Brave New World
Chapter 3 Close
Reading
Chapter 3 Summary:
I.
There are 4 different story lines going on throughout this chapter:
A. The students getting their history lesson from the D.H.C. and Mustapha
Mond
B. The Voices of the building (moving people and in hypnopaedia sayings
told to the children)
C. Bernard is in the elevator and changing room overhearing Henry Foster
and the Assistant Director of Predestination talking about their
sexcapades.
D. Lenina and Fanny discussing men and materialism in their locker room.
Summary of DHC and Mond Lesson “thread”:
1. DHC starts teaching history lesson by telling students about how erotic
play in children was not allowed in the past.
2. Controller comes in and gives in depth history lesson (four aspects):
A. History of Families and Monogamy before World State
B. History of world destruction before World State
C. History of adopting Mass Consumerism
D. History of adopting Soma Morality
Mond Discusses Family and Monogamy
a.Tells students about “vivaparous mothers” (mothers that give live birth…oh my!!!) and
“living with one’s family” (describing the home as a horrible, crowded, unsanitary lifestyle
with a “brooding mother”) (36)
b.Goes on to say about how Ford (as “Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to
call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters”) said that family caused all kinds
of madness: “from sadism to chastity” (39).
c.Now, “everybody belongs to everyone else” (40) as he quotes the hypnopaedic saying.
d.Describes monogamy as like a hot water under pressure in a pipe: one hole (one
release) and it’s dangerous…they were forced to “feel strongly”; many releases, and
there’s no pressure…(41)
e.Worst of all, people were forced to suffer these emotions “in hopelessly individual
isolation” (41).
f.“Fortunate boys….No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy---to
preserve you so far as it is possible, from having no emotions at all” (44).
g.stability can be achieved, and he says that no social stability can be achieved without
individual stability (42).
Mond Discusses End of Old World Order
a. Talks about social stability like a machine that “turns, turns, turns and must keep on
turning.” He goes on to show how the world population was 1 billion, the machine
turns and it becomes 2 billion, but the machine stopped and 1 billion starved to death.
b. Moves on to tell about how society became the One World State.
c. Describes how the world turned down “ectogenesis” (creation of an organism outside
of the womb) because of Christianity.
d. Describes how “liberalism” and the desire for “freedom” kept people from being
conditioned through “sleep teaching”: “Liberty to be inefficient and miserable” (46).
e. Describes how the Caste System is rejected because of “democracy” (47).
f. Describes the Nine Years’ War in A.F. 141 and the horrible chemical warfare that
followed (47-8).
g. Describes the killing as “such a splendid show that summer” (48).
h. Then describes the “Nine Year’s War” and “great Economic Collapse” (48) leaving the
world as only having a choice between stability and collapse.
Mond Discusses Mass Consumerism
a. Mond describes how the wheels of the machine need to keep moving to keep society
stable (42)
b. After the Controllers take, well….control, they force the “conscription of consumption,”
which created “conscientious objection” (49).
1. “Eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders
Green” (50).
2. “…the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with
dichlorethyl sulphide” (50).
c. “Controllers realized that force was no good” (50).
1. Began the “slower, but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian
conditioning and hypnopaedia” (50).
d. Controllers campaigned against viviparous birth and the past (51).
Mond Discusses the New Morality
a. Ford’s introduction of the Model-T becomes the beginning of the new era (52). He
becomes like their “god”
1. Year A.F. 632 (After Ford…like Anno-Domoni…he becomes a historical Christ-like
figure).
2. All of the crosses have their tops cut off and become “T’s” (52).
b. Mond talks about how our world has “Heaven” but still drinks a lot of alcohol; had a
soul and immortality, but still did “morphia and cocaine” (53).
c. Mond implies that religion was used like drugs; therefore, soma becomes the
replacement for religion:
1. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects” (54).
Connections: Monogamy vs. Promiscuity
a. Lenina and Fanny have the same name, but
there are only ten thousand last names for the
2 billion people on the earth (36).
1. Connects to Mond discussing the
destruction of the family
b. Fanny feels “out of sorts” and needs to take a
pregnancy substitute (38).
1. Can they really get rid of the desire for
viviparous reproduction?
c. Fanny chastises Lenina for seeing Henry too
much (40).
1. Ties into Mond describing the pipe under
pressure: she’s feeling strongly.
d. Lenina decides to adopt society’s norm and
take up Bernard on his offer to go to the
Savage Reservation (44).
e. Fanny accuses Bernard of wanting to be alone
and gets in a fight with Lenina for her wanting
to go out with him (45).
1. Connects to Mond saying about those
that had to suffer alone.
2. He seems to be more like us.
a. Henry Foster and the Assistant
Predestinator discuss how awesome this
new “feelie” is (35)
1. Connects to the kids’ sex play. Adult
entertainment.
b. They talk about how“pneumatic” Lenina is
(44)
1. They readily adopt the multiple holes
in the pipe philosophy
2. It seems to be a male adolescent
fantasy.
c. Bernard overhears Henry and A.P. and hate
them for treating Lenina as a piece of meat
(45-6).
1. Bernard is like the boy who doesn’t
want to participate in sex play (32).
Everybody Belongs to Everybody Else:
1. This is the hypnopaedic statement
that everyone hears: this voice is
heard throughout the section and
everyone but Bernard repeats it.
Connections: History of Coming to Social Stability
a. While Mond is discussing all of the conflict that
lead to social stability, Fanny and Lenina are
having their argument ( 42-9).
a. Mond describes the chemical warfare and
anthrax bombs of the Nine Year’s War in A.F.
141 as “such a splendid show that summer”
(48).
1. Lenina, at the same time, says about how
she does “want to see a Savage
Reservation” (48).
i. This juxtaposition makes us
wonder who the real “savages”
are…
a. Mond has that commentary on democracy: “As
though men were more than physicochemically equal (47).
b. At the same time, Bernard shows how he is
not equal: commenting on how he can’t try to
defend Lenina’s honor with Henry and the A.P.
because “they were two, they were large, they
were strong” (47).
a. Might makes right: seems to be how the
Controllers ruled for a long time with all
of their Anthrax Bombs and Massacres.
Connections: Mass Consumerism
a. As Lenina and Fanny make peace, and as Mond
describes the last actions of force (the Simple
Lifer and Museum Massacres) leading to NeoPavlovian Conditioning and Hypnopaedia, we
begin to hear the voice of the building more
frequently, giving these mass consumption
mantras:
1. I do love flying.
2. I do love new clothes.
3. Ending is better than mending.
4. More stitches, less riches.
a. Lenina and Fanny discuss Lenina’s new
Malthusian belt.
1. “silver-mounted green moroccosurrogate cartridge belt” (50).
2. Fanny’s upset because hers is SO old: 3
months (52).
a. Mass Consumerism is directly tied the “anti-culture” nature of the One World State:
1. “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books” (50).
2. “There were some things called the pyramids” (51).
3. “And a man called Shakespeare. You’ve never heard of them of course” (51).
i. So, it seems as if there is something extremely linked with consumerism and
ignorance.
Connections: The New Morality
a. Mond says that Christianity was “the ethics and philosophy of under-consumption…”
(53).
1. Linking morality to economics.
2. This is then linked to Lenina and Fanny’s obsession of the Malthusian belt.
b. Mond also links Christianity to drugs (53).
1. Soma becomes their go-to relief rather than spirituality.
i. The A.P. and Henry try to goad Bernard into taking some soma: “One cubic
centimetre cures ten gloom sentiments” (54).
ii. The A.P. is mimicking the hypnopaedic saying that he’s heard so much,
bringing the voice from the trumpet back in, being spoken through him, just
as it is spoken through Mond, Lenina, and Henry before.
Important Quotations
1. “I’m going to take him [the boy who didn’t want to play erotic games] to the Assistant Superintendent of
Psychology. Just to see if anything’s at all abnormal” (32).
a. Dramatic irony…of course it’s abnormal…all of this is abnormal --- naked recess??? Also hyperbole.
b. Dramatic irony + Hyperbole = the beginnings of satire.
2. “History is bunk…He waved his hand; and it was though, with an invisible feather wisk, he had brushed
away a little dust, and the dust of Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were
Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk---and where was Odysseus, where was
Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk---and those specks of antique dirt called Athens
and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom---all were gone. Whisk---the place where Italy had been
was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion;
whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk….” (35).
a. Here we get more irony: obviously the speaker knows about history, so this third-person narrator
has something of a personality. He/she is not of this Brave New World…so we can see here, that there
is an interesting twist on dramatic irony…we not only know something that the characters don’t, but
we also know that the speaker also knows that….leads us to believe the narrator stands on our side.
3. “There were those strange rumours of od forbidden books hidden in a safe in the Controller’s study.
Bibles, poetry---Ford knew what…’It’s alright, Director…I won’t corrupt them’”(35).
a. “Our Ford---or Our Freud, as for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he
spoke of psychological matters…” (39).
i. He’s the supreme political and moral leader, yet he could “corrupt” them?
ii. He’s one of the most intellectual people in the world, and yet he’s even ignorant to real
history.
iii. Also, how can he consume if he’s sitting around reading?
Important Quotations (cont.)
1. “In the four thousand rooms of the Center the four thousand electric clocks simultaneously struck four.
Discarnate voices called from the trumpet mouths” (33).
2. “His (Mond’s) voice was a trumpet” (42).
a. Mond’s voice becomes the voice of the machine.
b. So does everyone else’s as they repeat the hypnopaedic statements.
c. They are all part of the machine; cogs in the gears of society.
3. “The machine turns, turns, and must keep on turning---for ever” (42).
4. “Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three
centimetres an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies” (56).
a. The machine keeps turning. None of them are important…there are future replacements already
on the way….
HOW CAN YOU BEAT THE MACHINE? Bernard, John---your fight is useless!
Allusions
1. Polly Trotsky: Trotsky was a major figure in the Russian Revolution. Maybe tying everything to
communism? After all, everyone does belong to everyone else????
2. Ford: Henry Ford…popularized the assembly line. Appropriate that he becomes their god because they
are produced on an assembly line, and they “pray” to consumerism, which is driven by production,
which is the ultimate goal of the assembly line.
3. Freud: Sigmund Freud…the father of psychoanalytic thought. There’s so much that I could go into here
it’s not funny…but I’ll hold off because it’s part of the final project.
4. Bernard Marx: Two allusions
a. Bernard Shaw---as stated in book, a playwright…one that they apparently still are allowed to read
in the Brave New World…and he was a socialist…more socialism / communism links? I have my
own opinion about that as you will see.
b. Karl Marx---Father of modern communism. Wrote the Communist Manifesto and other communist
documents….while this may lead us to think this allusion points more toward this being a
communistic type of novel, I still have my reservations…Bernard is unhappy. Wouldn’t Marx be
happy in a socialist utopia? But Marx here is a revolutionary…just like Karl.
i. One other Marx allusion: Karl Marx wrote that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
Hmmm….
5. Christianity: Need I really explain this?