Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Harper Collins
1932
Ms. Hen read this novel years ago, when she was a young hen,
but not when she was in high school. She had been trying to remember what
happens in it, but she couldn’t. She decided to revisit the book to see how it
is relevant to today’s world, which is what the hot topic about BRAVE NEW WORLD
is about right now.
This novel is about the world in the future, in which babies
are made in factories in test tubes, and everyone is happy, people sleep with
whomever they want, and nobody gets married, and mother and
father are disgusting words. People are assigned a caste at birth: Alpha, Beta,
Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and they perform jobs that are equal to their station.
The Deltas and Epsilons are made into twins, sometimes up to twenty-four
identical twins, in order to perform the factory jobs completely the same. Women's roles in this society are mostly decorative; they are seen as objects, and when the women talk, they talk mostly of men. Women do not seem to have the high ranking jobs, and the medical students walking through the fertility center are all boys.
Bernard is an Alpha Plus who does not fit into the mold of
an Alpha because he is small in stature. This causes him to have low
self-esteem. He likes a girl, Lenina, whom lots of men have had, and he
reluctantly asks her to go to New Mexico to a savage reservation for a vacation.
She goes with him, and they are horrified by the Natives, but they also meet a
woman named Linda from the civilized world who has given birth to a child,
John, who has grown up only among the Natives. Bernard and Lenina bring the
Savage and Linda back to London where the mother and son are scrutinized and
fawned over.
This novel has aspects of the world today that are prophetic
since this was published in 1932. Promiscuity was not as prominent in those days
as it is today, and the critics who wrote about the novel when it came out thought this aspect of the novel was perverted. Also the notion that everyone
should be out to have fun all the time is a widely held belief today. Ms. Hen
thinks that the desire of trips to Disney World and the expansion of the park,
and also casinos popping up everywhere is an example of people’s desire to
forget about their troubles.
And of course, there’s the Internet. Mr. Huxley wrote in the 1946 introduction that he regretted that he did not include
nuclear fission in the novel. If he only knew what was coming in the world, he
would be astounded. The fact that everyone can be connected, and not live in reality is an example of how BRAVE NEW WORLD is becoming fact. The Feelies
are similar to virtual reality, which will be more widespread soon, Ms. Hen
believes.
The Savage found THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE when he
lived on the reservation, and he studied it backwards and forward, and that is
how he learned about the world. The Savage was discussing writing with one of
the writers for the Feelies, and he told the writer that he should write
something like Othello. The Director explained how this was not possible, “You
can’t make flivvers without steel. And you can’t make tragedies without social
instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy, and they get what they
want, and they never want what they can’t get.” Ms. Hen thinks that it’s
interesting that in a world of prosperity, there can be no tragedies. What kind
of world would that be? Younger people growing up today want to be coddled and
accommodated in school and at work, and this is where society might be headed.
The characters say things like, “Oh, Ford,” for Henry Ford,
like he is God, and the year is A.F. means After Ford. Ms. Hen thought this was
funny, until she learned about Henry Ford. He perfected the assembly line, and
was a pacifist, and thought that consumerism led to peace. He was also an
Anti-Semite, and was the only American mentioned in MEIN KAMPF. Ms. Hen doesn’t
know if Mr. Huxley knew or cared about this when he wrote BRAVE NEW WORLD.
Ms. Hen thinks this novel is important today for understanding someone’s vision of the future almost 90 years ago. Mr. Huxley got
some things right, but it’s not about getting things right, it’s about trying to
see where we’re headed to attempt to curb the problems before they get out of
control. But is it possible? Ms. Hen does not know. She doesn’t think people
want to give up their distractions, and honestly Ms. Hen does not want to do
that either. She tries to not be too attached, but it’s difficult. It’s
important to live in the real world as much as possible, even though it's terrible, it’s the only one we have (so far).
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| Ms. Hen saw this in Somerville, MA while she was reading the novel |
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