BRAVE NEW WORLD by ALDOUS HUXLEY

BRAVE NEW WORLD by ALDOUS HUXLEY

The plot

The author and the time

Bibliography

Themes of the novel

• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (Vintage Classics 2004)

• http://www.huxley.net/studyaid

• http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/22/aldous-huxley-prophet-dystopia-cs-lewis

• https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/bravenew/themes.html

• The novel opens in the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre, where the Director of the Hatchery and one of his assistants, Henry Foster, are giving a tour to a group of boys: Lenina Crowne, an employee at the factory, describes to the boys how she vaccinates embryos. Henry Foster and Lenina Crowne, have been dating each other a little too often, going against state rules, thus she decides to hang out with Bernard Marx.

• They go on a vacation to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where people considered unworthy of Utopia are confined (their behavior is almost primitive). Lenina and Bernard accidentally meet Linda and her son, John the Savage, on the Reservation. Bernard learns that long ago Linda had come to the Reservation with the Director, who had abandoned her there. Since carrying his child, she knew that she could not return to Utopia; therefore, she stayed on the Reservation and raised John. Bernard brings the two back to the New World and introduces them to the Director, who resigns his position for the shame.

• John becomes the object of everyone's curiosity and amusement, but grows repulsed by the ways of the New World and becomes unhappy. Despite his mood, Lenina finds herself attracted to John and tries to seduce him: he fights his physical attraction for her and resists her advances. When his mother dies, John goes crazy and tries to convert the Utopians to his way of thinking. Rebellion results and must be quelled: both Bernard and Helmholtz are blamed for the rebellion. Mustapha Mond condemns the two to the exile, while 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.

• Aldous Huxley was born in 1894 in Surrey, England into a family of the intellectual aristocracy.
• After leaving Oxford (1916) he met several Bloomsbury figures such as D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Mark Gertler, and also Maria Nys, who became his wife in 1919.
• His aim was "to arrive, technically, at the perfect fusion of the novel and the essay".
• He died of cancer on 22 November 1963, unaware that JFK had been assassinated earlier that day.

• Although the novel is set in the future it deals with contemporary issues of the early 20th century: Industrial Revolution, mass production, Russian Revolution (1917), and World War I.
• As he began writing the novel, his urge to parody a fictional future became embroiled with the non-fictional problems of the present.
• BNW may be read as a contribution to the widespread fear of Americanisation which was current in Europe at that time.

• The Use of Technology to Control Society: warns of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. It is important to recognize the distinction between science and technology. Whereas the State talks about progress and science, what it really means is the bettering of technology, not increased scientific exploration and experimentation.

• The Consumer Society: it is not simply a warning about what could happen to society if things go wrong, it is also a satire of the society in which Huxley existed, and which still exists today. Many clues point to the conclusion that the World State is simply an extreme version of our society’s economic values.

• The Incompatibility of Happiness and Truth: the almost universal use of the drug soma is probably the most pervasive example of such willful self-delusion. According to Mustapha Mond, the World State prioritizes happiness at the expense of truth by design: he believes that people are better off with happiness than with truth.

• The distruction 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.

2540

1958

632 A.F.

2014

1932

The characters

The setting of the novel

The prophetic aspect of the book

• The Director administrates the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. He is an intelligent but orthodox-minded Alpha, the father of John the Savage.

• Bernard Marx is an Alpha male who fails to fit in because of his inferior physical stature. Unlike his fellow utopians, Bernard is often angry, resentful and jealous. His surname recalls Karl Marx, even if his discontent stems from his frustrated desire to fit into his own society, rather than from a systematic or philosophical criticism of it.

• John the Savage is the illicit son of the Director and Linda. He is an outsider both on the Reservation and the ostensibly civilized Brave New World.

• Lenina Crowne is a popular and promiscuous vaccination-worker at the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Her behavior is sometimes intriguingly unorthodox, even if her values are those of a conventional World State citizen.

• Mustapha Mond is the Resident World Controller of Western Europe. Although in his youth he was fond in science and research, he argues that art and scientific freedom must be sacrificed in order to secure the ultimate utilitarian goal of societal happiness.

• Helmholtz Watson, an Alpha lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering, is friend with Bernard because they find common ground in their discontent with the World State.

• When BNW was written, Huxley thought of the Utopian world as a future reality, but now we realize that this future is very similar to our present: that's why it can be considered a prophetic book.

• The most important aim of the author was to warn his contemporary society from the danger of scientific progress, or progress in general.

• In the novel Huxley describes the mass production of children by what we would now call in vitro fertilisation; interference in the development process of infants to produce a number of "castes" with carefully modulated levels of capacities.

• Today the advertiser and the politician use the mass media to influence opinion, attitude, or course of action; in the future the mass media might be used to control opinion, attitude, or course of action as in Brave New World.

• In "Brave New World Revisited" (1958), he concluded that the world was becoming like Brave New World much faster than he originally thought.

• It it set in London in 632 A.F. (After Ford), which corresponds to AD 2540.

• Henry Ford is the presiding deity of the World State, a global caste system and a totalitarian society.

• The stability of the World state in mantainted through biological engineering and exhaustive conditioning.

• Its citizens have not been born, but "hatched" in order to fill their predestined social roles: they are divided in classes from Alphas to Epsilons.

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!

by Arianna Olivelli