Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

THE WRITER

Aldous Huxley was an essayist and novelist whose reputation reached its peak in the 1920's. Well known for his essays and novels, he also wrote poetry, journalism, historical studies, travel works, screenplays, and short stories. Brave New World (1932) is probably his most well-known novel, though he did publish many other novels of intellectual and critical success such as Antic Hay (1923), Point Counter Point (1928), and Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

Huxley was born into an intellectual family in Laleham, England, in 1894. He was sent to a ´prep´ school and then to Eton. His father, Leonard Huxley, taught and later worked and wrote for a publishing firm, and his mother, Julia Frances Arnold Huxley, founded a girls' school. His aunt, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, was a successful novelist, and his great-uncle the poet Matthew Arnold, who wrote "Dover Beach."

Huxley was the third of four children, all considered brilliant. Yet the gifted household suffered a number of tragedies which would later shape his life and work. His mother Julia died of cancer in 1908 when he was just fourteen. Two years later, he contracted an eye disease which left him nearly blind for eighteen months, ending his budding scientific or medical career. In 1914, his brother Trevenen committed suicide.

Point Counter Point (1928) is one of Huxley´s most complex novels, and it is the novel that established him as a best-selling author. Brave New World was to follow. He began Brave New World as a result of his intrigue with the sciences, which he had studied extensively. He was concerned with the social and moral ramifications of advances in science, medicine, and technology and the government responsibility. Although the novel can be read purely as science fiction, there is a deeper commentary reflecting Huxley's concern with technology and its place in society. The commentary on the potentially diverging paths of social and scientific progress continued into his later novels and essays.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The novel opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, in the years A.F., or After Ford. Ford is the God-surrogate that many citizens of the World State believe is also Freud, the controversial psychosexual psychologist. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is leading a tour group of young students around a lab. He explains the scientific process by which human beings are fertilized and custom-made, and shows them the Social Predestination room, where workers create the social castes. They pass onto the conditioning rooms, where they reinforce the caste divisions by sleep-teaching.

The characters live in a socially engineered and hedonistic world, where the approved drug Soma gets rid of negative emotions, doubts and ideals to ensure that people are happy and have no reason not to confirm to society. They listen to synthetic music, self-medicate and have purely recreational sex, divorced from strong emotions or commitments. People are made, not born, and the bonds between mother and child are broken.

The central character, Bernard, has doubts about the brave new world he lives in and attempts to express some of his more subversive views to Lenina, who is unreceptive, if not distressed, and who encourages him to soothe and distract himself with soma and sex.

When he and Lenina go to The Savage Reservation, where people live outside the norms of the World State, Lenina shudders at the unclean conditions. They meet John, ¨The Savage¨, who tells his story to Bernard. It turns out that he is the illegitimate son of the Director and Linda, a woman who disappeared twenty-five years ago.

Bernard reveals the story on his return. The three then meet with Mustapha Mond and speak of religion. Mond says that there is a choice between machinery, scientific medicine, and universal happiness-- or God.

John flees, planning to become independent, but becomes famous as the subject of a documentary film and can find no way out. He self harms and kills himself in the context of the rioting and orgies that close the novel.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING

What sacrifices does a world of ´universal happiness´ demand?

To what extent is Huxley´s world influenced by Freudian and Jungian theories?

Is Huxley´s novel prophetic? In what ways are many of its situations quite contemporary?