Brave New World

Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley, and published in 1932. Set in London in the year AD 2540 (632 A.F.—"After Ford"—in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to profoundly change society.

Brave New World's title derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

— William Shakespeare,The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206[6]

 

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer, novelist and philosopher. He studied at the University of Oxford with a first-class honours in English literature.

He was best known for his novels including Brave New World; for non-fiction books, such as The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug; and a wide range of essays. Early in his career Huxley published short stories and poetry. Later, he published travel writing, film stories, and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the U.S., living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. In 1962, a year before his death, he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

 

Main characters

John – the illicit son of the Director and Linda, born and raised on the Savage Reservation. John ("the Savage", as he is often called) is an outsider both on the Reservation—where the natives still practice marriage, natural birth, family life and religion—and the civilised World State. He has read nothing but the complete works of William Shakespeare, which he quotes extensively. John is intensely moral according to a code that he has been taught by Shakespeare but is also naïve: his views are as imported into his own consciousness as are the hypnopedic messages of World State citizens. Because he is unwanted in Malpais, he accepts the invitation to travel back to London and is initially astonished by the comforts of the World State. However, he remains committed to values that exist only in his poetry. He is upset with the entire utopian society for failing to live up to his Shakespearian ideals: he asserts that its technological wonders and consumerism are poor substitutes for individual freedom, human dignity and personal integrity. After his mother's death, he becomes deeply distressed. He then ostracizes himself from society and hangs himself in despair.

Bernard Marx – an Alpha-Plus sleep-learning specialist at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Bernard is a misfit. He is unusually short for an Alpha; an alleged accident with alcohol in Bernard's blood-surrogate has left him slightly stunted. Unlike his fellow utopians, Bernard is often angry, resentful, and jealous. His conditioning is clearly incomplete. He doesn't enjoy communal sports, solidarity services, or promiscuous sex. He doesn't even get much joy out of soma. (The drug soma is a symbol of the use of instant gratification to control the World State’s populace. It is also a symbol of the powerful influence of science and technology on society) Bernard is in love with Lenina and he doesn't like her sleeping with other men, even though "everyone belongs to everyone else". Bernard's triumphant return to utopian civilisation with John the Savage from the Reservation precipitates the downfall of the Director, who had been planning to exile him. Bernard's triumph is short-lived. Success goes to his head. Despite his tearful pleas, he is ultimately banished to an island for his non-conformist behaviour.

Lenina Crowne – a young, beautiful fetus technician at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. She is part of the 30% of the female population that are not freemartins (Sterile women). Lenina is promiscuous and popular but with an unusual behavior: she had a four-month relation with Henry Foster. Lenina goes to the Reservation with Bernard. On returning to civilisation, she tries and fails to seduce John the Savage. John loves and desires Lenina but he is repelled by her forwardness. Lenina visits John at the lighthouse but he attacks her with a whip, unwittingly inciting onlookers to do the same. Her exact fate is left unspecified.

Mustapha Mond – Resident World Controller of Western Europe, "His Fordship" Mustapha Mond presides over one of the ten zones of the World State, the global government set up after the cataclysmic Nine Years' War and great Economic Collapse. Mond argues that art, literature, and scientific freedom must be sacrificed to secure the ultimate utilitarian goal of maximising societal happiness. He defends the genetic caste system, behavioural conditioning, and the lack of personal freedom in the World State.

The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (DHC), also known as Thomas "Tomakin" – He is the administrator of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where he is a threatening figure who intends to exile Bernard to Iceland. His plans take an unexpected turn, however, when Bernard returns from the Reservation with Linda and John, a child they both realize is actually his. This fact, scandalous and obscene in the World State not because it was extramarital but because it was procreative, leads the Director to resign his post in shame.

Linda – John's mother, decanted as a Beta-Minus in the World State and subsequently lost during a storm while visiting the New Mexico Savage Reservation with the Director many years before the events of the novel. Linda became pregnant with the Director's son during their time together and was therefore unable to return to the World State by the time that she found her way to Malpais. Having been conditioned to the promiscuous social norms of the World State, Linda finds herself at once popular with every man in the pueblo (because she is open to all sexual advances) and also reviled for the same reason, seen as a whore by the wives of the men who visit her. Linda is desperate to return to the World State and to soma, wanting nothing more from her remaining life than comfort until death.

 

Sources of names and references

The limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens can be traced to political and cultural figures who contributed to the bureaucratic, economic, and technological systems of Huxley's age, and presumably those systems in Brave New World:

• Bernard Marx, from George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Bernard of Clairvaux or possibly Claude Bernard) and Karl Marx.

• Henry Foster, from Henry Ford, American industrialist, see above.

• Lenina Crowne, from Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader during the Russian Revolution.

• Fanny Crowne, from Fanny Kaplan, famous for an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Lenin. Ironically, in the novel, Lenina and Fanny are friends.

• George Edzel, from Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford.

• Polly Trotsky, from Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader.

• Benito Hoover, from Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy; and Herbert Hoover, then-President of the United States.

• Helmholtz Watson, from the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the American behaviorist John B. Watson.

• Darwin Bonaparte, from Napoleon I, the leader of the First French Empire, and Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species.

• Herbert Bakunin, from Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher and Classical liberal, and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian philosopher and anarchist.

• Mustapha Mond, from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of Turkey after World War I, who pulled his country into modernisation and official secularism; and Sir Alfred Mond, an industrialist and founder of the Imperial Chemical Industries conglomerate.

• Primo Mellon, from Miguel Primo de Rivera, prime minister and dictator of Spain (1923–1930), and Andrew Mellon, an American banker and Secretary of the Treasury (1921–1932).

• Sarojini Engels, from Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto along with Karl Marx: and Sarojini Naidu, an Indian politician.

• Morgana Rothschild, from J. P. Morgan, US banking tycoon, and the Rothschild family, famous for its European banking operations.

• Fifi Bradlaugh, from the British political activist and atheist Charles Bradlaugh.

• Joanna Diesel, from Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who invented the diesel engine.

• Clara Deterding, from Henri Deterding, one of the founders of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, and Clara Ford, wife of Henry Ford.

• Tom Kawaguchi, from the Japanese Buddhist monk Ekai Kawaguchi, the first recorded Japanese traveller to Tibet and Nepal.

• Jean-Jacques Habibullah, from the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Habibullah Khan, who served as Emir of Afghanistan in the early 20th century.

• Miss Keate, the Eton headmistress, from nineteenth-century headmaster John Keate.

• Arch-Community Singster of Canterbury, a parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church's decision in August 1930 to approve limited use of contraception.

• Popé, from Popé, the Native American rebel who was one of the instigators of the conflict now known as the Pueblo Revolt.

• John the Savage, after the term "noble savage" originally used in the verse drama The Conquest of Granada by John Dryden, and later erroneously associated with Rousseau. Furthermore, from the prophet John the Baptist.

 

Setting

2540 A.D.; referred to in the novel as 632 years “After Ford,” meaning 632 years after the production of the first Model T car.

Brave New World is set in a futuristic, dystopian world. The majority of the story takes place in a 'utopian' London where the air is clean and sterile, the people are never unhappy or lack anything they desire, and the state has totalitarian control over every person born.

Central London is a ring of buildings and flats surrounded by parkland used for sport and play. Outer London offers playing courts for the different caste workers: "a double row of Escalator-Fives Courts lined the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden. In the Ealing stadium a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress."

There is no wild, uncultivated countryside, only fields, and no abandoned or "for sale" buildings; every building belongs to the state and is used to its full capacity. This London is perfect, with every inch used for either work or play.

Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre

This is the work place of the book's main characters.

The building is squat and grey, thirty-four stories high and lined with windows. 

Inside the building, the atmosphere is tropical. The rooms are half-filled with rack upon rack of embryos, ova and spermatozoa; the other half holds babies and children being hypnopaedically conditioned.

Malpais Savage Reservation

The 'savage reservations' are areas that remain untouched by science and the new world, allowing the native people to preserve their customs and traditions. Although Malpais is a fictional place, its inspiration lies in the Southwest United States, where real Zuni reservations can still be found.

The Zuni tribe live in a pueblo (town or village), on Mesas: isolated flat-topped hills with steep sides. Ladders are used to reach their homes.

The area is surrounded by desert. Rainfall is scarce and erratic. The Zuni, therefore, build dams to collect water.

 

 

When the novel begins, some students are being given a guided tour through the London Hatcheries. Henry Foster and Lenina Crowne, two employees of this centre, have been dating each other a little too often, going against state rules. Lenina decides to date Bernard Marx, who is very intelligent but not quite like the others of his caste. Lenina and Bernard decide to go on a vacation to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where people considered unworthy of Utopia are confined. On the reservation, the inhabitants live in an almost primitive manner. Before Bernard leaves for his vacation, he is warned by Tomakin, the Director of Hatcheries, about his non-conformist ways and threatened with exile to Iceland.

Lenina and Bernard accidentally meet Linda and her son, John the Savage, on the Reservation. Bernard learns from John that long ago Linda had come to the Reservation with Tomakin, who had abandoned her there. Discovering herself to be carrying Tomakin's child, she knew that she could not return to Utopia; therefore, she stayed on the Reservation and raised John. Hearing this story, Bernard goes to the Controller and gains his permission to take John and his mother back to Utopia. When Bernard presents the pair to Tomakin, the Director is shattered and resigns from his position at the Hatcheries, having become an object of ridicule. Bernard no longer has to worry about being exiled to Iceland.

John becomes the object of everyone's curiosity and amusement. Bernard at first is pleased by the attention that he receives because of the Savage. Things, however, do not go smoothly. John soon grows repulsed by the ways of the New World and becomes unhappy. Despite his mood, Lenina finds herself terribly attracted to John and tries to seduce him. John, however, fights his physical attraction for her and resists her advances.

When his mother dies, John goes crazy. He then tries to convert the Utopians to his way of thinking. Rebellion results and must be quelled. Bernard and Helmholtz Watson are blamed for the rebellion. When the two of them are taken to Mustapha Mond, along with John, Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled. John is retained for further experimentation. He resists and tries to flee into solitude, but the citizens of Utopia continue to hound him. In a fit of misery and depression, John commits suicide.

 

Major Themes

In Aldous Huxley's own words, "the theme of Brave New World is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals." The conflict of the novel is between utopianism and primitivism, or between a world run efficiently by science and a human one where culture and spirituality survive, though not without want and misery. The book is also about the dangers and limitations of a totalitarian government and explores the dilemma between science and religion, as well as between mysticism and nationality.

Brave New World, though published in 1932, depicts problems that are still very contemporary. Being a utopian novel that describes the future, it envisages events that probably seemed fantastic to Huxley's contemporaries. Now, however, the things described in Huxley's imaginative and brave new world no longer seem so fantastic or futuristic.

 

LITERARY / HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

After World War I, two basic themes emerged in literature: isolation and relationship within a decaying moral order. In Brave New World, Huxley deals with both themes. In fact, the novel is an example of science fiction dystopia, a utopia-in-reverse. Huxley clearly portrays a disenchanted world that has become dehumanized by scientific advancement. The novel further belongs to the literature of ideas, following in the tradition of Dickens, Shaw, Wells, and Orwell.

Although Brave New World is science fiction, many of the advances described in the book had already been introduced. The cultivation of embryos of small mammals in vitro and the cloning of parasitic insects had already been accomplished in the scientific community by the time Huxley wrote the novel. And largely due to leaders like Darwin and Freud, science had begun to supplant ethics, religion, art, and philosophy. In the political sphere, the individual was no longer the central concept of society; instead, there was a powerful movement towards a government controlled welfare state. Because of post-war change, social instability, and economic chaos, it was a time of great anxiety and stress for all people. As a result, many searched for a simple formula that could serve as a panacea to all the problems that they encountered. The totalitarian system of Huxley's new world was such a panacea, but the author clearly points out that it was not an answer to the many problems of his day.