This example of a dystopian novel opens in a pleasure-dominated but totalitarian future world by touring London’s main Hatchery. This expository device allows the author to introduce unexpected features of his imagined future, where human reproduction has been removed from the messy lives of individuals. In a totally mechanized system, the exact kinds of human beings that society needs are produced in exactly the right quantity.

Divided by intellect into five classes (intellectual Alphas for decision-making to near-simian Epsilons for manual labor), these scientifically produced humans arrive in adulthood already trained to do their assigned tasks, subscribing to the motto “Community, Identity, Stability.” In place of the family, citizens may indulge in casual sex as long as they don’t form permanent bonds, or go to “the feelies” as long as they don’t exercise any individual creativity, and enjoy a hallucinogenic recreational drug (soma) instead of developing greater maturity and autonomy.

The key characters are Lenina Crowne, a nurse at the Hatchery; Bernard Marx, a psychologist; and Helmholtz Watson, a scientist. Each of these characters illustrates weaknesses in the new reproductive system. Bernard shows signs of dangerous individualism and alienation; Watson wishes to create a book of his own; and Lenina tends to form lasting emotional bonds with others.

Lenina and Bernard begin an affair, and they take a vacation to the uncivilized wilds of New Mexico. They are surprised to encounter two apparent Europeans, Linda and her son John, a young man. She had conceived her child in violation of the hygienic genetic procedures required in the “civilized world” and raised him herself, breaking the civilized taboo on motherhood. Bernard knows that the Director of Hatcheries had traveled here with a woman many years ago and had returned alone, so he suspects that John is the illegal son of this important authority. He invites John and Linda to return to the civilized world, but his motives are hardly charitable.

Linda and John struggle to assimilate to life in the brave new world, but they are pawns in Bernard’s power struggle with the Director. Linda adapts by retreating into a haze of soma; meanwhile, John becomes the victim of curiosity seekers. He desires sex, but he is repelled by the promiscuity that is a normal aspect of this world. John’s characteristic response to stress is violence, and his disruptions bring him before Mustapha Mond, the Controller.

Huxley uses their long debate to form the core of this novel of ideas. John condemns the laws that have limited human beings to an inferior state of infantile happiness delivered by sex, drugs, and feelies. Mustapha Mond tells him, in an argument that recalls Plato’s expulsion of poets from The Republic, that art stirs the passions and leads to dissatisfaction, unhappiness, social unrest, and political instability. The price to society of allowing individual expression is too high, and the benefits achieved by eliminating it are too great to allow it to continue. Individual freedom must be limited so that collective good can rise to a maximum level. Ultimately, John cannot adjust to this new world, and his presence there changes the lives of the main characters in drastic ways.

In 1957, Aldous Huxley wrote a treatise on his own novel, Brave New World Revisited. Many of the cultural features he had imagined in 1932 were coming into existence, especially in the increasing dominance of mass media. The picture of enslavement through pleasure presented in Brave New World is innovative; such a world is a much more threatening prospect than the brutal oppression of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s great insight was to see that a world of enjoyment would be a stronger threat to human freedom, and his great literary achievement was to create that world in such a way that it is clearly an outgrowth of the one we actually live in today.

Bibliography
Baker, Robert S. Brave New World: History, Science, and Utopia. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, 39. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.
Bloom, Harold. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996.
De Koster, Katie. Readings on Brave New World. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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