Our first meeting with Linda in Chapter Seven is fairly disturbing, if only because Huxley describes and portrays her as grotesquely as possible She’s all bloated flesh and bad smells, stinking of the crude alcohol and drugs that she’s used in futile attempts to replicate a soma holiday This is the grotesquerie of Mother; no wonder it’s an obscenity where Lenina hails from! Linda points out that she simply didn’t need the skills she needed for the real world when all that was required of her in the World State was so much simpler – not so much instinctual as conditioned, but automatic all the same Birth, parenting, motherhood – it all seems impossible when you’ve never been taught to do any of it “There's so much one doesn't know; it wasn't my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world – well, what are you to answer if you're a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?” This actually points to something else about Huxley, albeit obliquely so, that’s important, but that we haven’t discussed yet One of Huxley’s odder fascinations concerned eugenics – the idea of advancing the human race through selective reproductive habits that increased the prevalence of desirable traits and eliminated undesirable ones This meant that one needed to make sure that the High had more offspring while the Low reproduced less frequently in order to increase, say, the human race’s average intelligence level The eugenics movement is not one of the twentieth century’s finer achievements, and while the British Eugenics Society claimed Brave New World was about their movement, Huxley actually keeps it fairly toned down; if anything, it’s easy to interpret Brave New World as an angry broadside against eugenicist pursuits Huxley’s fixation on the idea that humans could be “controlled for traits,” however, did make its way into the book He was convinced that authors such as H.G. Wells, whose utopian visions rested in part on the idea that the High could be convinced to alternate between High and Low work, were hopelessly misguided, that they did not understand the human heart as he did In his mind, a superior individual could not move from fertilizing a field one day to composing an opera for the next three before returning for half a week to the fields; he simply wouldn’t tolerate work that was so clearly beneath his traits and talents Huxley’s attitudes towards humanity made it impossible for him to believe in Utopia We diverged from the discussion about Linda because we needed to point out a problem with Huxley’s attitude, a problem that expresses itself exquisitely through Linda herself Basically, if the High cannot bother itself with Low work, it will quickly adopt a position of learned helplessness This is all well and good when the World State actively promotes learned helplessness Linda’s narrow skill-set is appropriate in a society that shuns challenge, versatility, and hardship while prizing specialization, efficiency, and ease Unfortunately, her lack of skill leaves her completely helpless when cut off from the society she knew You essentially become dependent out of ignorance For example, I probably had a longer and richer academic career than my mechanic…but I can’t fix my own car, and I undoubtedly feel less confident in his presence than he feels in mine This is the value of living with risk; if you’re ever in a situation with uncontrolled variables (i.e., anywhere outside the World State), you need to be versatile, and problems force you to acquire those skills John’s mother may not have coping skills, but John is not like his mother, and not simply because it’s clear he’s had to fend for himself for some time He’s the product of so many conflicted mythologies and belief systems; the Savage Reservation isn’t just a non-World State society, but a schizoid fusion of different ones To be honest, John’s coping skills aren’t the best either…but at least he’s trying! Chapter Eight fleshes out John’s history, and it’s a complex one, full of pain, hardship, and longing, perfunctorily punctuated by small triumphs and fleeting moments of joy Huxley tells it in a dreamlike way, hopping from moment to moment in order to build up the backstory Those of you reading Slaughterhouse Five will eventually see a more complex variation of this narrative style We see his difficult relationship with Linda, who doesn’t let him call her Mother (for obvious reasons) Linda is a creature from a different world, and her refusal to assimilate and adapt to this one separates her from her son John doesn’t really understand how to relate to her because his natural feelings differ from her conditioning Linda’s Beta-like behavior – entertaining married men, heavily abusing drugs – make her an outcast in the world of the Reservation, which makes John a marked target for abuse; his only means of coping with the others’ cruelty is to take pride in his ability to read, even though his reading is largely limited to a World State textbook For a while, his only happiness lies in the moments when Linda shares stories about the “Other Place” Then he stumbles upon The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and his world transforms Much like Helmholtz, John has been searching for something without knowing precisely what he’s looking for; this is why he feels a primal excitement after creating things out of clay When he reads Shakespeare, he’s pierced He finally has language to describe his feelings, language that Linda could never teach him; after all, she’s emotionally illiterate Shakespeare’s words are old, ornate, overly patterned and selfconsciously beautiful In other words, they’re perfect for John, who ends up living out Shakespearean themes and events on a regular basis His attack on Popé, for example, explicitly recalls Hamlet – reacting to a violation of a child/parent bond without really understanding why he feels what he does (and Linda, again, couldn’t tell him) His longing for Kiakimé recalls Romeo and Juliet It is finished. Old Mitsima's words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished … In silence and from a long way off, but violently, desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished. He was sixteen. John decides to go back to the World State with Bernard, Lenina, and Linda partly because he’s tired of feeling so terribly alone His choice comes directly after he tells of his near-suicide, as well as the time he tried to see what crucifixion felt like Clearly, he’s searching for meaning, and he’s not finding it on the Savage Reservation; he’s actually excited to see the World State The young man drew a deep breath. "To think it should be coming true– what I've dreamt of all my life. Do you remember what Miranda says?" "Who's Miranda?" But the young man had evidently not heard the question. "O wonder!" he was saying; and his eyes shone, his face was brightly flushed. "How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!" The flush suddenly deepened; he was thinking of Lenina, of an angel in bottle-green viscose, lustrous with youth and skin food, plump, benevolently smiling. His voice faltered. "O brave new world," he began, then-suddenly interrupted himself; the blood had left his cheeks; he was as pale as paper. "Are you married to her?" he asked. "Am I what?" "Married. You know–for ever. They say 'for ever' in the Indian words; it can't be broken." "Ford, no!" Bernard couldn't help laughing. John also laughed, but for another reason–laughed for pure joy. "O brave new world," he repeated. "O brave new world that has such people in it. Let's start at once." "You have a most peculiar way of talking sometimes," said Bernard, staring at the young man in perplexed astonishment. "And, anyhow, hadn't you better wait till you actually see the new world?" Chapter Nine is a fairly quiet and character-centric passage; it mainly serves to set up the pieces whose movements will dominate the book’s second half Mond orders Bernard to bring Lenina, Linda, and the Savage back to the World State, and it’s here that Huxley begins expressing what we’d already begun suspecting: that Bernard isn’t as high and mighty as he’d like to be The extra bit of attention from the Controller, small as it might be, begins to effect a change in Bernard’s personality As it so happens, Bernard actually craves the acceptance he seems to work so doggedly to undermine, and John gives him the means to earn it This link to Mond, and the power he’ll have to exact his revenge on the DHC, marks the point at which Bernard’s character begins to take an ugly turn He oversteps his bounds eventually, even irritating Mond with his presumptiveness While Bernard undergoes a bit of a personal metamorphosis, John does as well He swoons at the sight of Lenina, so much so that I can’t help but be reminded of Romeo swooning over Juliet when he sees her for the first time at the Capulets’ party Lenina’s clothes and features are even described in childlike terms, which serve both to reinforce the comparison – Juliet wasn’t even fourteen when Romeo married her – and to remind us how infantile everyone remains in the World State The comparison is surely intentional, considering that Huxley features Romeo and Juliet prominently in two later scenes John almost reaches out to touch Lenina as she sleeps, but stops himself Not only does he resist that initial impulse, but he also feels ashamed that such a thing could even occur to him In the first half of the chapter, the earlier hints about Bernard’s personality coalesced into something we could call hypocrisy; in the second, we see the inner war between John’s nature and ideals – first glimpsed in flashback on the Savage Reservation – resolving into something more definite, something we can call turmoil And just as Bernard will ultimately be undone by his weaknesses, so, too, will John Chapter Ten serves mainly as a means of bringing the DHC down In turn, its real purpose is to show how deeply shameful unorthodoxy is in the World State You either conform to societal norms and belong, or you don’t – and never will again The irony, of course, is that the DHC is “a perfect gentleman” – he’s the picture of orthodoxy His conflict with Bernard, for example, isn’t just rooted in his shame over Bernard’s witnessing his “confession”; he’s actually offended by Bernard’s oddness, and plans to humiliate him before exiling him for failing to behave appropriately impulsively and hedonistically Remember, selfishness is fine as long as you’re taking what you want in the context of fitting in Once you start taking what you want in a way that separates you from the social body, you threaten the fabric of society itself “…His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual – and, after all, what is an individual?" With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. "We can make a new one with the greatest ease – as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.” By impregnating Linda – no matter how accidentally – the DHC has committed an act that’s far more unorthodox than anything Bernard’s ever done He has created a deeply individual being, and in doing so, has created something separate from the State (for, in this world, the State is quite literally everyone’s parent) In jiu-jitsu-esque fashion, the presentation of the Savage paints the DHC as deeply corrupt, his own weaknesses manifested in the flesh – and the man who would have banished Bernard flees into self-imposed exile Moreover, Linda’s hideous now, particularly compared to how she looked when she lived in “civilization” She’s been transformed by their “shared sin,” and her presence – let alone her public and sloppy displays of affection – disgust everyone who’s only know the sterility of civilization John’s entrance, whereupon he enthusiastically greets the DHC as his “father!”, provides the icing on the cake It’s a theatre of the ridiculous and shameful, loudly punctuated by shattered test tubes full of genetic material as everything descends into chaos With the DHC out of the way, our characters settle back down in the World State for the entirety of Chapter Eleven John, oddly enough, has become something of a celebrity, or at least a curiosity That attention decidedly does not extend itself to his mother, an offensive presence to any who lay eyes on her Linda begins losing herself in soma, even though such abuse will ultimately kill her; she doesn’t seem to believe that she’ll losing anything worth keeping, and the people around her (John accepted) don’t think she’s of any use The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day. “Which will finish her off in a month or two,” the doctor confided to Bernard. “One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can't.” Surprisingly, as every one thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most conveniently out of the way), John raised objections. “But aren't you shortening her life by giving her so much?” “In one sense, yes,” Dr. Shaw admitted. “But in another we're actually lengthening it.” The young man stared, uncomprehending. “Soma may make you lose a few years in time,” the doctor went on. “But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give you out of time. Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.” John began to understand. “Eternity was in our lips and eyes,” he murmured. “Eh?” “Nothing.” “Of course,” Dr. Shaw went on, “you can't allow people to go popping off into eternity if they've got any serious work to do. But as she hasn't got any serious work …” “All the same,” John persisted, “I don't believe it's right.” The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Well, of course, if you prefer to have her screaming mad all the time…” In a world where “every one belongs to every one else,” no one wants Linda – no one except her son, and the relationship between a mother and her son represents the kind of devotion that simultaneously confuses and offends civilized people She can’t do anything other than “mother” John, and even that skill’s useless to the social body because it’s so wrong – all Bernard can say is that parenthood provides “an interesting example of the way in which early conditioning can be made to modify and even run counter to natural impulses” In the end, Linda has no interest in caring for John now that she’s home; she’s abdicated all responsibilities, retreated into the vaporous depths of soma holidays, and reverted completely and immediately into a life that ultimately won’t let her back in In the meantime, Bernard grows more pompous, Lenina enjoys romantic encounters with the best and brightest of the Alpha community (the Arch-Community Songster among them), and the Savage gets to see more of civilization – although the contrast between him and his companions grows with every page When he sees the Bokanovsky groups, he’s left vomiting in the bushes, and when he repeats Miranda’s words – “O brave new world, that has such people in it!” – there’s a bitter, self-aware irony behind them We zip from the brave new world back to a study of the Savage reservation – "a place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing" This explanation doesn’t really jibe with the society Huxley’s built, for even if there’s a shortage of resources in those particular regions, that hasn’t stopped them from colonizing the islands enough to be able to send people to them; for that matter, there are bits and pieces of civilization on the reservation (the fences, the transports, etc.) If the Savage Reservations are another type of island (a quarantine for cultures rather than for unorthodox individuals) the explanation makes a little more sense, but it doesn’t quite account for the fact that the islands aren’t part of the larger World State system, whereas the Savage Reservations are (for example, the State’s economy profits when people visit John’s Reservation) It seems like Huxley’s forcing the World State to incorporate a bastion of disorder and stability into its system, which just doesn’t make sense when you consider how bent the State is on wiping such things out This is reinforced when John watches an entire academy laugh at presentations of the very rituals he wanted to participate in The mere idea of suffering for something larger doesn’t make sense to them because all they know how to do is please themselves, but it’s the foundation of everything for John At the end of the chapter, John and Lenina each long for one another, suffering as a result of feelings that transcend their fragile bodies John reads Shakespeare in order to cope; Lenina takes soma in order to escape Nothing, in fact, paints a clearer contrast between John and the others than the sequence directly prior to the end of the chapter where he visits the feelies with Lenina The scenario, a grotesque, exploitative riff on the racial politics at the heart of Othello (yet another nod to Shakespeare within the book), offends John’s high-minded, old-fashioned sensibilities; he feels scandalized by foreign feelings playing across his lips at the direction of an emotional engineer For Lenina, it’s just great entertainment Bernard’s offended two people by chapter’s end – Mustapha Mond and Helmholtz Watson His letter to Mond, in particular, inspires the latter to mutter that he’d “ought to teach [Bernard] a lesson” – foreshadowing the former’s eventual downfall Without doing anything too flashy or showy, Huxley’s narrowed his narrative focus until it’s become clear to us that five main characters will drive the story: Lenina, Bernard, Helmholtz, John, and Mond Others may serve a purpose, but those are the Big Five