Brave New World

Brave New World

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's fifth Novel and was published in 1932. It is an utopian novel, which means, that it is set in a fictional society that is “perfect” that is to say there are no more crimes, no more hate, no more pain and so on. In reality these perfect societies prove to be dystopian, that is in most novels there is for example a totalitarian government (for example “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell) or drugs are used to keep the people calm (for example Brave New World by Aldous Huxley). The term was coined by Thomas More's novel Utopia from 1516, although utopian novels have existed before that.

Setting

The novel is set in AD 2540 where most of the world is united in the “World State” where everyone is happy. There is no more natural procreation but every person is cloned and conditioned in so called Hatcheries. There they are also put into one of five castes (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon). These different castes define the type of work they will be doing for the rest of their life. For example Alphas are considered the new world leaders and intellectual elite, whereas Epsilons are created with low intelligence (by oxygen deprivation) to do menial labour. All children are taught by a hypnopaedic process, that is to say they subconsciously learn by listening to a voice while they sleep. The two main forms of recreation are on the one hand a drug called “soma”, which is a kind of hallucinogen but without a hangover and is produced and developed by the World State and on the other hand sex, which is encouraged from very early on. The idea of family and/or marriage are considered somewhat like a taboo. The live expectancy is about 60 but death is not feared because there are no family ties and everyone is sure and knows that society will continue the way it always has. In several locations on the planet are so called reservations where “savages” live. They are not submitted to the conditioning and the drug but left on their own accord with several “strange rituals” like religion or ageing, because in the World State no one shows signs of age in their life.

Plot

In the first chapters the reader gets an impression of how wonderful live in the World State is and how the hatcheries work. The reader is also introduced to Lenina, a vaccination worker in the hatchery and Bernard an Alpha and psychologist who has an inferiority complex because he is a bit shorter than the “average” Alpha. Bernard takes Lenina on a holiday to a reservation in New Mexico to seduce Lenina. The seduction fails because Lenina is disgusted by the aged people in the reservation and she has forgotten her soma rations. Both encounter an old woman called Linda and her son John. Linda was a former citizen of the World State but got lost in the reservation and separated from her group. She turns out to be the date of Bernard's boss. Both Linda and John are considered outcasts in the reservation because Linda's conditioning still works so she wants to have sex with all the men in the village and John is an outcast because of his mother's deeds. Bernard arranges permissions for John and his mother to leave the reservation. On their return Bernard confronts his boss, because he wanted to relocate Bernard to Iceland, with his former lover and his son. John is the new top story in London society and even Bernard with his inferiority complex can shine but it is only for a very shot period. John on the other hand is disgusted by the society of the World State and is heartbroken when his mother dies in a hospital. The workers in the hospital feel sick about John's display of sorrow and so John tries to start a riot by throwing the worker's soma rations out of the window. The riot is subdued by the police via soma-gas. John, Bernard and his only friend Helmholtz (also a friend of John) are send to the office of Mustapha Mond, who is one of the controllers of the World State. Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to foreign islands, where they can “do as the please” without influencing the population. John and Mustapha engage in philosophical discussions. After that John starts to live in an old lighthouse in isolation from society, but this life is cut short by when a video is shown of him flagellating himself. A large group of people gathers around his lighthouse to see the savage but the sight of Lenina in the crowd is too much for John and so he attacks her. This outbreak of emotion triggers an orgy of sex and soma in which even John participates. In the morning the crowd returns only to see that John has committed suicide by hanging himself in an attempt to escape from society.

Important Characters

John (the Savage): He is an outsider from a reservation in New Mexico and the son of Linda and the director of the London Hatchery.

Bernard Marx: Psychologist and Alpha male who has the feeling of not fitting in because of his shorter stature, which is common for lower castes. His last name probably recalls Karl Marx, a German author best known for his book “Das Kapital”.

Helmholtz Watson: He is an Alpha male and lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering. He, like Bernard, is discontent with the World State, but his discontent has more to do with the fact that he thinks his work is meaningless, than Bernard's complains about his size. His name resembles that of Hermann von Helmholtz, who was a German physician and physicist.

Lenina Crowne: She is a vaccination worker at the Hatchery. She is the focus of desire by many men, including Bernard and John. She is often seen as rather unorthodox since she dates one man for a longer period of time (in the beginning she dates Bernard but later develops a huge crush on John).

Literature

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1974

www.huxley.net

http://www.online-literature.com/aldous_huxley/brave_new_world/

http://somaweb.org/