Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932.Huxley then
wrote Brave New World Revisited (1958), and Island (1962), his final novel.
Title - Brave New World's title derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's The
Tempest, Act V, Scene I:
O wonder!
How many godly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206[5]
This line itself is ironic: Miranda spent most of her life on an isolated island, and the only people
she ever knew were her father and his servants, an enslaved savage, and spirits, notably Ariel. When
she sees other people for the first time, she is overcome with excitement, and says the famous line
above. Translations of the title often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of
literature in an attempt to capture the same irony: the French edition of the work is entitled Le
Meilleur des mondes ("The Best of All Worlds"), an allusion to an expression used by the
philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and satirised in Candide, Ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759).
Sources
Literary - Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 while he was living in England. And said that
Brave New World was inspired by the utopian novels of H. G. Wells, including A Modern Utopia
(1905) and Men Like Gods (1923). Unlike the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time,
Huxley gave a frightening vision of the future.
George Orwell believed that Brave New World must have been partly derived from the novel We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin, but Huxley denied.
Historical - Although the novel is set in the future it deals with contemporary issues of the early
20th century: mass production, Russian revolution, the First World War (1914–1918) had
transformed the world. The events of the depression in Britain in 1931, with its mass unemployment
and the abandonment of the gold standard currency, persuaded Huxley to assert that stability was
the "primal and ultimate need" if civilisation was to survive the present crisis. The characters sre
mainly named after people known in England like Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of
Western Europe, is named after Sir Alfred Mond whose vast technologically advanced plant near
Billingham, north east England, Huxley visited shortly before writing the novel, which made a great
impression on him.
A trip in America and the reading of My Life and Work by Henry Ford produced in him a fear of
Americanization in Europe.
PLOT
This book doesn’t really have a straightforward plot. It’s just a bunch of different ideas about what a
perfect society would be like, according to the author.
The beginning of the book describes the world they live in, Utopia. The director of "Hatcheries and
Conditioning" talks about how their world works. They fertilize human female eggs, and babies
grow in bottles. People control how babies are born and who the babies are. There are 5 classes of
people. Alphas are the top class, Epsilons are the lowest. All the babies are kinda regulated by the
government -- they control how the person will think and how smart the person is. They condition
these babies to love life and like their job.
The Controller talks about Utopia. He is one of 10 dudes who run the world. There are many
principles in the society. One important thing is that the leaders don’t teach people about history
because they don’t want people to be influenced by things in the past enough to try and change stuff
in the present. Another big principle is that people have no emotions. They are given a drug called
Soma which makes them permanently happy. Lastly, being in love is a crime, but having sex is
okay.
Then a story starts. Bernard Marx (main dude) is in the Alpha class. He loves this chick named
Lenina Crowne. She works in the embryo room and is dating a scientist. She has a friend named
Fanny who tells her to date other men. She likes Bernard, but doesn’t love him. Poor guy. She
follows the law that you can’t love. Bernard is a bit weird in that he’s different than most of the
people in the alpha class. He has a friend named Helmholtz Watson who is good at everything, but
hates his job, which is writing propaganda.
Then Bernard takes Lenina to some savage reservation in North America. The Director of Utopia
tells them about his trip to the reservation. He tells them he brought some chick (Linda) who
disappeared when they were there. Then the director gets pissed at Bernard because Bernard is a
non-conformist (he doesn’t do what everyone else is doing). Bernard and Lenina go to the
reservation. They meet this savage named John. Turns out John is the son of the director. Bernard
figures out that the woman the director brought to the reservation got pregnant. Getting pregnant is
against the law in Utopia so the director doesn’t talk about it. The woman got lost while on the
reservation and had to stay there and give birth there. John has only heard about Utopia. He likes to
read Shakespeare.
Bernard brings John and his mom back to Utopia. The Director tries to get Bernard kicked out, but
when he shows everyone the woman who the director got pregnant and his son, they laugh at the
director. Everyone is curious about the savage (John). His mom (Linda) goes into a coma. John
goes around and sees the sites but he doesn’t like Utopia.
Then everyone thinks that Lenina is doing it with John the savage. She isn’t though. Even though he
has fallen in love with her, he is a romantic so he doesn’t wanna have sex too soon. She wants him
in a big way, and comes over to his place and strips. He kicks her out and calls her a whore.
Then John finds out his mom is sick. He goes to the hospital and is sad. But the main dudes of
Utopia don’t like his display of emotion because they teach everyone to be happy and that death is a
happy thing. John, Bernard, and Bernard’s friend, Helmholtz are arrested. The Controller explains
to them what Utopia is all about. Bernard is exiled to Iceland (between USA and England),
Helmholtz is sent to the Falkland Islands (off South America), and John is kept in England. John is
made to live a life of solitude. All the Utopians wanna kill John. Lenina joins them, and John kills
himself.
References
"Our Ford" is used in place of "Our Lord", as a credit to popularising the use of the assembly line.
Huxley's description of Ford as a central figure in the emergence of the Brave New World might
also be a reference to the utopian industrial city of Fordlândia commissioned by Ford in 1927.
"Our Freud" is sometimes said in place of "Our Ford" due to the link between Freud's
psychoanalysis and the conditioning of humans, and Freud's popularisation of the idea that sexual
activity is essential to human happiness and need not be limited to procreation. It is also strongly
implied that citizens of the World State believe Freud and Ford to be the same person.
H. G. Wells, "Dr. Wells", British writer and utopian socialist, whose book Men Like Gods was an
incentive for Brave New World. "All's well that ends Wells" wrote Huxley in his letters, criticising
Wells for anthropological assumptions Huxley found unrealistic.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose conditioning techniques are used to train infants.
William Shakespeare, whose banned works are quoted throughout the novel by John, "the Savage".
The plays quoted include Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Troilus
and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Othello. Mustapha Mond also knows them because he, as a
World Controller, has access to a selection of books from throughout history, including the Bible.
Thomas Robert Malthus, whose name is used to describe the contraceptive techniques (Malthusian
belt) practised by women of the World State.
Reuben Rabinovitch, the character in whom the effects of sleep-learning, hypnopædia, are first
noted.
John Henry Newman, Mustapha Mond discussed Cardinal Newman with the Savage after reading a
quote from his book
NAMES
The limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens can be
traced to political and cultural figures who contributed to the bureaucratic, economic, and
technological systems of Huxley's age, and presumably those systems in Brave New World:[17]
Bernard Marx, from George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Bernard of Clairvaux or possibly Claude
Bernard) and Karl Marx.
Henry Foster, from Henry Ford American industrialist, see above.
Lenina Crowne, from Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader during the Russian Revolution.
Fanny Crowne, from Fanny Kaplan, famous for an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Lenin.
Ironically, in the novel, Lenina and Fanny are friends.
George Edzel, from Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford.
Polly Trotsky, from Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader.
Benito Hoover, from Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy; and Herbert Hoover, then-President of the
United States.
Helmholtz Watson, from the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the
American behaviorist John B. Watson.
Darwin Bonaparte, from Napoleon I, the leader of the First French Empire, and Charles Darwin,
author of The Origin of Species.
Herbert Bakunin, from Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher and Classical liberal,[18] and
Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian philosopher and anarchist.
Mustapha Mond, from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of Turkey after World War I, who pulled
his country into modernisation and official secularism; and Sir Alfred Mond, an industrialist and
founder of the Imperial Chemical Industries conglomerate.
Primo Mellon, from Miguel Primo de Rivera, prime minister and dictator of Spain (1923–1930),
and Andrew Mellon, an American banker and Secretary of the Treasury (1921–1932).
Sarojini Engels, from Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto along with Karl
Marx: and Sarojini Naidu, an Indian politician.
Morgana Rothschild, from J. P. Morgan, US banking tycoon, and the Rothschild family, famous for
its European banking operations.
Fifi Bradlaugh, from the British political activist and atheist Charles Bradlaugh.
Joanna Diesel, from Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who invented the diesel engine.
Clara Deterding, from Henri Deterding, one of the founders of the Royal Dutch Petroleum
Company, and Clara Ford, wife of Henry Ford.
Tom Kawaguchi, from the Japanese Buddhist monk Ekai Kawaguchi, the first recorded Japanese
traveller to Tibet and Nepal.
Jean-Jacques Habibullah, from the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Habibullah Khan, who served as Emir of Afghanistan in the early 20th century.
Miss Keate, the Eton headmistress, from nineteenth-century headmaster John Keate.
Arch-Community Singster of Canterbury, a parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Anglican Church's decision in August 1930 to approve limited use of contraception.
Popé, from Popé, the Native American rebel who was one of the instigators of the conflict now
known as the Pueblo Revolt.
John the Savage, after the term "noble savage" originally used in the verse drama The Conquest of
Granada by John Dryden, and later erroneously associated with Rousseau. Furthermore, from the
prophet John the Baptist.
Comparisons with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in
the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be
no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those
who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we
would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from
us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would
become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in
Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to
oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984,
Postman added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled
by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our
desire will ruin us.
Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on
Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article "Why
Americans Are Not Taught History":
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling
expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten
volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen EightyFour already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist
nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus.
Orwell's was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that
would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it
by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley ... rightly foresaw that any such regime could break because
it could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history
curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was
the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant
servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.
THEMES
The Use of Technology to Control Society - Brave New World warns of the dangers of giving the
state control over new and powerful technologies (ex. control of reproduction)
It is important to recognize the distinction between science and technology: the State talks about
progress and science, what it really means is the bettering of technology, not increased scientific
exploration and experimentation. T
The Consumer Society - Brave New World is a satire of the society in which Huxley existed, and
which still exists today.
The Incompatibility of Happiness and Truth - Brave New World is full of characters who do
everything they can to avoid facing the truth about their own situations. The almost universal use of
the drug soma is probably the most pervasive example of such willful self-delusion. Soma clouds
the realities of the present and replaces them with happy hallucinations, and is thus a tool for
promoting social stability. B
The Dangers of an All-Powerful State - Like George Orwell’s 1984, this novel depicts a dystopia
in which an all-powerful state controls the behaviours and actions of its people in order to preserve
its own stability and power. But a major difference between the two is that, whereas in 1984 control
is maintained by constant government surveillance, secret police, and torture, power in Brave New
World is maintained through technological interventions that start before birth and last until death,
and that actually change what people want. ty.
Pneumatic - The word pneumatic is used with remarkable frequency to describe two things:
Lenina’s body and chairs. Pneumatic is an adjective that usually means that something has air
pockets or works by means of compressed air. In the case of the chairs (in the feely theater and in
Mond’s office), it probably means that the chairs’ cushions are inflated with air. In Lenina’s case,
the word is used by both Henry Foster and Benito Hoover to describe what she’s like to have sex
with.
Ford, “My Ford,” “Year of Our Ford,” etc. - hroughout Brave New World, the citizens of the
World State substitute the name of Henry Ford, the early twentieth-century industrialist and founder
of the Ford Motor Company, wherever people in our own world would say Lord” (i.e., Christ). This
demonstrates that even at the level of casual conversation and habit, religion has been replaced by
reverence for technology—specifically the efficient, mechanized factory production of goods that
Henry Ford pioneered.
Alienation - The motif of alienation provides a counterpoint to the motif of total conformity that
pervades the World State. Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, and John are alienated from the World
State, each for his own reasons. Bernard is alienated because he is a misfit, too small and powerless
for the position he has been conditioned to enjoy. Helmholtz is alienated for the opposite reason: he
is too intelligent even to play the role of an Alpha Plus. John is alienated on multiple levels and at
multiple sites: not only does the Indian community reject him, but he is both unwilling and unable
to become part of the World State. The motif of alienation is one of the driving forces of the
narrative: it provides the main characters with their primary motivations.
Sex - Brave New World abounds with references to sex. At the heart of the World State’s control of
its population is its rigid control over sexual mores and reproductive rights. Reproductive rights are
controlled through an authoritarian system that sterilizes about two-thirds of women, requires the
rest to use contraceptives, and surgically removes ovaries when it needs to produce new humans.
The act of sex is controlled by a system of social rewards for promiscuity and lack of commitment.
John, an outsider, is tortured by his desire for Lenina and her inability to return his love as such.
The conflict between John’s desire for love and Lenina’s desire for sex illustrates the profound
difference in values between the World State and the humanity represented by Shakespeare’s
works.
Shakespeare - Shakespeare provides the language through which John understands the world.
Through John’s use of Shakespeare, the novel makes contact with the rich themes explored in plays
like The Tempest. It also creates a stark contrast between the utilitarian simplicity and inane babble
of the World State’s propaganda and the nuanced, elegant verse of a time “before Ford.”
Shakespeare’s plays provide many examples of precisely the kind of human relations—passionate,
intense, and often tragic—that the World State is committed to eliminating.
Symbols
Soma The drug soma is a symbol of the use of instant gratification to control the World State’s
populace.