Brave New World

Utopian/dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley first published in 1932. Set in a fictional society in the future which claims to be “perfect”, but is not.

Setting

The novel is set in AD 2540 where most of the world is united in the “World State” where everyone is happy. There is no more natural procreation but every person is cloned and conditioned in so-called hatcheries. There they are also put into one of five castes (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon). These different castes define the type of work they will be doing for the rest of their life. For example Alphas are considered the new world leaders and intellectual elite, whereas Epsilons are created with low intelligence (by oxygen deprivation) to do menial labour. All children are taught by a hypnopaedic process, i.e. they subconsciously learn by listening to a voice while they sleep.

The two main forms of recreation are on the one hand a drug called soma, which is a kind of hallucinogen but without a hangover and is produced and developed by the World State, and on the other hand sex, which is encouraged from very early on. The idea of family and/or marriage are considered a taboo. Life expectancy is about 60 but death is not feared because there are no family ties and everyone is sure and knows that society will continue the way it always has.

In several locations on the planet are so called reservations where “savages” live. They are not submitted to the conditioning and the drug but left on their own accord with several “strange rituals” like religion or ageing.

Plot

In the first chapters the reader gets a glimpse into life in the "Brave New World". The reader is also introduced to Lenina, a vaccination worker in the hatchery and Bernard, an Alpha and psychologist, who has an inferiority complex because he is a bit shorter than the “average” Alpha. Bernard takes Lenina on a holiday to a reservation in New Mexico in order to seduce her. The seduction fails because Lenina is disgusted by the aged people in the reservation and she has forgotten her soma rations.

Both encounter an old woman called Linda and her son John. Linda was a former citizen of the World State but got lost in the reservation and separated from her group. She turns out to be the date of Bernard's boss. Both Linda and John are considered outcasts in the reservation because Linda's conditioning still works so she wants to have sex with all the men in the village and John is an outcast because of his mother's deeds. Bernard arranges permissions for John and his mother to leave the reservation.

On their return Bernard confronts his boss, because he wanted to relocate Bernard to Iceland, with his former lover and his son. John is the new top story in London society and even Bernard with his inferiority complex can shine but it is only for a very shot period. John on the other hand is disgusted by the society of the World State and is heartbroken when his mother dies in a hospital. The workers in the hospital feel sick about John's display of sorrow and so John tries to start a riot by throwing the worker's soma rations out of the window. The riot is subdued by the police via soma-gas. John, Bernard and his only friend Helmholtz (also a friend of John's) are sent to the office of Mustapha Mond, who is one of the controllers of the World State. Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to foreign islands, where they can “do as they please” without influencing the population. John and Mustapha engage in philosophical discussions.

After that John starts to live in an old lighthouse in isolation from society, but this life is cut short when a video is shown of him flagellating himself. A large group of people gathers around his lighthouse to see the savage but the sight of Lenina in the crowd is too much for John and so he attacks her. This outbreak of emotion triggers an orgy of sex and soma in which even John participates. In the morning the crowd returns only to see that John has committed suicide by hanging himself in an attempt to escape from society.

Important Characters

John (the Savage): He is an outsider from a reservation in New Mexico and the son of Linda and the director of the London Hatchery.

Bernard Marx: Psychologist and Alpha male who has the feeling of not fitting in because of his shorter stature, which is common for lower castes. His last name probably recalls Karl Marx.

Helmholtz Watson: He is an Alpha male and lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering. He, like Bernard, is discontent with the World State, but his discontent has more to do with the fact that he thinks his work is meaningless, than Bernard's complains about his size. His name resembles that of German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and Dr Watson, the close friend of Sherlock Holmes.

Lenina Crowne: She is a vaccination worker at the Hatchery. She is the focus of desire by many men, including Bernard and John. She is often seen as rather unorthodox since she dates one man for a longer period of time (in the beginning she dates Bernard but later develops a huge crush on John). Name probably alludes to Soviet revolutionary Lenin.

Huxley's Influences

Huxley’s novel was written between the First and Second World War and, even though various aspects had an impact on his work, there are two main influences that have to be discussed in order to understand why Huxley wrote his most famous book. One of them is his stance on eugenics and the other one is his experience with American culture.

In 1894, Aldous Huxley was born into a very rich and academically highly regarded family in Surrey. His little brother, Julian Huxley, was a well-known evolutionary biologist who was also an advocate for eugenics. “During this early period of his career, Huxley was close to a group of prominent Cambridge scientists who were outspoken socialists and reform eugenicists” (Woiak 110) and even though he never joined the Eugenics Society, he became “very familiar with its rhetoric and policy proposals and began incorporating these into his articles” (Ibid. 118). Many readers of Brave New World tend to assume that Huxley opposed any form of eugenics due to the many oppressive technological and scientific methods that he describes in his work. It is crucial to understand that he was, in fact, part of an elitist group of intellectuals who believed that there was a human way of genetically modifying the human race in order to improve it and, even though Huxley “expressed [his] revulsion at nazi practices” (Dikötter 467), he still held the “assumption that societies will always have innately inferior and superior groups” (Woiak 118). The caste system and the Bokanovsky groups in the novel are an extreme expression of the eugenic principle.

The second aspect that was influential to his work was Huxley’s journey to the United States in 1926. After the First World War, he noticed an American impact on Europe that he found alarming. When he finally arrived in the United States, he was shocked to see that it was “every bit as vulgar and as freakish as he had anticipated” (Bradshaw xix). Huxley wrote several letters in which he expressed his concerns about the possibility that what he had seen in America might also indicate the future for the rest of the world. In one of those letters, he wrote that Americans "can live out their lives […] without once being solitary, without once making a serious mental effort, without once being out of sight or sound of some ready-made distraction" (qtd. in Woiak 113). It is this bitterness about cheap, popular culture that finds its expression in Brave New World.

The structures of the novel's fictional World State are strongly influenced by what Huxley saw during his journey, and his work was “first conceived as a satire on the global diffusion of the American way of life” (Bradshaw xx). During his travels, the author also discovered Henry Ford’s My Life and Work. He read about Ford’s principles on mass production and mass consumption and found them to be in tune with what he would later see in America (Ibid.). Ford’s ideas had a huge impact on Huxley’s novel and the invention of the assembly line becomes the starting point for the new society in Brave New World.

Sources

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.

www.huxley.net

http://www.online-literature.com/aldous_huxley/brave_new_world/

http://somaweb.org/

Bradshaw, David. “Introduction by David Bradshaw.“ Brave New World. London: Random House, 2007. Xvii-xxvii.

Dikötter, Frank. "Race culture: recent perspectives on the history of eugenics." The American Historical Review 103.2 (1998): 467-478.

Woiak, Joanne. "Designing a brave new world: Eugenics, politics, and fiction." The Public Historian 29.3 (2007): 105-129.