
castes, usually 12 people who eventually unite in a sexual orgy.
-
SOMA A drug that both tranquilizes and intoxicates without
hangovers or side effects. It provides citizens of the Utopia with
escape from self and surroundings. The word comes from the Sanskrit
language of ancient India. It means both an intoxicating drink used in
the old Vedic religious rituals there and the plant from whose juice
the drink was made- a plant whose true identity we don't know.
-
SPERMATOZOA Male reproductive cells.
-
SURROGATE Something selected as a substitute. Embryos grow in blood
surrogate instead of real blood because they grow outside a mother's
body. Morocco-surrogate is imitation leather. Violent Passion
Surrogate floods the body with the same hormones that fear and rage
would.
-
VIVIPAROUS Bearing live young rather than eggs, as mammals,
including humans, do.
-
ZIPPICAMIKNICKS Women's underwear, one-piece but sexy.
CRITICS
THE CRITICS (HBRACRIT)
-
THE PRICE OF UTOPIA
A life-span without war, violence and the dread of cruel disease- is
it not worth the silly slogans, the scent organ, the Feelies and the
lack of an unknown freedom? But the price- in our terms- is also the
freedom to reject servitude, the freedom to choose, to grow, to
change. The price is deep and graduated human relationships, is
virtue, is courage, endurance, faith exchanged for uniformity and
spiritual squalor. There is no doubt on which side Aldous comes down.
-Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 1974
-
THE WORSHIP AND ENSLAVEMENT OF SCIENCE
In the World-State man has been enslaved by science, or as the
hypnopaedic platitude puts it, "science is everything." But, while
everything owes its origin to science, science itself has been
paradoxically relegated to the limbo of the past along with culture,
religion, and every other worthwhile object of human endeavor. It is
ironic that science, which has given the stablest equilibrium in
history, should itself be regarded as a potential menace, and that all
scientific progress should have been frozen since the establishment of
the World-State.
-Peter Bowering, Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels
-
A CHOICE BETWEEN SQUALOR AND SPIRITLESS HAPPINESS
The core of the book is the argument on happiness between the
Controller and the Savage. They argue like a couple of Oxford dons
on the name and nature of happiness in society. The Savage reveals a
power in dialectic for which his past life, one would have thought,
had hardly prepared him. Huxley is right. It would have been better if
the Savage had had another background, something worth preferring.
As it is, he has to choose between the squalor of the Reservation
and the spiritless shallow happiness of the world according to Ford.
-Laurence Brander, Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study, 1970
-
AMERICA- THE BRAVE NEW WORLD?
...For Huxley, it is plain, there is no need to travel into the
future to find the brave new world; it already exists, only, too
palpably, in the American Joy City, where the declaration of
dependence begins and ends with the single-minded pursuit of
happiness.
-Peter Firchow, Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist, 1972
ADVISORY_BOARD
ADVISORY BOARD (HBRAADVB)
-
We wish to thank the following educators who helped us focus our
Book Notes series to meet student needs and critiqued our
manuscripts to provide quality materials.
-
Murray Bromberg, Principal
Wang High School of Queens, Holliswood, New York
-
Sandra Dunn, English Teacher
Hempstead High School, Hempstead, New York
-
Lawrence J. Epstein, Associate Professor of English
Suffolk County Community College, Selden, New York
-
Leonard Gardner, Lecturer, English Department
State University of New York at Stony Brook
-
Beverly A. Haley, Member, Advisory Committee
National Council of Teachers of English Student Guide Series
Fort Morgan, Colorado
-
Elaine C. Johnson, English Teacher
Tamalpais Union High School District
Mill Valley, California
-
Marvin J. LaHood, Professor of English
State University of New York College at Buffalo
-
Robert Lecker, Associate Professor of English
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
-
David E. Manly, Professor of Educational Studies
State University of New York College at Geneseo
-
Bruce Miller, Associate Professor of Education
State University of New York at Buffalo
-
Frank O'Hare, Professor of English
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
-
Faith Z. Schullstrom, Member of Executive Committee
National Council of Teachers of English
Director of Curriculum and Instruction
Guilderland Central School District, New York
-
Mattie C. Williams, Director, Bureau of Language Arts
Chicago Public Schools, Chicago, Illinois
-
-
BIBLIOGRAPHY (HBRABIBL)
BRAVE_NEW_WORLD
FURTHER READING
-
AUTHOR'S OTHER WORKS
-
Many of Huxley's other books are worth reading. Listed here are
those that provide particular additional insights into Brave New
World.
-
Crome Yellow, 1921.
-
Point Counter-Point, 1928. Like Crome Yellow, this book gives you an
earlier view of some of the ideas developed in Brave New World and
provides characters to compare with those of the Utopian novel.
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The Perennial Philosophy, 1945.
-
The Doors of Perception, 1954. In this book and in The Perennial
Philosophy, Huxley explores the ideas of mystic communion and drugs.
-
Brave New World Revisited, 1958. Huxley treats in essay form many of
the same topics he explored 25 years earlier in his novel:
overpopulation, overorganization, propaganda, and chemical
conditioning, among other subjects. "The nightmare of total
organization... has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now
awaiting us, just around the next corner." The book ends with two
chapters on what people can do to prevent the nightmare from
becoming reality. Huxley wanted to lower the world birth rate,
increase food production, renew the environment, and decentralize
political and economic power. He also wanted to create a system of
education that would make propaganda and conditioning more difficult
to abuse.
-
Island, 1962. This novel about a good Utopia shows that Huxley never
gave up his belief in the benefits of science or of a drug that
would enable man to transcend the limits of the self and know God,
despite the warnings he gave against the misuse of science and drugs
in Brave New World. The people of Pala, a fictional island in the
Indian Ocean, enjoy a stable population, healthy agriculture,
marvelous preventive medicine, no heavy industry, and an economy
that is neither capitalist nor socialist. They also use
moksha-medicine, a perfected version of LSD, to have religious visions
that enable them to achieve a union with God. And, as in Brave New
World, they use chemicals to condition babies- but with a major
difference: on Pala such techniques are employed only to eliminate
aggression or to raise the intelligence of retarded children to within
normal range.
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OTHER WORKS ABOUT UTOPIA
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Three novels by other writers can be compared to Brave New World.
-
Orwell, George. 1984 (1948). A novel of an even grimmer future
than that portrayed by Huxley.
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Wells, H. G. Men Like Gods (1923). The novel Huxley intended to
satirize in his own Utopia.
-
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We (1959). A portrayal of the future inspired
by the repression within the Soviet Union, the book bears some
resemblances to Braze New World and influenced George Orwell.
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CRITICAL WORKS
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Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1974. Essential to understand how Huxley's life related to
his writings.
-
Bowering, Peter. Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1969. One of the more useful critical
studies.
-
Brander, Laurence. Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study. Lewisburg,
Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1970. Another useful study.
-
Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist. Minneapolis,
Mn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1972. One of the more useful
critical studies.
-
Kuehn, Robert E., editor. Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
-
Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure. London: Chatto
and Windus, 1969.
-
Watts, Harold H. Aldous Huxley. New York: Twayne, 1969.
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THE END OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR BARRON'S BOOK NOTES