Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
• Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey,
southern England, in 1894, into an
estabilished intellectual family. He was
the grandson of Thomas Henry
Huxley, Victorian scientist who had
greatly contributed to the diffusion of
the theory of evolution. In 1915 he
went to Eton and then to Oxford,
taking his degree. Then when World
War I broke out he was declared unfit
for military. In 1932 he write his most
most famous work “Brave New World”.
In 1937 he moved to southern
California and in 1963 he died in
America.
The origin of the title
Brave New World's ironic title derives from
Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's The
Tempest:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new
world! That has such people in't!
This line is word-by-word quoted in the novel
by John the Savage, when he first sees
Lenina.The expression "brave new world"
also appears in Émile Zola's Germinal and in
Rudyard Kipling's 1919 poem The Gods of the
Copybook Headings.Translations of the novel
into other languages often allude to similar
expressions used in an attempt to capture the
same irony.
Setting (the real protagonist)
•
The novel opens in London in the "year of our Ford 632" (AD 2540) and the vast
majority of the population is unified under The World State, an eternally peaceful, stable
global society in which goods and resources are plentiful and everyone is happy.
Natural reproduction has been done away with and society is divided into five castes:
Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, each Alpha or Beta is the product of one
fertilized egg developing into one fetus, instead members of other castes are not unique
but are instead created using clonation. All members of society are conditioned in
childhood to hold the values that the World State idealizes, which improves societal
stability and quality of life. Everyone is encouraged to consume the ubiquitous drug
soma, a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "holidays", and it
was developed expressly for this purpose. Recreational sex is an integral part of society
but marriage, natural birth, parenthood, and pregnancy are considered obscene. In The
World State, people typically die at age 60 having maintained good health and
youthfulness their whole life and the conditioning system eliminates the need for
professional competitiveness: people are literally bred to do their jobs and cannot desire
another so there is no competition within castes.
Plot
• In the massified”brave new world”, two
young men feel a certain restleness.
One is Bernard Marx and the other
Helmholtz Watson. Both are belonging
to the highest caste.Thinghs come to
head when Bernard and his sexual
patner, Lenina Crowne,bring back with
them a savage,whom they name
John.Their destiny is sealed when they
are summoned before the World
Controller,who sends them into
exile.John is kept,as the subject of a
scientific experiment.He runs away and
refuges in a abandoned lighthouse.
Finally he kills himself rather than be
deprived of his liberty.
Characters
•
Bernard Marx, Alpha-Plus but anomalously small, psychologist and one
of the main protagonists. He dates Lenina for a short period of time.
•
Lenina Crowne, Beta-Plus, Vaccination-worker at the Hatchery and one
of the main protagonists; loved by John the Savage.
•
Helmholtz Watson, Alpha-Plus, lecturer at the College of Emotional
Engineering (Department of Writing), friend and confidant of Bernard
Marx and John the Savage.
•
John the Savage ("Mr. Savage"), son of Linda and Thomas
(Tomakin/The Director), an outcast in both primitive and modern
society. He is one of the main protagonists in the story.
•
Thomas "Tomakin", Alpha, Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
(D.H.C.) for London; later revealed to be the father of John the Savage.
•
Linda, a Beta-Minus. John the Savage's mother, and Thomas's long lost
lover. She is from England and was pregnant with John when she got
lost from Thomas in a trip to New Mexico. She is disliked by both
savage people because of her "civilized" behaviour, and by civilized
people because she is fat and looks old.
•
Mustapha Mond, Alpha-Double Plus, World Controller for Western
Europe
Main themes
• Fordism and Society
• Totalitarism
• Amorality
Fordism and Society
The World State is built upon
the principles of Henry Ford's
assembly line, mass
production, homogeneity,
predictability, and
consumption of disposable
consumer goods. At the same
time as the World State lacks
any supernatural-based
religions, Ford himself is
revered as a deity, and
characters celebrate Ford Day
and swear oaths by his name.
The biological techniques
used to control the populace in
Brave New World do not
include genetic engineering;
Huxley wrote the book before
the structure of DNA was
known.
Soma doesn't merely stupefy, it's "hedonistic" in the baser
sense. A synthetic high doesn't force you to be happy for
a reason and drug is all about instant gratification. John
the Savage, by contrast, has a firm code of conduct. His
happiness doesn't derive from taking a soul-corrupting
chemical drug, his emotional responses are apparently
based on reasons and justified or unjustified, his
happiness, like our own today, will always be vulnerable to
disappointment. The utopians don't ever grieve or treat
each others' existence as special, blind to the tragedy of
death and to its pathos. The crucial point is that,
potentially, long-acting designer-drugs needn't supplant
our moral codes, but chemically predispose us to act them
out in the very way we would wish. So we can bootstrap
our way into becoming smart and happy while biologically
deepening our social conscience too It's true that morality
in the contemporary sense may no longer be needed
when suffering has been cured, however, specifically
moral codes of conduct become redundant. In Brave New
World, by contrast, unpleasantness hasn't been
eradicated, that's one reason its citizens' behaviour is so
shocking, and one reason they take soma. Brave New
World is a patently sub-standard utopia in need of some
true moral imagination - and indignation - to sort it out
Amorality
Totalitarism
BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for at its
pinnacle there are ten world controllers. We get to meet its spokesman, the donnish
Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe. Mond governs a society
where all aspects of an individual's life, from conception and conveyor-belt
reproduction onwards, are determined by the stateCitizens must not fall in love,
marry, oBrave New World, then, is centred around control and manipulationr have
their own kids.As ever, the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature
and Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus controls
bothOne of our deepest fears about the prospect of tampering with our natural
biological endowment is that we will ourselves be controlled and manipulated by
others.Huxley sows the fear that a future world state may rob us of the right to be
unhappypulated by others. Brave New World, then, is centred around control and
manipulation. As ever, the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature
and Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus controls both
Ban,accusation of plagiarism
• Brave New World has been
banned and challenged at various
times. In 1932, the book was
banned in Ireland. In 1980, it was
removed from classrooms in
Missouri among other challenges
and in 1993, an attempt was
made to remove the novel from a
California school's required
reading list because it "centered
around negative activity".
In 1982, Polish author Antoni
Smuszkiewicz presented
accusations of plagiarism against
Huxley.
Irene Giusti
Tiziano Panella
Manuel De Castro