Aldous Huxley

Sir Thomas More’s work, Utopia (1516):

A fictional account of a far away nation whose characteristics invite comparison with More’s England. More used his fictional Utopia to point out the problems present in his own society.

Writers have created utopias to challenge readers to think about the underlying assumptions of their own culture. Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift, seems at first to be a book of outlandish travel stories. Yet throughout the narratives, Swift employs his fictional worlds ironically to make serious arguments about the injustices of his own Britain.

In utopian fiction, imagination becomes a way to explore alternatives in political, social, and religious life.

A utopia is an imaginary society organized to create ideal conditions for human beings, eliminating hatred, pain, neglect, and all of the other evils of the world.

The word utopia comes from Sir Thomas More’s novel, Utopia (1516), and is derived from Greek roots that can be translated to mean “good place” or “no place.” Books that include descriptions of utopian societies were written long before More’s novel. Plato’s Republic is a prime example. Sometimes the societies described are meant to represent the perfect society, but sometimes utopias are created to satirize existing societies or to speculate about what life might be like under different conditions.

In the 1920s, just before Brave New World was written, a number of bitterly satirical novels were written to describe the horrors of a planned or totalitarian society. The societies they describe are called dystopias, places where things are badly awry. Either term, utopia or dystopia, could correctly be used to describe Brave New World.

A beautiful society with a general pacifistic attitude (inclined to peace).

Poverty and misery are removed.

Very few laws are necessary.

Money is not necessary.

People do only work that they enjoy and which benefits the common good.

The Judeo-Christian concept of the Garden of Eden and Heaven.

The Buddhist concept of Nirvana.

Advances in science and technology will abolish suffering and death.

Changes in human nature and the human condition.

The antonym of utopia.

An imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.

Totalitarian dictatorship (complete government control).

Glorification and justification of violence.

Technology replaces humanity.

Fictional and futuristic.

Dystopia serves as a warning to contemporary (modern) man.

It comments on our own current society.

Brave New World is a novel of dystopia - an imaginary place of the most horrific environment.

In this case, it is a savage criticism of the scientific future.

It is Huxley’s idea of the worse possible place to live.

Brave New World is told by an omniscient narrator:

The first part - by Bernard Marx.

The second part - by John the Savage.

Scientific development will lead to a perfect world in which there is no freedom.

The people of Brave New World have lost their right to be unhappy.

Sleep-teaching shows that brainwashing is bad.

Year: 632 A.F. (A.F. means “After Ford,” the deity in Brave New World). Place: London. Civilization as we know it has gone through a devastating war. The use of anthrax bombs and poison gases exhausted both sides,

leaving the people who remained a choice between World Control and devastation.

After a further nine years’ war, the dictatorship got control and brought stability.

Stability is maintained by rigid control of the number and type of people.

Human beings are now “born” artificially, marriage is forbidden, family life is unknown, children are created and cared for by the State.

There are five castes - Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon. Ten world controllers have all the power. Peace is safeguarded through conditioning all the young to think alike

and in “soma”. Motto of the state - Community, Identity, Stability.

Feelies - motion picture shows which offer the audience not only visual and auditory images but also tactual sensations. The audience takes hold of two knobs on the seat and feels the action taking place on the screen.

Orgy-porgy - A Solidarity Service hymn and dance which is used to signify the coming together of many people into a unified oneness. It is semi-religious rite in which indiscriminate wholesale sexual relations produce solidarity in the members.

Phosphorous Recovery - The cremation factories are able to recover 99% of the phosphorous contained in each body. This is then used as a raw material or in fertilizer returned to enrich the soil.

Pneumatic - buxom

Podsnap's Technique - A method for speeding up the ripening of mature eggs. The process makes possible the production of many identical human beings at roughly the same time.

Savage Reservation - One of the only places left on earth where people remain in a state of nature. The Savages were not considered worth civilizing and were therefore placed in fenced off areas which contained some of the worst land. John was born here. His mother, Linda, is a former resident of the Brave New World.

Solidarity Service - A semi-religious service with strong sexual elements.

Soma - A narcotic used to create pleasant sensations without any after-effects. The word is actually taken from a drug that exists in India.

Bokanovsky's Process:

Mass production of human embryos, which are deliberately predestined to a certain level of intelligence.

It is the basis for producing identical human beings.

Human egg has its normal development arrested, whereupon it proceeds to bud, producing many identical eggs. These are produced as lower-caste citizens. They will feel both their kinship and their sameness of thought as they grow to adulthood.

Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy - a game in which children fling a ball onto a platform. The ball then rolls down the interior and lands on a rotating disk, which flings the ball in a random direction, at which point the ball must be caught.

Ectogenesis - growing something outside of the body rather than inside; in this case, growing embryos in bottles rather than in a mother's womb.

Father - dirty word; humorous. Mother - dirty word; filth; sickening. Henry Ford (1863-1947) - U.S. automobile manufacturer credited with

developing interchangeable parts and the assembly-line process. Here, the man who created the ideological aspects of the Utopian society and who is substituted in phrases where God is usually used making him the god-like figure of the dystopia.

Freud - The Utopian society believes that Ford and Freud are the same man, but that Freud is the name Ford used when writing about psychology; in reality Freud is considered the father of modern psychoanalysis.

Hypnopaedia - sleep learning, which is part of the conditioning process; people learn ethics while sleeping to ensure social stability.

Malthusian Belt - Thomas Malthus is famous for showing that the world population grows more rapidly than the supply of food. In the book, the belt holds all contraceptive devices that Lenina has (and all women who can reproduce have) been conditioned to use each time she has sex.

Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning - Pavlov is famous for showing that animals can be trained to do something through a system of rewards and punishments. This is used on all babies to condition them to like or dislike certain objects. It is one of the main conditioning techniques which helps ensure social stability.

Pregnancy Substitute - An intravenous injection which tricks the body into thinking it is pregnant and which is used to balance the hormones.

Viviparous - Bearing live young rather than eggs. (Human condition of today.)

Decanting - pouring from one container into another. Here, Huxley’s term for birth.

Freemartin - an imperfectly developed female calf, usually sterile. Here, Huxley’s term for a sterile woman. Most of the women of the dystopia are freemartins.

Surrogate - a substitute. Lupus - any of various diseases with skin lesions. Demijohn - a large bottle of glass or earthenware with a narrow neck

and a wicker casing. Lift - British word for elevator. Corpus Luteum - yellow tissue formed in the ovary by a ruptured

Graafian follicle (ovarian follicle) that has discharged its ovum; if the ovum is fertilized, this tissue secretes the hormone progesterone, needed to maintain pregnancy.

Thyroxin - the active hormone of the thyroid gland.

Highest Caste:

Alphas - not too many; able to have "some" independent thinking, or so they think. In reality, they have been programmed to think/believe that they are thinking independently.

Lowest Caste:

Epsilons - numerous; those who are to be the Epsilons are given other determinants of inheritance, such as a decrease in available oxygen or overexposure to heat.

Morons; slaves and like it, because they know nothing else.

Mustapha Mond - The World Controller, intellectually and politically powerful. Offers a historical view of the new world at the beginning of the novel and later debates John and Helmholtz on society’s values. Mond sentences Bernard and Helmholtz banished to the Falkland Islands and determines that John must stay in London.

The D.H.C. - The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, called “Tomakin” by Linda. He occupies an important position in the new world but loses it when Linda announces that he is the father of their son, John.

Henry Foster - An Alpha who is seeing Lenina Crowne. He is a typically conventional Londoner.

Fanny Crowne - Lenina’s friend. Fanny represents the conventional views of the brave new world. She encourages Lenina to pursue John sexually if he will not take the lead.

Bernard Marx - An Alpha-Plus psychologist, rumored to have received alcohol in his blood surrogate, a circumstance that would explain his shortness. Identifying himself as a true individual, Bernard bristles at the social pressures for conformity and longs for the intense, heroic feelings but lacks the ability to be a rebel. He brings John the Savage and Linda back from the Savage Reservation and so makes possible the conflict that informs the last third of the novel.

Lenina Crowne - A technician, attracted by Bernard, in love with John. A conventional young woman who is drawn unconsciously toward danger, she represents ideal beauty for John.

Helmholtz Watson - Bernard’s friend, later a friend of John. An Emotional Engineer, he longs to become a poet. He represents a more courageous and intellectual character than Bernard.

John the Savage - The son born of parents from the new world but raised in the Savage Reservation. John represents a challenge to the dystopia. He is the character closest to being the hero of the novel.

Linda - John’s mother. An upper-caste Londoner, she commits the ultimate social sin by bearing a child. She is deeply ashamed and longs for escape, finding it in peyote, mescal, sex, and soma.

Popé - Linda’s lover in Malpais. Popé’s involvement with Linda inspires John’s deep revulsion for sex.

Mitsima - An old Indian man in Malpais who begins to teach John to mold clay and presides in the marriage ceremony John witnesses. He represents the beginning and end of John’s involvement in the traditional life of Malpais.

The Russian Revolution and challenges to the British Empire abroad raised the possibility of change on a world scale. At home, the expansion of transportation and communication - the cars, telephones, and radios made affordable through mass production - also brought revolutionary changes to daily life. With the new technology, distances grew suddenly shorter and true privacy rarer. While people in industrialized societies welcomed these advances, they also worried about losing a familiar way of life, and perhaps even themselves, in the process. The nightmare vision of the fast-paced but meaningless routine of Brave New World reflects this widespread concern about the world of the 1920s and 1930s.

The period also brought a new questioning of traditional morality, especially regarding sex. Clothing/dress, language, and especially fiction expressed a greater openness for both women and men in their sexual lives. Some hailed this change as the beginning of true individual freedom, while others condemned it as the end of civilization itself. Huxley, with typical wit, uses the issue for irony, creating an image of the young Lenina being scolded for her lack of promiscuity. Sexual rules may change, Huxley tells his readers, but the power of convention remains the same.

At a period of great change, Huxley creates a world in which all the present worrying trends have produced terrible consequences. Movement toward socialism in the 1920s, for example, becomes, in Huxley’s future, the totalitarian World State. Questioning of religious beliefs and the growth of materialism, likewise, transforms into a religion of consumerism with Henry Ford as its god. And if Model T’s roll off the assembly line in the present, in a stream of identical cars, then in the future, human beings will be mass-produced, too. Huxley’s future vision, through the use of wit and disturbia, imagines the end of a familiar, traditional life and the triumph of all that is new and strange in the modern world.