A Comprehensive Guide to Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
Last updated on August 14th, 2024 at 11:05 am
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932.
It is set in a futuristic world where technology, conditioning, and a rigid caste system have created a society devoid of individuality and emotional depth. The novel explores themes of totalitarianism, consumerism, and the loss of personal freedoms, portraying a world where human beings are engineered for specific roles and kept content with artificial pleasures.
Brave New World is so popular that it has nearly 2 million ratings on Goodreads.
INTRODUCTION TO BRAVE NEW WORLD
Written in 1931 and published the following year, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a dystopian—or anti-utopian—novel.
The author questions the values of 1931 London, using satire and irony to portray a futuristic world in which many of the contemporary trends in British and American society have been taken to extremes. Although he was already a bestselling author, Huxley achieved international acclaim with Brave New World and the novel, which is best appreciated as an ironic commentary on contemporary values, subsequently became a classic.
The story is set in London, 600 years in the future. People all around the world are part of a totalitarian state, free from war, hatred, poverty, disease, and pain. They enjoy leisure time, material wealth, and physical pleasures. However, in order to maintain this society, the ten Controllers of the world eliminate most forms of freedom and distort many traditionally held human values.
Standardization and progress are valued above all else. These Controllers create human beings in factories, using technology to make numerous people from the same fertilized egg and to condition them for their future lives. Children are brought up together and subjected to mind control through sleep teaching to further condition them.
As adults, people are content to fulfil their destinies as part of five social classes, from the intelligent Alphas, who run the factories, to the mentally disabled Epsilons, who do the most menial jobs. All spend their free time indulging in harmless and mindless entertainment and sports activities. When the Savage, a man from the uncontrolled area of the world (an Indian reservation in New Mexico) comes to London, he questions the society and ultimately has to choose between conformity and death.
BRAVE NEW WORLD Summary
Brave New World opens in the year 2495 at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a research facility and factory that mass-produces and then socially-conditions test-tube babies. The date is A.F. 632, A.F.—After Ford—being a notation based on the year of birth (1863) of Henry Ford, the famous car manufacturer and assembly line innovator who is worshipped as a god in Huxley’s fictional society.
Five genetic castes or classes inhabit this futurist dystopia, and are named after the first five letters of the Greek alphabet: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. While upper castes are bred for intellectual and managerial occupations, the lower castes, bred with less intelligence, perform manual labour. All individuals are conditioned by electric shock treatment and hypnopaedia (sleep conditioning) to reject or desire what the State dictates.
For example, infants are taught to hate flowers and books but encouraged to seek out s*ex, entertainment, and new products. Most importantly, they are conditioned to be happiest with their own caste and to be glad they are not a member of any other group. For instance, while 80 Beta children sleep on their cots in the Conditioning Centre, the following hypnopaedic message issues from speakers placed beneath the children’s pillows:
“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able…”
The director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
“They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson.”
The story begins in the London Hatchery’s employee locker room where Lenina Crowne, a Gamma worker, discusses men with another female co-worker, Fanny Crowne.
The subject of their conversation is Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus who is considered abnormally short, a defect rumoured to be from an excess of alcohol added to the “blood surrogate” surrounding his developing embryo. Generally perceived as antisocial and melancholic, Bernard is unusually withdrawn and gloomy, despite the fact that social coherence and mood enhancement—especially through promiscuity and regular doses of the drug “soma”—is State-sanctioned and encouraged.
Nevertheless, despite Bernard’s oddness, Lenina finds him “cute” and wants to go out with him. After all, Lenina has been going out with the Centre’s research specialist, Henry Foster, for four months—unusually long in this society. In need of a change from the places they always go—the feelies, which are like films with the sense of touch, and dance clubs with music produced from scent and colour instruments—Lenina and Bernard go on holiday to the New Mexico Savage Reservation, a “natural” area populated by “sixty thousand Indians and half-breeds” living without television, books, and hot water, still giving birth to their own children, and still worshipping an assortment of Christian and pagan gods.
To prevent the “savages” from escaping, the whole reservation is surrounded by an electrified fence.
Wandering around the Reservation, Lenina is horrified by the sight of mothers nursing their own infants, elderly people who actually look their age because they have not been chemically treated, and a sacrificial ritual in which a boy is whipped, his blood scattered on writhing snakes.
After witnessing this ceremony, Lenina and Bernard meet John, who unlike them and all they know was not born from a test tube.
His mother, Linda, gave birth to him on the Reservation. On a previous visit from civilization to the Reservation years before, Linda, while pregnant with John, was abandoned by John’s father, who returned to civilization after Linda disappeared and was thought to have died. Bernard realizes that John’s father is none other than the Director of Hatching and Conditioning, the man who has tried to exile Bernard to Iceland for being a non-conformist. John’s mother, Linda, has always resented the Reservation, and John, although he wants to become a part of “savage” society, is ostracized because he is the white son of a civilized mother, and because he reads books, especially Shakespeare.
John’s status as an outcast endears him to Bernard. John, meanwhile, is becoming infatuated with Lenina, and like Linda, he is excited about the prospect of life in the civilized world. At Bernard’s request, John and Linda go with Bernard and Lenina to, as John puts it (quoting from Shakespeare’s The Tempest), the “brave new world” of London. Bernard wonders if John might be somewhat hasty calling London a “brave new world”.
Back in London, Bernard uses Linda’s impregnation and abandonment, and her son, to disgrace the Director.
He then introduces the exotic John (now known as “the Savage”, or “Mr Savage”) to Alpha society, while Linda begins to slowly die from soma abuse. John comes to hate the drug that destroys his mother, and he becomes increasingly disenchanted with this “brave new world’s” open se*xuality, promiscuity, and contempt for marriage. When John finally confesses his love to Lenina, she is overjoyed and makes overt se*xual advances towards him. However, appalled by the idea of se*x before marriage, John asks Lenina to marry him. Now it is her turn to be shocked. “What a horrible idea!” she exclaims.
In the aftermath of this aborted romance, John must face another crisis.
He rushes to the Park Lane Hospital in time to see his mother die, and he is shocked when a class of children come in for their conditioning in death acceptance. Lenina’s rejection and his mother’s death are too much for John to bear. At the hospital, he begins ranting in the hallways and takes the staff’s daily soma ration and dumps it out of the window. The angry soma-dependent staff of 162 Deltas attack him. Bernard’s friend, Helmholtz Watson, rushes to John’s defence as Bernard timidly watches. The police arrive in time to quell the disturbance, arrest the three nonconformists, and deliver them to the office of the Controller, Mustapha Mond.
The Controller tells John that he must remain in civilization as an ongoing experiment. Bernard and Helmholtz, on the other hand, are to be exiled to separate islands because, says Mond, “’It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.’”
In the last section of the novel, John, unable to tolerate the Controller’s judgment, flees to the countryside determined to live a life close to nature, of truth, beauty, and even pain, free from incessant and artificial happiness. John tries to cleanse himself of civilization by ritual self-flagellation. However, he is discovered and becomes the centre of overwhelming media attention. In a final welter of events,
John succumbs to the temptation of the crowd’s spontaneous orgy of violence, se*x, and soma.
The next day, unable to live with himself in this brave new world, John hangs himself.
CHARACTERS OF BRAVE NEW WORLD
1. Fanny Crowne
Like her co-worker, Lenina Crowne, Fanny is a 19-year-old Beta.
Although she shares Lenina’s last name and is genetically related to her, she is just a friend. Family connections have no meaning in civilization. Her character serves as a foil to contrast society’s values—which she accepts completely—with Lenina’s unconventional behaviour.
2. Lenina Crowne
Lenina Crowne is, like Linda, a Beta. Young and beautiful, she has auburn hair and blue eyes; however, she also suffers from the immune system disorder lupus, which causes skin lesions.
Employed at the Embryo Room of the Hatchery, Lenina is a shallow person, completely accepting the values of her society without question. However, part of her longs to form a lasting relationship with one man, a desire that is considered ugly and dirty in a society that believes promiscuity is healthy. For this reason, while she is attracted to Henry Foster, she chooses Bernard Marx, too. Bernard is unusual because he is discontented. Lenina finds this attractive in spite of herself and the warnings from her friend Fanny to stay away from him.
When she meets John the Savage, she feels a tremendous se*xual attraction towards him, but she has been taught to disdain love, passion, and commitment.
Unable to escape her conditioning, she is afraid of his attraction to her.
3. The Director
The Director loves to hear himself talk, and, therefore, greatly enjoys giving guided tours of the Hatchery to visiting students, as he does at the beginning of the book.
Like many intelligent Alphas, the Director secretly used to wonder about life outside the society over which he has so much control. In the past, he took a trip with a young woman named Linda to the New Mexico Indian reservation to see how the “primitive” people lived. Once there, Linda, who was carrying his child, disappeared. He assumed she was dead and returned without her.
The Director tells this story to Bernard, but quickly realizes that his revelation is unseemly for a man of his great reputation. He returns to acting professionally, even gruffly, with Bernard.
When Linda’s baby, John the Savage, comes to London as an adult, he faces the Director and calls him father. Everyone reacts as if it were an obscene joke. The Director is horrified and humiliated at the public revelation that he fathered a child, just like a primitive. His reputation is irreparably ruined.
4. Henry Foster
Henry Foster is a fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-complexioned scientist in the London Hatchery and a model citizen.
He is efficient, pleasant, and cooperative, working hard at his job and spending his leisure time engaging in mindless, if harmless, activities, such as watching Feelies (films), playing new forms of golf, and having casual s*ex.
Lenina Crowne has been seeing him exclusively for four months, a practice that raises eyebrows because romantic commitments are frowned on. Henry does not realize that Lenina has been faithful to him and would be upset if he knew because, as Fanny points out to Lenina, he is “the perfect gentleman”. He expects nice girls to take multiple se*xual partners just as he does. Huxley uses the character of Henry Foster to explain how the Hatchery functions and how average citizens are supposed to behave.
5. Benito Hoover
Huxley took the name Hoover from United States President Herbert Hoover, and Benito from the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
A friend and colleague of Henry Foster, Benito is one of many men who would like to have se*x with Lenina Crowne. He is disapproving of Bernard Marx until Bernard introduces the Savage. Then, like many other people, Benito fawns over Bernard, bringing him gifts.
6. John the Savage
John the Savage is the central character in Brave New World through whom Huxley compares the primitive and civilized societies of the future.
He is the son of the Director and Linda, and was born and raised on an Indian reservation in New Mexico after an accident stranded Linda there (the Director had mistakenly assumed she was dead and returned to civilization without her).
John, now 20, tall, and handsome, was raised in the Indian culture. He has a utopian view of civilization that is based on his mother Linda’s tales, and he has a vast knowledge of Shakespeare because he learned to read using the only book available to him: The Complete Works of Shakespeare. John the Savage’s perception of the world around him and what it means to be human is greatly influenced by Shakespeare.
Sometimes called just “the Savage”, John represents the idea of the noble savage: that a person raised in a primitive world, away from Western civilization, has a purity of heart that civilized people lack (although Huxley does not portray the primitive world as a paradise).
John the Savage cannot understand why civilized people think that having been born to and brought up by one’s parents is an obscene joke, or why they do not feel sorrow when confronted with death. He very much loves his mother, and cannot understand why his father rejects him. After several discussions with Mustapha Mond, he realizes that because his values are completely different no place exists for him within civilization.
7. Linda
A Beta-minus, Linda had worked contentedly in the Fertilizing Room until an incident that occurred 20 years earlier while on a date with the Director.
They had visited the New Mexico Indian reservation, where she fell, injuring her head. When she regained consciousness the Director was gone. Pregnant with his child, she was taken in by the Indians, but she never fitted into their world because she had been conditioned to live in civilization. For example, Linda continued to be se*xually promiscuous, having se*x with the other women’s mates, because that was the way a proper girl behaved where she came from—the “Other Place”, as she called it.
Linda was embarrassed to give birth to her son, John, and tried to teach him that civilization was superior to life on the reservation. However, she could not explain why it was superior because this was not something she had been conditioned to understand.
When Linda meets Bernard and Lenina she is anxious but thrilled to return to civilization, but she cannot emotionally cope with the return. The embarrassment of being a mother, of being old and no longer physically beautiful, is too much for her, so she chooses to drug herself with soma, eventually dying from an overdose. Her inability to handle the contrast between the primitive world and the civilized one foreshadows her son John’s final decision to commit suicide.
8. Bernard Marx
Like other members of civilization, Bernard Marx is named after a person whose ideas greatly influenced the society in Brave New World: Karl Marx.
Bernard Marx, an Alpha, is a very intelligent man and a specialist in sleep-teaching. However, he is discontented with society and does not completely accept its values—he hates the casual attitude towards se*x, dislikes sports, and prefers to be alone. Some people think Bernard was improperly conditioned—that the chemistry of the womblike bottle he lived in as a foetus was somehow altered. They point to the fact that Bernard is eight centimetres shorter and considerably thinner than the typical Alpha as evidence that a physical reason exists for his emotional differences.
This physical inadequacy makes Bernard self-conscious, and he is particularly uncomfortable around lower-class people since they remind him that he physically resembles his inferiors.
Bernard is a selfish person, trying to bend the rules of society for his own needs and using other people to boost his own fortune. He vacillates between boasting and self-pity, which annoys his friend Helmholtz Watson. When Bernard discovers the Savage, he realizes that by bringing him back to society he will be able to gain revenge against the Director, who has been threatening him with exile to Iceland. The Director’s reputation will be ruined when it is revealed that he is a father.
Bernard also realizes that the Savage will be the key to his acceptance into society, a curiosity that everyone will want to see.
Indeed, Bernard brings the Savage home, and suddenly everyone wants to meet and spend time with him and the Savage.
Bernard tells himself that people like him because of his discovery, unaware that really they are gossiping about him, saying that anyone so odd and so self-absorbed is bound to come to a bad end. He relishes his new popularity with women and becomes angry at John for not cooperating with his attempts to show him off; he believes John is ruining his chances of finally being accepted. Bernard’s popularity is predictably short-lived, and in the end, he is indeed exiled to Iceland.
9. Mitsima
Mitsima is the Indian elder who teaches John the Savage the ways of the Indian people.
10. Mustapha Mond
Mustapha Mond is the Controller of world society and an intellectual who secretly indulges his own passion for knowledge, literature, and history, all of which are denied to ordinary citizens in order to keep people from questioning the structure and values of the society that has been created for them.
He is of medium height, with black hair, a hooked nose, large red lips, and piercing dark eyes. Mond is a friendly and happy fellow, faithful to his job and his vision of a utopian society.
He enjoys discussing Shakespeare with John the Savage, and treats him like a favourite pupil. Formerly a scientist, as a young man he was given the choice of becoming a controller or an exiled dissident, so he chose the former. As the Controller, he has free will, but he denies it to others. Mond understands the frustrations of Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, who have trouble accepting all of the restrictions of their carefully controlled lives.
In the end, however, Mustapha Mond’s loyalty is to the society rather than to individuals, so he banishes Marx, Watson, and the Savage to isolated areas where they cannot influence others.
11. Pope
Pope is an Indian man with whom Linda forms a bond, sleeping with him regularly despite her feeling that she ought to be promiscuous.
Pope is amused by John’s jealousy and hatred towards him. He introduces Linda to mescal, an alcoholic drink made by the Indians, which Linda thinks is a sorry substitute for soma because it gives her a hangover.
12. Helmholtz Watson
Watson (named by Huxley after John B. Watson, the founder of the Behaviourist School of psychology) is an Alpha-plus, a highly intellectual writer and lecturer.
He is a powerfully built, broad-shouldered man with dark curly hair. Although he is a typical handsome Alpha male, he is, like his friend Bernard Marx, a little different from his peers. Watson is more intelligent than he is supposed to be, a fact he has only recently discovered.
Watson has a distinguished career as an emotional engineer and writer, penning snappy slogans and simplistic rhymes designed to promote the values of society and pacify people. However, he is frustrated by the limitations of his work and believes that there must be something more meaningful to write about. This unconventional desire causes him to feel like an outsider. He befriends Bernard Marx because he sees in him a similar sense of not belonging, of dissatisfaction, but he is disturbed by Bernard’s self-pitying and boastful behaviour.
Watson is brilliant, but when the Savage introduces him to Shakespeare’s works, he cannot completely understand the plays because he is too limited by his conditioning.
Watson accepts his exile to the isolated Falkland Islands, hoping that being with other outsiders and living in uncomfortable conditions will inspire his writing.
THEMES OF BRAVE NEW WORLD
Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s satirical vision of a future totalitarian society in which the trends of Huxley’s day are taken to extremes.
An outsider encounters this “brave new world”, but he finds it impossible to live by its values and chooses to die rather than conform.
a. Volition/ Free Will versus Enslavement
Only the Controllers of society, the ten elite rulers, have freedom of choice.
Everyone else has been conditioned from the time when they were embryos to accept unquestioningly all the values and beliefs of the carefully ordered society. Upper-class Alphas, who have a higher intellect, are allowed a degree of freedom because they do not conform as readily to the rules of society. They are occasionally allowed to travel to the Indian reservation to see how outsiders live. It is hoped that exposure to an “inferior” and “primitive” society will finally dispel any doubts about their own society’s superiority.
Beyond this, however, no room exists in “civilized” society for free will, creativity, imagination, or diversity, all of which can lead to conflict, war, and destruction. Therefore, dissidents who want these freedoms are exiled to remote corners of the earth. Anyone who feels distressed for any reason quickly ingests a dose of the tranquilizer “soma”.
John the Savage believes that the price to be paid for harmony in this society is too great. He sees the people as enslaved, addicted to drugs, and weakened and dehumanized by their inability to cope with pain or delayed gratification of any sort. He exercises his freedom of choice by killing himself rather than becoming a part of such a world.
b. Class-struggle
As a result of conditioning, class conflict has been eliminated.
The Controllers have determined that there should be five social classes, from the superior, highly intelligent, and handsome Alphas—who have the most desirable and intellectually demanding occupations—to the inferior, mentally deficient, and physically unattractive Epsilons, who do the least desirable, menial jobs. Huxley makes the Alphas tall and fair and the Epsilons dark-skinned, reflecting the prevailing attitudes of the 1930s. All people are genetically bred and conditioned from birth to be best adapted to the lives they will lead and to accept the class system wholeheartedly.
Members of different classes not only look physically different but wear distinctive colours to make sure that no one can be mistaken for a member of a different group. Only John the Savage can see people as they really are because he has not been conditioned to accept unquestioningly the rigid class structure.
Thus, when he sees a dark-skinned man of a lower caste, he is reminded of the Shakespearean character Othello, who was a noble Moor.
c. Se*xuality
The inhabitants of Huxley’s future world have very unusual attitudes towards s*ex by the standards of contemporary society.
Promiscuity is considered healthy and superior to committed, monogamous relationships. Even small children are encouraged to engage in erotic play. The Controllers realize that strong loyalties created by committed relationships can cause conflicts between people, upsetting productivity and harmony. Since the needs of society are far more important than the needs of the individual, the Controllers strongly believe that sacrificing human attachments—even the attachment between children and their parents—is a small price to pay for social harmony.
Women use contraception to avoid pregnancy, and if they do get pregnant accidentally, they hurry to the abortion centre, a place Linda recalls with great fondness.
She regrets bitterly having had to give birth in what she feels was a “dirty” affair.
d. Science and Technology
Science and technology provide the means for controlling the lives of the citizens in Brave New World.
First, cloning is used to create many human beings from the same fertilized egg. The genetically similar eggs are placed in bottles, where the growing embryos and foetuses are exposed to external stimulation and chemical alteration to condition them for their lives after being “decanted” or “hatched”.
Babies and children are subject to cruel conditioning. They are exposed to flowers, representing the beauty of nature, and given electric shocks to make them averse to nature. They are brought to the crematorium, where they play and are given treats so that they will associate death with pleasantness and therefore not object when society determines it is time for them to die. Also, hypnopaedia, or sleep teaching, is used to indoctrinate children.
Adults use “soma”, a tranquilizer, to deaden feelings of pain or passion. Frivolous gadgets and hi-tech entertainment provide distractions, preventing the childlike citizens from engaging in rich emotional and intellectual lives or from experiencing challenges that might lead to emotional and intellectual growth. Indeed, the Controller feels that technology’s purpose is to make the distance between the feeling of desire and the gratification of that desire so short that citizens are continually content and not tempted to think for themselves or question anything.
Since books are taboo and knowledge is restricted only to the powerful elite minority, the citizens are unaware that technology has been used to limit their lives.
Huxley questions the ethics of the use of technology for social purposes and brings to light the danger of the misuse of technology by totalitarian governments.
e. Knowledge versus Obliviousness
To control the citizens, the Controllers make sure that people are taught only what they need to know to function within society and no more.
Knowledge is dangerous. Books are strictly forbidden, the way we see in Fahrenheit 451. Art and culture, which stimulate the intellect, emotions, and spirit, are reduced to pale imitations of the real thing. Music is synthetic and characterized by absurd popular songs that celebrate the values of the society. Films appeal to the lowest common denominator. Citizens are conditioned to believe that wanting to be alone is abnormal. They seek shallow relationships, devoid of intimacy and commitment, rather than spend time alone thinking.
If they did spend time in contemplation, they might, like Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, start questioning the meaning of their lives and the function of the society.
Only the Controller has access to the great literature and culture of the past. He enjoys discussing Shakespeare with John the Savage. Huxley, by granting his primitive character only Shakespeare’s works to base his perceptions on, stresses the power of literature: that it can capture an enormous range of human experience, to which the citizens of the brave new world are completely oblivious.
Ultimately, however, the people who accidentally attain knowledge have only two choices if they are to survive: they can become oppressors or outcasts.
VI LITERARY METHOD
a. Frame Of Reference
Huxley relates the story of Brave New World through a third-person, omniscient voice.
The narrative is chronological for the most part, jumping backwards in time only to reveal past events, as in when the Director explains to Bernard Marx what happened when he visited the Indian reservation, or when John and Linda recall their lives on the reservation before meeting Bernard and Lenina. The first six chapters are devoted to explaining how the society functions, through the device of the lecture tour that the Director, and later the Controller, conduct of the “hatchery”, or human birth factory.
Thereafter, the reader gains insight into the characters through their dialogue and interaction. For example, Bernard and Lenina’s conversation on their date shows how deeply conditioned Lenina is to her way of life and how difficult it is for Bernard to meet society’s expectations of how he should feel and behave. When Huxley finally presents the arguments for and against the compromises the society makes in order to achieve harmony, he does so in the form of a dialogue between Mustapha Mond and John the Savage. The book ends with a sober and powerful description of John’s vain struggle to determine his own way of life.
This is in marked contrast to the humorous, satirical tone of much of the novel, making it especially poignant.
b. Background
Set predominantly in London, 600 years in the future, Brave New World portrays a totalitarian society where freedom, diversity, and conflict have been replaced by efficiency, progress, and harmony. The other important locale in the novel, presented as a contrast to this futuristic society, is the Indian reservation in New Mexico, where the “primitive” culture of the natives has been maintained.
c. Sarcasm and Witicism
In order to portray the absurdity of the future society’s values as well as those of contemporary society, Huxley employs satire, parody, and irony.
Ordinary scenes the reader can recognize incorporate behaviour, internal thoughts, and dialogue that reveal the twisted and absurd values of the society’s citizens, and since the roots of many of the practices seen in this futuristic society are to be found in contemporary ideas, the reader is led to question the values of contemporary society. For example, in the society of the future the modern drive for progress and efficiency is taken to the absurd extreme of babies being hatched in bottles for maximum efficiency.
Huxley even satirizes sentimentality by having the citizens of the future sing sentimental songs fondly recalling not their mothers but the “dear old bottle” in which they grew as foetuses.
d. Literary Reference
Throughout the novel, evidence of Huxley’s eclectic knowledge of science, technology, literature, and music can be found.
He makes frequent allusions to Shakespeare, mostly through the character of John, who quotes the playwright whenever he needs to express a strong human emotion.
Indeed, the title itself is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which the sheltered Miranda first encounters some men and declares, “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” Huxley also makes many allusions to powerful, influential people of his day, naming characters, buildings, and religions after them. For example, Henry Ford is as a god; his name is used in interjections (Oh my Ford!) and in calculating the year (A.F., or After Ford, instead of ad).
Even the Christian cross has been altered to resemble the T from the old Model T car built by Ford.
The character of the Savage is reminiscent of the Noble Savage—the concept that primitive people are more innocent and purer of heart than civilized people.
However, Huxley is careful not to portray him as heroic or his primitive culture as ideal.
One of the most subtle influences on the story is Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis.
The Savage suffers from what Freud termed the Oedipus complex, a powerful desire to connect with one’s mother. At one point, when he sees his mother with her lover, he identifies with Hamlet, who also had an Oedipal complex, an over attachment to his mother that prevented him from accepting her as se*xually independent of him.
Freud believed that childhood experiences shape adult perceptions, feelings, and behaviour, and the characters in the novel are all clearly compelled to feel and act according to the lessons they learned as children, even when faced with evidence that their behaviour results in personal suffering.
HISTORICAL AND SOCIETAL SITUATION
When Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, it was at the beginning of a worldwide depression.
The effects of the United States stock market crash of 1929 were beginning to be felt in Britain. People longed for the kind of economic security that Huxley gives to the citizens of his fictional world.
Huxley was also very much aware of the social and scientific changes that had begun to sweep the world at the beginning of the century, and particularly throughout the 1920s. Technology was rapidly replacing many workers. Although politicians promised that progress would solve unemployment and economic problems, workers were forced to take whatever jobs were available. More often than not, unskilled or semi-skilled labourers worked long hours without overtime pay, under unsafe conditions, and without benefits such as pensions.
Unlike the inhabitants of the brave new world, they had no job guarantees and no security. Furthermore, they often had little time for leisure and little money to spend on entertainment or on material luxuries.
In order to increase consumer demand for the products being produced, manufacturers turned to advertising in order to convince people they ought to spend their money buying products and services.
Also, Henry Ford, who invented the modern factory assembly line, was now able efficiently to mass-produce cars. For the first time, car parts were interchangeable and easily obtained, and Ford deliberately kept the price of his Model T low so that his workers could afford them. In order to pay for the new cars, buying on credit became acceptable.
Soon, people were buying other items on credit, fuelling the economy.
All of these economic upheavals affected Huxley’s vision of the future. First, he saw Ford’s production and management techniques as revolutionary, and chose to make Ford not just a hero to the characters in his novels but an actual god. Huxley also saw that technology could eventually give workers enormous amounts of leisure time.
The result could be more time spent in creativity and solving social problems, but Huxley’s Controllers, perceiving these activities as threatening to the order they have created, provide foolish distractions to preoccupy their workers. These future workers do their duty and buy more and more material goods to keep the economy rolling, even to the point of throwing away clothes rather than mending them.
In Huxley’s day, people’s values and ideas were changing rapidly.
Young people in the 1920s rejected the moralistic Victorian values of their parents’ generation. Men and women flirted with modern ideas, such as communism, and questioned rigid attitudes about social class. Some embraced the idea of free love (s*ex outside of marriage or commitment), as advocated by people like the author Gertrude Stein. Others talked publicly about s*ex, or using contraceptives, which were popularized by Margaret Sanger, the American leader of the birth-control movement.
Women began to smoke in public, cut their hair into short, boyish bobs, and wear much shorter, looser skirts. These new se*xual attitudes are taken to extremes in Brave New World.
Scientists were also beginning to explore the possibilities of human engineering. The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov showed that it was possible to create a conditioned response in animals. He rang a bell whenever he fed a group of dogs, and over time Pavlov’s dogs began to salivate at the sound of a bell, even when no food was presented to them.
Pavlov’s fellow scientist, John B. Watson, founded the Behaviourist School of psychology: he believed that human beings could be reduced to a network of stimuli and responses, which could then be controlled by whoever experimented on them. In the 1930s, the German Nobel Prize winner Hans Spemann developed the controversial science of experimental embryology, manipulating the experience of a human foetus in the womb in order to influence it.
The eugenics movement—which was an attempt to limit the childbearing of lower-class, ethnic citizens—was popular in the 1920s as well.
The fad of hypnopaedia, or sleep teaching, was popular in the 1920s and 1930s. People hoped to teach themselves passively by listening to instructional tapes while they were sleeping. Although the electroencephalograph, a device invented in 1929 that measures brain waves, would prove that people have a limited ability to learn information while asleep, it also proved that hypnopaedia can influence emotions and beliefs. Meanwhile, the ideas of the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, were also becoming popular.
He believed, among other things, that most psychological problems stem from early childhood experiences. Huxley incorporated all of these technological and psychological discoveries into his novel, making the Controllers misuse this information about controlling human behaviour to oppress their citizens.
Brave New World was written just before dictators such as Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Stalin in Russia, and Mao Tse-tung in China created totalitarian states in countries that were troubled by economic and political problems. These leaders used extreme tactics to control their citizens, from propaganda and censorship to mass murder.
Huxley could not have predicted what was on the horizon. The grim totalitarian state to come would be incorporated into another futuristic anti-utopian novel, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
About The Author: Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, in Laleham near Godalming, Surrey, and grew up in London.
His family was well known for its scientific and intellectual achievements: Huxley’s father, Leonard, was a renowned editor and essayist, and his highly educated mother ran a boarding school. His grandfather and brother were leading biologists, and his half-brother, Andrew Huxley, won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work in physiology.
When he was 16 Aldous Huxley went to Eton, and from 1913 to 1916 he attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he excelled academically.
There were many tragedies in Huxley’s life. His mother died from cancer when he was 14 and as a teenager he came close to losing his eyesight through illness. Limited by his failing vision, Huxley was unable to fight in World War I or pursue a scientific career, so he focused instead on writing. He married Maria Nys in 1919, and they had one son, Matthew.
Huxley supported his family through writing, editing, and teaching. He also spent time travelling throughout Europe, India, and the United States.
Huxley’s first published works, poetry and short stories, received modest attention from critics, before he turned to novels: Crome Yellow (1921), set on an estate, featuring the vain and narcissistic conversations between various artists, scientists, and members of high society; Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925), both satires of the upper-class after World War I; and Point Counter Point (1928), a bestselling novel incorporating Huxley’s knowledge of music.
Huxley’s next novel, Brave New World (1932) brought him international fame. Written just before the rise of the dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the novel did not present the same bleak vision of totalitarianism later found in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Huxley subsequently commented on this omission and revisited the ideas and themes of Brave New World in a collection of essays called Brave New World Revisited (1958). During the rest of his career, he wrote novels, short stories, and collections of essays that were, for the most part, popular and critically acclaimed.
Despite being nearly blind all his life, he also wrote film screenplays, most notably for the Hollywood adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1940) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1944).
In the last ten years of his life Huxley experimented with mysticism, parapsychology, and, under the supervision of a physician friend, the hallucinogenic drugs mescaline and LSD. He wrote of his drug experiences in the book The Doors of Perception (1954).
Huxley’s wife died in 1955, and in 1956 he married the author and psychotherapist Laura Archera. In 1960 Huxley was diagnosed with cancer, and for the next three years his health steadily declined. He died in Los Angeles, California, where he had been living for several years, on November 22, 1963. Huxley’s ashes were buried in England in his parents’ grave.
Conclusion
Brave New World remains a powerful critique of modern society’s potential trajectory, emphasizing the dangers of losing individuality and freedom in the pursuit of technological progress and social stability. It serves as a warning against the unchecked use of technology and the erosion of personal freedoms.
