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�Aign=LEFT>Brave
New World is partly a statement of ideas (expressed by characters with
no more depth than cartoon characters) and only partly a story with a plot.
The first three chapters present most of the important ideas or themes
of the novel. The
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains that this Utopia breeds
people to order, artificially fertilizing a mother's eggs to create babies
that grow in bottles. They are not born, but decanted. Everyone
belongs to one of five classes, from the Alphas, the most intelligent,
to the Epsilons, morons bred to do the dirty jobs that nobody else wants
to do. The lower classes are multiplied by a budding process that can create
up to 96 identical clones and produce over 15,000 brothers and sisters
from a single ovary. All the babies are conditioned, physically and chemically
in the bottle, and psychologically after birth, to make them happy citizens
of the society with both a liking and an aptitude for the work they will
do. One psychological conditioning technique is hypnopaedia, or teaching
people while they sleep- not teaching facts or analysis, but planting suggestions
that will make people behave in certain ways. The Director also makes plain
that sex is a source of happiness, a game people play with anyone who pleases
them. The Controller, one of the ten men who run the world, explains some
of the more profound principles on which the Utopia is based. One is that
"history is bunk"; the society limits people's knowledge of the past so
they will not be able to compare the present with anything that might make
them want to change the present. Another principle is that people should
have no emotions, particularly no painful emotions; blind happiness is
necessary for stability. One of the things that guarantees happiness is
a drug called soma, which calms you down and gets you high but never gives
you a hangover. Another is the "feelies," movies that reach your sense
of touch as well as your sight and hearing. After Huxley presents these
themes in the first three chapters, the story begins. Bernard Marx, an
Alpha of the top class, is on the verge of falling in love with Lenina
Crowne, a woman who works in the Embryo Room of the Hatchery. Lenina has
been dating Henry Foster, a Hatchery scientist; her friend Fanny nags her
because she hasn't seen any other man for four months. Lenina likes Bernard
but doesn't fall in love with him. Falling in love is a sin in this world
in which one has sex with everyone else, and she is a happy, conforming
citizen of the Utopia. Bernard is neither happy nor conforming. He's a
bit odd; for one thing, he's small for an Alpha, in a world where every
member of the same caste is alike. He likes to treasure his differences
from his fellows, but he lacks the courage to fight for his right to be
an individual. In contrast is his friend Helmholtz Watson, successful in
sports, sex, and community activities, but openly dissatisfied because
instead of writing something beautiful and powerful, his job is to turn
out propaganda. Bernard attends a solidarity service of the Fordian religion,
a parody of Christianity as practiced in England in the 1920s. It culminates
in a sexual orgy, but he doesn't feel the true rapture experienced by the
other 11 members of his group. Bernard then takes Lenina to visit a Savage
Reservation in North America. While signing his permit to go, the Director
tells Bernard how he visited the same Reservation as a young man, taking
a young woman from London who disappeared and was presumed dead. He then
threatens Bernard with exile to Iceland because Bernard is a nonconformist:
he doesn't gobble up pleasure in his leisure time like an infant. At the
Reservation, Bernard and Lenina meet John, a handsome young Savage who,
Bernard soon realizes, is the son of the Director. Clearly, the woman the
Director had taken to the Reservation long ago had become pregnant as the
result of an accident that the citizens of Utopia would consider obscene.
John has a fantasy picture of the Utopia from his mother's tales and a
knowledge of Shakespeare that he mistakes for a guide to reality. Bernard
gets permission from the Controller to bring John and Linda, his mother,
back to London. The Director had called a public meeting to announce Bernard's
exile, but by greeting the Director as lover and father, respectively,
Linda and John turn him into an obscene joke. Bernard stays and becomes
the center of attention of all London because he is, in effect, John's
guardian, and everybody wants to meet the Savage. Linda goes into a permanent
soma trance after her years of exile on the Reservation. John is taken
to see all the attractions of new world society and doesn't like them.
But he enjoys arguing with Helmholtz about them, and about Shakespeare.
Lenina has become popular because she is thought to be sleeping with the
Savage. Everyone envies her and wants to know what it's like. But, in fact,
while she wants to sleep with John, he refuses because he, too, has fallen
in love with her- and he has taken from Shakespeare the old-fashioned idea
that lovers should be pure. Not understanding this, she finally comes to
his apartment and takes her clothes off. He throws her out, calling her
a prostitute because he thinks she's immoral, even though he wants her
desperately. John then learns that his mother is dying. The hospital illustrates
the Utopia's approach to death, which includes trying to completely eliminate
grief and pain. When John goes to visit Linda he is devastated; his display
of grief frightens children being taught that death is a pleasant and natural
process. John grows so angry that he tries to bring the Utopia back to
what he considers sanity and morality by disrupting the daily distribution
of soma to lower-caste Delta workers. That leads to a riot; John, Bernard,
and Helmholtz are arrested. The three then confront the Controller, who
explains more of the Utopia's principles. Their conversation reveals that
the Utopia achieves its happiness by giving up science, art, religion,
and other things that we prize in the real world. The Controller sends
Bernard to Iceland, after all, and Helmholtz to the Falkland Islands. He
keeps John in England, but John finds a place where he can lead a hermit's
life, complete with suffering. His solitude is invaded by Utopians who
want to see him suffer, as though it were a sideshow spectacle; when Lenina
joins the mob, he kills himself.
Huxley
Characters:
THE
DIRECTOR OF HATCHERIES AND CONDITIONING
HENRY
FOSTER
LENINA
CROWNE
THE
CONTROLLER, MUSTAPHA MOND
HELMHOLTZ
WATSON
JOHN
THE SAVAGE
LINDA
Setting
Themes