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Brave New World

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For other uses, see Brave New World (disambiguation).

Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1932. Set in London in 2540 (or AF 632), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning that combine to change society. Huxley answers this novel with a reassessment in his 1958 non-fiction text, Brave New World Revisited, also summarized below.

Brave New World
First edition cover
First edition cover
AuthorAldous Huxley
Cover artistLeslie Holland
LanguageEnglish
GenreDystopian novel
PublisherChatto and Windus (London)
Publication date
1932
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages288 pp (Paperback edition)
ISBNISBN 0-06-080983-3 (Paperback edition) Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

Background

The world the novel describes is a utopia, albeit an ironic one: humanity is carefree, healthy and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated and everyone is permanently happy due to government-provided stimulation. The irony is that all of these things have been achieved by eliminating many things that humans consider to be central to their identity — family, culture, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy. It is also a hedonistic society, deriving pleasure from promiscuous sex and drug use, especially the use of soma, a powerful drug taken to escape pain and bad memories through hallucinatory fantasies. Additionally, stability has been achieved and is maintained via deliberately engineered and rigidly enforced social stratification.

Brave New World is Huxley's most famous novel. The ironic title comes from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:

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

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 while he was living in France and England (a British writer, he moved to California in 1937). By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer and social satirist. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, had published a collection of his poetry titled The Burning Wheel in 1916 and published four successful satirical novels; Crome Yellow in 1921, Antic Hay in 1923, Those Barren Leaves in 1925 and Point Counter Point in 1928. Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first attempt at a utopian novel.

Brave New World was inspired by the H.G. Wells utopian novel Men Like Gods. Wells's optimistic vision of the future gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. Contrary to the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future. Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia", somewhat influenced by Wells's own The Sleeper Awakes and the works of D.H. Lawrence. Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, completed ten years before in 1921, has been suggested as an influence but Huxley stated that he had not known of the book at the time.[2]

Huxley visited the newly-opened and technologically-advanced Brunner and Mond plant, part of Imperial Chemical Industries, or ICI, Billingham and gives a fine and detailed account of the processes he saw. The introduction to the most recent print of Brave New World states that Huxley was inspired to write the classic novel by this Billingham visit.

Although the novel is set in the future, it contains contemporary issues of the early 20th century. The Industrial Revolution was bringing about massive changes to the world. Mass production had made cars, telephones and radios relatively cheap and widely available throughout the developed world. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the first World War (1914–1918) were resonating throughout the world.

Huxley was able to use the setting and characters from his futuristic fantasy to express widely held opinions, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future. An early trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Not only was Huxley outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness and inward-looking nature of many Americans,[1] he also found a book by Henry Ford on the boat to America. There was a fear of Americanisation in Europe, so to see America firsthand, as well as read the ideas and plans of one of its foremost citizens, spurred Huxley to write Brave New World with America in mind. The "feelies" are his response to the movies, and the sex-hormone chewing gum is parody of the ubiquitous chewing gum, which was something of a symbol of America at that time. In an article in the May 4, 1935 issue of Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton explained that Huxley was revolting against the "Age of Utopias" - a time, mostly before World War I, inspired by what H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were writing about socialism and a World State.

After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that optimism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolt against Utopia than against Victoria.

Brave New World received nearly universal criticism from contemporary critics, although his work was later embraced. Even the few sympathetics tended to temper their praises with disparaging remarks.[2]

Characters

Listed in order of appearance-

  • Thomas "Tomakin", Alpha, Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.) for London; later revealed to be the father of John the Savage.
  • Henry Foster, Alpha, Administrator at the Hatchery and Lenina's current partner.
  • Lenina Crowne, Beta[citation needed], Vaccination-worker at the Hatchery, Loved by John the Savage.
  • Mustapha Mond, Alpha, World Controller for Western Europe.
  • Assistant Director of Predestination.
  • Bernard Marx, Alpha-Plus psychologist.
  • Fanny Crowne, Beta, Embryo worker (no relation to Lenina)
  • Benito Hoover, Alpha, friend of Lenina, disliked by Bernard.
  • Helmholtz Watson, Alpha-Plus, Lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing), friend and confidant of Bernard Marx and John the Savage.
  • At the Solidarity Service: Morgana Rothschild (woman whose unibrow haunts Marx), Herbert Bakunin, Fifi Bradlaugh, Jim Bokanovsky, Clara Deterding (the President of the group), Joanna Diesel, Sarojini Engels, and "that great lout" Tom Kawaguchi.
  • Miss Keate, Headmistress of the high-tech glass and concrete Eton College (the name is a joke, based on the famous nineteenth-century Headmaster John Keate).
  • Arch-Community Songster, a quasi-religious figure based in Canterbury A parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church's decision in August 1930 to approve limited use of contraception.
  • Primo Mellon, a reporter for the upper-caste newssheet Hourly Radio who attempts to interview John the Savage and gets kicked in the Endometrium for his troubles.
  • Darwin Bonaparte, a paparazzo who brings worldwide attention to John's hermitage.

Of Malpais

  • John the Savage, son of Linda and Thomas (Tomakin/The Director), an outcast in both primitive and modern society.
  • Linda, a Beta. John the Savage's mother and Thomas's (Tomakin/The Director) long lost lover. She is from England and was pregnant with John when she got lost from Thomas in a trip to New Mexico. She is disliked by both savage people because of her "civilized" behaviour, and by civilized people because she is fat and looks old.

These are fictional and factual characters who died before the events in this book, but are of note in the novel.

  • Henry Ford, who has become a messianic figure to The World State. "Our Ford" is used in place of "Our Lord", as a credit to his invention of the assembly line.
  • Sigmund Freud, "Our Freud" is sometimes said in place of "Our Ford" due to the link between Freud's psychoanalysis and the conditioning of humans, and Freud's popularisation of the idea that sexual activity is essential to human happiness and need not be open to procreation. It is also implied that citizens of the World State believe Freud and Ford to be the same person.
  • H.G. Wells, "Dr. Wells" is mentioned in one of the conversations; this refers to British writer and utopian socialist, whose book Men Like Gods was actually a starting incentive for Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World. "All's well that ends Wells" - wrote Huxley in his letters, criticizing Wells for anthropological assumptions Huxley found unrealistic.
  • Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose conditioning techniques are used to train infants.
  • William Shakespeare, whose banned works are quoted throughout the novel by John "the Savage." The plays quoted include Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Measure for Measure, and Othello. Mustapha Mond also knows them.
  • Thomas Malthus, whose name is used to describe the contraceptive techniques practiced by women of The World State. (Malthusian Belt)
  • Reuben Rabinovitch, the fictional boy in whom the effects of sleep-learning, hypnopædia, are first noted.

Other historical characters are assumed to be the sources of the limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens:

Synopsis

The novel begins in London in the "year of our Ford 632" (AD 2540 in the Gregorian Calendar). In this world, the vast majority of the population is unified as The World State. No one argues because they all have a strict place in society. There is no social competition. Sex has become a social activity rather than a means of reproduction, and is encouraged to be practiced since childhood (however, due to the remnants of some innate behavior of the past, several children do find the activity unnatural & frightening at first, as the beginning of the novel shows). Natural reproduction can occur, but is frowned upon in society, so women take birth control. Humans are now created in a lab and grown in an artificial life supporting machine until the fetus is matured. As a result, sexual competition and actual romantic relationships are obsolete. Marriage is no longer necessary.

Society is rigidly divided into five castes — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon (with each caste further split into Plus and Minus members). All members of society are trained to be good consumers in order to keep the economy strong and are expected to be involved socially; spending time alone is discouraged. However, the need for time alone is negated with the use of the drug Soma, and everyone in the State uses Soma. Soma is a hallucinogen apparently unlike any known in prior lifetimes like ours. The drug makes it possible for everyone to be blissfully oblivious and perfectly content to do the assigned tasks of their caste.

The caste system eliminates the need for professional competitiveness. This also reduces the differences in social classes, contrary to caste systems with which the reader is familiar. The highest caste members get no more food, medical attention, housing, drugs, etc., than the lowest caste members. Instead, people are separated into categories based on "natural" abilities they have been bred to possess. For instance, through selective breeding the higher castes are the smartest, so they are largely assigned jobs as scientists and scholars. The lower castes are bred to do menial tasks and to have such a disposition as to be very happy with this type of work.

People who do not fit into this "Utopian" society live on a "Savage Reservation." These "savages" reproduce normally, though the story implies reproduction is infrequent.

The first half of the novel describes life in the World State and the personalities of Lenina and Bernard. It also introduces the character of Helmholtz Watson, an Alpha-Plus lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing).

The Reservation and the Savage (chapters 7–9)

Bernard secures passage for himself and Lenina to the Savage Reservation as a "date." Here they are introduced to the society of Malpais, which has been largely forgotten by the people of The World State. Inhabitants of the reservation reproduce naturally and live in a nonsterile environment, which disgusts Lenina and fascinates Bernard.

The couple encounters Linda, a woman formerly of The World State who had given birth to a son, John (later referred to as John the Savage). Most of the residents of this land are illiterate and uneducated; John, however, was educated by his mother while being raised among people who had religion. Also, because he was not raised in The World State, he was able to access censored literature such as Shakespeare.

John is also fascinated by Bernard and Lenina, and wants to see the world from which his mother came. Bernard agrees to take Linda and John back with him.

The Savage Visits The World State (chapters 10–15)

Culture shock results when the "savage" is brought into the society of the "Brave New World," as John initially calls it.

During this time in the story, the Director of the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre wastes no time in verbally denouncing Bernard for his lifestyle choices in front of all of the higher-caste workers at the Centre. However, as soon as the Director finishes his tirade, Bernard defends himself by presenting the Director with his seemingly-forgotten lover and unknown son, Linda and John, in front of the entire Centre, to the absolute humiliation of the Director. This tremendous amount of pressure forces the Director to immediately resign afterwards, as he had been exposed as a hypocrite.

Meanwhile, John is appalled by the World State and Lenina's promiscuity. While in London, John meets and quickly befriends Helmholtz Watson. They meet often to discuss writing, especially that of Shakespeare, with whom Watson is obviously unfamiliar.

When John's mother died he mourned, which was bewildering to those of this society. After seeing their cold reactions to death, John becomes angry and a bit violent. He goes off and destroys a large supply of soma, causing a riot. This results in the police having to come in and use soma-gas on the crowd, and John and his would-be rescuers are arrested.

Bernard, Helmholtz and John are brought before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe. The heated argument that begins between Mustapha and John leads to the decision that John will not be set free. Mustapha considers him an experiment. Bernard and Helmholtz are sent to live in Iceland and the Falkland Islands respectively. These are but two of several island colonies reserved for exiled citizens of the World State, where Helmholtz can become a serious writer and Bernard can live his life in peace. Mond reveals that exile to the islands, a frequent threat and dread to prevent unorthodox thinking, is where more freethinkers are put, rather than engage in repression.

In the final chapters, John attempts to isolate himself from society on the outskirts of London; however, he is unable to live without lusting for Lenina and constantly punishes himself physically and mentally for these thoughts. This causes him to be harassed by sightseers who are intrigued by the extremely (to them) unusual behaviour. At the very end of the novel, John attacks Lenina as she joins the crowd of onlookers and succumbs to an orgy of drugs and sex. In the morning John, horrified by what he has done to Lenina and disgusted by himself, commits suicide.

Fordism and society

Main article: The World State

The World State is built around the principles of Henry Ford, who has become a Messianic figure worshipped by society. The word Lord has been replaced with the similar-sounding Ford. "After Ford" (AF), a parody of AD, Anno Domini, is used as its year designation that starts at 1908, the creation of the Ford Model T. The assembly line process is present in many aspects of life and the symbol "T" has replaced the Christian cross, a reflection of the Model T, and a symbolic cutting off of the upward-pointing part of the Cross, as belief in God has been abolished. Ford's famous phrase "History is bunk" has become The World State's approach to the past.

From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated, by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep (called "hypnopædia" in the book) to believe that their own class is best for them. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and a hallucinogenic drug called soma (Greek for "body"), distributed by the Arch-Community Songster of Canterbury, a secularised version of the Anglican Sacrament of Communion ("The Body of Christ").

Contrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. Huxley wrote the book in the 1920s, thirty years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. However Mendel's work with inheritance patterns in peas had been re-discovered in 1900 and the eugenics movement, based on Darwinian selection, was well established. Huxley's family included a number of prominent biologists including Thomas Huxley, half brother and Nobel Laureate Andrew Huxley, and brother Julian Huxley who was a biologist and involved in the eugenics movement. In light of this, the fact that Huxley emphasizes conditioning over breeding is notable. As the science writer Matt Ridley put it, Brave New World describes an "environmental not a genetic hell." Human embryos and fetuses are conditioned via a carefully designed regimen of chemical (such as exposure to hormones and toxins), thermal (exposure to intense heat or cold, as one's future career would dictate) and other environmental stimuli, although there is an element of selective breeding as well.

Social Critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of 1984 and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has himself published multiple articles on Huxley and a full-length book on Orwell, notes the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why Americans Are Not Taught History":

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons towards a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley… rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.[6]

Brave New World Revisited

File:Braverevisite.jpg
Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), written by Huxley almost thirty years after Brave New World, was a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved towards or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future but in Brave New World Revisited he concluded that the world was becoming much more like Brave New World much faster than he thought.

Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion. Brave New World Revisited is different in tone due to Huxley's evolving thought and his conversion to Vedanta between the two books.

  • The Scientific Outlook by philosopher Bertrand Russell. When Brave New World was released, Russell thought that Huxley's book was based on his book The Scientific Outlook that had been released in previous year. Russell contacted his own publisher and asked whether or not he should do something about this apparent plagiarism. His publisher advised him not to, and Russell followed this advice.
  • The 1921 novel Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells. A utopian novel that was a source of inspiration for Brave New World.
  • The 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman alludes to how television is goading modern Western culture to be like what we see in Brave New World, where people are not so much denied human rights such as free speech and expression as they are conditioned to not care.
  • Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952) he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Eugene Zamiatin's We."[7]
  • Brave New World (film) (1998)
  • Brave New World (TV) (1980)
  • Brave New World (Radio Broadcast) CBS Radio Workshop (January 27 and February 3 1956)
  • Demolition Man (1993) - allusions.
  • Equilibrium (2002)
  • The Island (2005)
  • Brave New World (Stage Adaptation) Brendon Burns, Solent Peoples Theatre 2003
  • Schöne Neue Welt (Musical) GRIPS Theater Berlin, Germany, 2006
  • Brave New World (1997 song by Iron Savior metaphorically following the events of the book)
  • Brave New World (2000 song and album by Iron Maiden metaphorically following the events of the book)
  • Soma (Song by The Strokes)

Publications

Brave New World title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

  • Brave New World
    • Aldous Huxley; Perennial, Reprint edition, September 1, 1998; ISBN 0-06-092987-1
  • Brave New World Revisited
    • Aldous Huxley; Perennial, March 1, 2000; ISBN 0-06-095551-1
  • Huxley's Brave New World (Cliffs Notes)
    • Charles and Regina Higgins; Cliffs Notes, May 30, 2000; ISBN 0-7645-8583-5
  • Spark Notes Brave New World
    • Sterling, December 31, 2003; ISBN 1-58663-366-X
  • Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (Barron's Book Notes)
    • Anthony Astrachan, Anthony Astrakhan; Barrons Educational Series, November 1984; ISBN 0-8120-3405-8

Also publications for NSW HSC Students.

References

  1. ^ The Vintage Classics edition of Brave New World.
  2. ^ Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (October 17, 2006), P.S. "About the Book."
  3. ^ Radix.
  4. ^ Banned Books, Alibris.
  5. ^ (pl)A. Smuszkiewicz Zaczarowana gra, Poznań 1982
  6. ^ Christopher Hitchens, "Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History." Harper's Magazine. November 1998, pp. 37–47.
  7. ^ Playboy Magazine interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., July 1973. [1]
  • Huxley, Aldous, 1894–1963 (1998). Brave New World (First Perennial Classics ed. ed.). New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-092987-1. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  • Huxley, Aldous, 1894–1963 (2000). Brave New World Revisited (First Perennial Classics ed. ed.). New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-095551-1. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  • Postman, Neil (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. USA: Penguin USA. ISBN 0-670-80454-1.
  • Higgins, Charles & Higgins, Regina (2000). Cliff Notes on Huxley's Brave New World. New York: Wiley Publishing. ISBN 0-7645-8583-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • http://www.huxley.net/

See also

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Brave New World.
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