Brave New World
Prophetic or Apocalyptic?
Prophetic: predictive; presageful or portentous
Apocalyptic: predicting or presaging imminent disaster and total/universal destruction
A collision of cultures
to shake our beliefs as readers
Find a partner among your
group to work with as we delve
into the allusions in the novel
Brave New World
Allusions
Allusions: references to history or literature
Lenina
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A variation of Lenin -Nikolai Lenin, the
Russian Socialist, who
had a tremendous
influence in the
formation of the
Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, the
present-day Russia.
Ford

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An important figure in the
formation of the World
State. His utilization of the
mass-production technique
influenced social, political,
and economic life.
In Huxley's Utopia, the life,
work, and teachings of Ford
are the sources of
inspiration and truth. Even
time is reckoned according
to Ford.
Bernard Marx

Marx is an obvious reference to
Karl Marx, a German Socialist,
whose best-known work, Das
Kapital, expresses his belief that the
fundamental factor in the development of society
is the method of production and exchange. Karl
Marx called religion the opium of the people; in
Huxley's Brave New World, soma is substituted
for religion.
Neopavlovian Conditioning

Conditioning is defined as
the training of an individual to
respond to a stimulus in a
particular way. The Russian
scientist Ivan Pavlov
conducted experiments to
determine how this
conditioning takes place. In
Brave New World individuals
are conditioned to think, act,
feel, believe, and respond
the way the government
wants them to.
Benito Hoover

Benito Hoover combines the names of two
men who wielded tremendous power at the
time Huxley was writing Brave New World:
Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator,
and Herbert Hoover, the
American President.
The Malthusian belt:
Thomas Malthus

This English political economist believed that
unless the population diminished, in time the
means of life would be inadequate.
Improvements in agriculture, he predicted, would
never keep up with expanding population, and
increases in the standard of
living would be impossible. In
the World State, mandatory
birth-control regulates the
growth of population.
Predestination

Predestination is the act of
deciding an individual's fate
or destiny.
• Both the Old and New Testaments contain
allusions to God as the Predestinator, but since the
World State has eliminated God, this is now the
function of government. In the World State each
individual has been predestined according to the
needs of society.

Since 1900, in any 10-year period,
advances in science and technology
have overshadowed advancements
made during ANY previous 100-year
period.
Periodic table in 1869
Telephone in 1876
Light bulb in 1879
E=mc2 in 1887
Germ theory of disease in 1890
Radium in 1899
Radio tube in 1905, transmitter in 1914
Insulin in 1922
Sliced bread in 1928
Jet engine in 1937
Huxley’s warning!
Huxley realized that these advances, which
were welcomed as progress, were full of
danger. Man had built higher than he could
climb; man had unleashed power he was
unable to control.


Brave New World is Huxley's warning; it
is his attempt to make man realize that
since knowledge is power, he who
controls and uses knowledge wields the
power.
Science and technology should be the
servants of man -- man should not
adapted and enslaved to them. Brave
New World is a description of our lives
as they could be in the none-too-distant
future.
International political scene

Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the
dictatorship of Mussolini in Italy, and the Nazi
Party movement in Germany. Concerned
about threats to man's freedom and
independence, Huxley realized that
communism and fascism place the state
above the individual and demand total
allegiance to a cause.
Economic changes

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A time of more and bigger factories, more
manufactured goods, the advent of massproduced automobiles
Big business used and misused the individual
-- man became important as a producer and
a consumer.
Societal changes

More people were moving to the cities 
change in attitude and point of view. As "one
of the crowd," the individual is not responsible
for himself or for anybody else. Huxley carries
this loss of individuality one step further in his
projection of Bokanovskified groups of
identical twins performing identical tasks.
EQ: How does Huxley present his
message to the reader through
allusion and satire? ELABLRL1, 2, 3

What might a message be to a modern reader?
Let’s analyze the allusions in order to answer
these questions
1. With your partner, create one level 2 question
to support the facts on your handout
2. With your partner, summarize the
information, connecting the summary to the
Huxley’s beliefs and Historical factors questions.
3. Complete a story map with your partner
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http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/de/pd/instr/strats/storymapping/index.html
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