Brave New World Topics of Discussion:
Where does the title come from?
It is a quote from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which states, “O brave new world/ That has such
people in’t” (V.I).
Notice how John uses it when he first goes to London considering it a blessing, kind of like going to a
Utopia. However, shortly after being in London, he uses the same quote again, but in an ironic mood
trying to portray the perversity of “the Other place.” In his mind, this place with all its technology is not
“expensive enough” because it doesn’t provide books and other forms of entertainment he’s used to. This
is important for Huxley to juxtapose what the reader has heard because it suddenly changes this infantile
place into a more dystopian light. The question then becomes: does Huxley believe our society should be
a drug-infested utopia where the infantile ethos thrives, or should it have an adult ethos that places the
individual and reality as the most important?
What is the translation of the Nicholas Berdiaeff quote after the title page?
Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly believed. We currently face a question that
would otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real?
This quote reveals a little the importance of Huxley’s time. After World War I, politicians of his time,
namely Chamberlain thought post World War I was a time of utopic peace. England and France were
beginning to disarm themselves, which led directly into the hands of World War II where NAZI’s took
advantage of a weakened Europe.
In this regard, the quote is partially a prophecy, but also warning as to the way this book will turn out: no
matter how perfect societies are made to appear, there will always be problems because society is not a
well-oiled machine even with conditioning. A good example of this appears in Chs. 14-15.
Main Characters (in order of appearance)
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.)/Thomas-
Henry Foster-
Lenina Crowne-
Mustapha Mond-
Bernard Marx-
Fanny Crowne-
Benito Hoover-
Helmholtz Watson-
Linda-
Who do you think is the actual main character of the book? Explain.
Setting:
26th century London and a traditional pueblo Malpais (or “bad country”) on an Indian Reservation in New
Mexico.
Conflicts:
External -- between Mustapha Mond and Bernard and John; others?
Internal -- within Bernard, within John; others?
Societal – London and Malpais; others?
Themes:
1. The price for technological progress is the loss of individuality and human freedom. Why are these
critical to our understanding of society and human nature, especially as we try to make things more
mechanized? How has consumerism become synonymous, it seems, with technology in our society?
What might Huxley be arguing and what do you say in regards to his argument?
2. The triumph of reason over passion, and science over art leads to distortions of human nature. Why
does Huxley purposefully juxtapose these concepts within the novel? Can you connect these ideas to our
current society? Focus on political stances such as the idea of decreasing funding for the arts because
they are considered unimportant facets of education. What do you think the result will be?
3. The purpose of society is governed by an infantile ethos of consumption and open sexuality. From this
novel, do you get the feeling that one should love and be jealous, or that people should be more open to
their inner desires? What happens when these two collide and what is Huxley’s purpose in pinpointing
these two motifs on John and Lenina?
4. The price of a utopian society to rid one’s self of individual freedoms. To whom should we give more
importance to, based on this novel, society or individual thinking? Consider the way Huxley uses
multiple people that bend both ideas, but controversially (I think) ends with John the Savage. Why does
Huxley choose to end this novel with John? What has he shown: the destruction of Mond’s society or a
perfection of it?
For Further Reading (and Watching):
Books
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Brave New World (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) by Harold Bloom
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (Bloom’s Guides) by Harold Bloom
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
1984 by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
V for Vendetta Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Minority Report by Phillip K. Dick
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Blade Runner (i.e. Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?) by Phillip K. Dick
Films:
▪ Brave New World by Burt Brinckerhoff (1980)
▪ Brave New World by Leslie Libman and Larry Williams (1998)
▪ Equilibrium by Kurt Wimmer
▪ Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) by Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Spielberg
▪ The Matrix by the Wachowski Brothers
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Aldoux Huxley Biography (1894-1953)
English novelist and critic, grandson of the prominent biologist T.H. Huxley (see further below) and
brother of Julian Huxley, also a biologist. Aldous Huxley's production was wide. Besides novels he
published travel books, histories, poems, plays, and essays on philosophy, arts, sociology, religion and
morals. Among Huxley's best known novels is BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), which is one of the
classical works of science fiction along with George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
"Half of the human race lives in manifest obedience to the lunar rhythm; and there is
evidence to show that the psychological and therefore the spiritual life, not only of women,
but of men too, mysteriously ebbs and flows with the changes of the moon. There are
unreasoned joys, inexplicable miseries, laughters and remorses without a cause. Their
sudden and fantastic alternations constitute the ordinary weather of our minds. These
moods, of which the more gravely numinous may be hypostasized as gods, the lighter, if we
will, as hobgoblins and fairies, are the children of the blood and humours. But the blood
and humours obey, among many other masters, the changing moon. Touching the soul
directly through the eyes and, indirectly, along the dark channels of the blood, the moon is
doubly a divinity." (from 'Meditations of the Moon' in Music at Night and Other Essays, 1931)
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, into a well-to-do upper-middle-class family.
Leonard Huxley, his father, was a biographer, editor, and poet. Huxley's mother, Julia Arnold, was the
daughter of Thomas Arnold, a brother of Matthew Arnold, the great British humanist. Julia's sister was
the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who published under the name Mrs. Humphry Ward. Julia Arnold died
of cancer when Huxley was fourteen. Later Huxley said that it gave him a sense of the transience of
human happiness.
Huxley first studied at Eton College, Berkshire (1908-13). At the age of 16 Huxley suffered an attack of
keratitis punctata and became for a period of about 18 months totally blind. By using special glasses and
one eye recovered sufficiently he was able to read and he also learned braille. Despite a condition of nearblindness, Huxley continued his studies at Balliol College, Oxford (1913-15), receiving his B.A. in
English in 1916. Unable to pursue his chosen career as a scientist - or fight in World War on the front Huxley turned to writing. He worked for the War Office in London in 1917, and taught briefly at Eton
College and Repton. His first collection of poetry appeared in 1916 and two more volumes followed by
1920. In 1919-20 he was member of the editorial staff of Athenaeum under Middleton Murray, Katherine
Mansfield's husband. Huxley wrote biographical and architectural articles and reviews of fiction, drama
music and art.
"I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in
the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I
did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink,
and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'" (from 'Sermons in Cats' in Music at Night)
In 1920-21 Huxley was drama a critic for Westminster Gazette, an assistant at the Chelsea Book Club and
worked for Condé Nast Publications (1922). His first novel, CROME YELLOW (1921), a witty criticism
of society, appeared in 1921. Huxley's style, a combination of brilliant dialogue, cynicism, and social
criticism, made him one of the most fashionable literary figures of the decade. He was a friend of Lady
Ottoline Morrell and the Bloomsbury group, which included such writers as Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell,
Lytton Strachey, and E.M. Forster. In eight years he published a dozen books, among them POINT
COUNTER POINT (1928), in which the numerous characters, among them D.H. Lawrence, Murray,
Mansfield, and the author himself, are compared to instruments in an orchestra, and each character plays
his separate portion of Huxley's vision of life. Later these early works, mostly satirical comments on
contemporary events, have been criticized for their rather one-dimensional characters, which the author
used as a mouthpiece to say "almost everything about almost anything" - as Huxley once described the
nature of the essay. In DO WHAT YOU WILL (1929) Huxley predicts that Karl Marx's Proletariat
becomes "a bourgeoisie with oily instead of inky fingers", compares the first motion picture in which
spoken dialogue is heard, 'The Jazz Singer', to a "brimming bowl of hog-wash", and sees that at out time
"monotheism has lost the value which circumstances once gave it. It lacks political utility, and to the
individual it is a poison." In the essay 'Fashions on Love' he defends D.H. Lawrence's doctrine of the
'natural love' but rejects "the sexual impulse, which now spends itself purposelessly..."
During the 1920s Huxley formed a close friendship with D.H. Lawrence with whom he traveled in Italy
and France. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy with his wife and son Matthew. With her Huxley
also traveled in India and the Dutch Indies. In the 1930s he moved to Sanary, near Toulon, where he
wrote in four months Brave New World, a dystopian vision of a highly technological society of the future
(the word "utopia" comes from Thomas More's novel Utopia). Huxley turned upside down H.G. Wells'
scientific optimism. Developments in sciences and cultural changes in his own time inspired much of
imagination - such as mass production, which revolutionized industry, air travel, glamorized by Charles
Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, behaviorist psychology, and explorations in genetics. Margaret Mead's
Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) also was among the books he read for the novel. In the book Huxley
answered to fears of hopes of wide variety of his readers and in its first year it sold a total of twenty-eight
thousand copies in England and in the United States, and enjoyed respectable sales throughout the
remainder of the century.
In the1930s Huxley was deeply concerned with the Peace Pledge Union. He moved in 1937 with the
guru-figure Gerald Heard to the United States, believing that the Californian climate would help his
eyesight, a constant burden, which he treated with Dr. W.H. Bates's eye-training method. The results he
described in THE ART OF SEEING (1942). After this turning point in his life, Huxley abandoned pure
fictional writing and chose the essay as the vehicle for expressing his ideas. He also wrote screenplays in
collaboration with Christopher Isherwood for film studios, but did not gain success in this field. Among
their unproduced film treatments was Jacob's Hands, a story about healing powers and disappointment in
love. Huxley also was a regular contributor to Vedanta and the West, the magazine Isherwood edited
while a discipline of Swami Prabhavananda.
Brave New World - A cry of warning and nightmarish black comedy of a future society.- The Nine Year
War, a global holocaust, has reshaped the history. In the year 632 after Ford (i.e., the 26th century) the
world has attained a kind of scientifically balanced communist utopia. Universal happiness is preserved
by psychotropic drugs. Religion, art, theoretical science are unimportant, but life is free of illness and old
age. Scientists are able to produce babies who will fit their future job exactly. There are five types of
humans, ranging from the intellectually superior Alphas to the semimoronic Epsilons. Alpha-Plus
Bernard Marx resists soma, the soporific drug carried by all citizens. It helps to stop any signs of stress or
dissatisfaction and longing for a fuller life. Eventually Bernard is exiled to Iceland. John the Savage,
raised in a reservation of American Indian primitives and abandoned by his mother in a primitive outpost,
comes into this world. John is thinking, feeling individual, who has read Shakespeare and witnessed
primitive religious rituals. Bernard brings John and his ruined Beta-Minus mother Linda to England.
When his mother dies of an overdose of the feel-good drug, John swells a violent revolt. He engages in a
dialogue with the World Controller Mustapha Mond and debates the merits of freedom and passion. He is
harassed as a freak of the accepted social order. In the end the Savage yields to the temptations of the
carefree world, and kills himself in disgust. - The book received mixed critics. H.G. Wells was offended
by what he regarded as Huxley's betrayal of science and the future. Bertrand Russell and Hermann Hesse
recognized the serious intent beneath the surface of playful wit. The novelist, essayist and critic C.P.
Snow dismissed in a 1959 review both Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) and Brave New World
especially for their pessimism about scientific progress and social purpose.
Several of Huxley's screenplays never got filmed. His best screenplays for Hollywood included MGM's
Pride and Prejudice (1940). The first film project offered was an adaptation of Galsworthy's Forsyte
Saga, which Huxley turned down, explaining in a letter, ''Even the lure of enormous lucre could not
reconcile me to remaining closeted for months with the ghost of the late poor John Galsworthy. I couldn't
face it.'' In 1938 he wrote an uncredited treatment for Madame Curie, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. With
John Houseman and Robert Stevenson he worked for the 20th Century-Fox film Jane Eyre (1944),
starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. Woman's Vengeance (1947), directed by Zoltan Korda and
starring Charles Boyer and Jessica Tandy, was based on Huxley's story 'The Gioconda Smile.'
"One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm.
Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera
had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on
the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike
column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers,
onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People,
every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into
death!" (from Island, 1962)
BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED appeared in 1958. He stated that in writing Brave New World he
had failed to recognize the ominous potential of nuclear fission, "for the possibilities of atomic energy had
been a popular topic of conversation for years before the book was written." He believed that individual
freedom was much closer to extinction than he had imagined. Huxley's other later works include THE
DEVILS OF LOUDON (1952), depicting mass-hysteria and exorcism in the 17th-century France.
ISLAND (1962) was an utopian novel and a return to the territory of Brave New World, in which a
journalist shipwrecks on Pala, the fabled island, and discovers there a kind and happy people. But the
earthly paradise is not immune to the harsh realities of oil policy. BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
(1958) was a sequel to his classic novel. Huxley compared the predictions of his earlier work with
subsequent developments in science and society. In 1963 appeared LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, a
collection of essays.
In his later years Huxley wrote two books about mind-altering drugs, becoming a guru among Californian
hippies'. While writing Brave New World Huxley had read about drugs, but it took 22 years before he
experimented with them himself. In a article from 1931, Huxley stated that drug-taking "constitutes one
of the most curious and also, it seems to me, one of the most significant chapters in the natural history of
human beings." THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION (see Jim Morrison), published in 1954, was an
influential study of consciousness expansion through mescalineand. Huxley also started to use LSD and
showed interest in Hindu philosophy. The Doors of Perception prompted Thomas Mann to write in a
letter, that it is a "completely – I don't want to say immoral, but one must say irresponsible book, which
can only contribute to the stupefaction of the world and to its inability to meet the deadly serious
questions of the time with intelligence." Kingsley Amis said in the Spectator that Huxley's "present role"
is "that of a crank". In 1961 Huxley suffered a severe loss when his house and his papers were totally
destroyed in a bush-fire. Little survived apart from the manuscript of Island. Huxley died in Los Angeles
on November 22, 1963. In the media news of his death were overshadowed by the assassination of
President Kennedy. Huxley was married twice. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, a Belgian, who died 1955.
They had one son. In 1956 he married the violinist and psychotherapist Laura Archera. They had first met
in 1848 when Laura Archera was planning to make a film on the Palio, the annual horce race in Siena.
She hoped that Huxley would write it.
As a essayist Huxley was concerned about the power of science and technology. His skepticism caused
much controversy among his readers. Huxley's philosophical cul-de-sac led him finally to seek answers
from mysticism and the thought of the East. One of Huxley's most puzzling ideas was the education of the
human being as 'amphibian', one capable of living in different environments. Late in his life Huxley
remarked, "It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find
at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'"
(Source: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ahuxley.htm)
Information on Brave New World Revisited:
If you liked Brave New World, you might find it interesting that in 1958 Aldous Huxley wrote a sequel of
sorts commenting on how many of his predictions had (sadly) come true. He mentions “I feel a good deal
less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming
true much sooner than I thought they would” (2).
His chapters are:
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Overpopulation- He considered it a major threat to our world
Quantity, Quality, Morality
Over-Organization- He explains “We begin to close our identity when society and technology
becomes too organized and stabilized.”
Propaganda in a Democratic Societyo Rational- which enlightens those to whom it is meant for
o Non-Rational- appeals to passion
Propaganda under a Dictatorship- Discusses Hitler’s use of propaganda
The Arts of Selling
Brainwashing- discusses Pavlov; Communist use of fear
Chemical Persuasion- discusses soma and how it causes no ill-effects. Karl Marx said “Religion
was opium of people” and in BNW “soma was people’s religion” (83).
Subconscious Persuasion
o If person is in “abnormally high suggestibility” (100) through stress or other influence
one can be convinced to do something
o Mentions his only mistake in BNW is “There is no reference in my fable to subliminal
projection. It is a mistake of omission which, if I were to rewrite the book today, I should
most certainly correct” (102).
Hypnopaedia
o In BNW only used for moral teaching
o Does not actually occur when person asleep but almost asleep (i.e. person is told he is
thirsty in sleep, gets up and gets a drink of water)
Education for Freedom- stresses individuality, even though we are programmed by society
What Can Be Done?- discusses solutions to society’s ills (140-143)
Which of these chapters (based on the brief information you see here) do you see as a problem in our
modern society?
Which do you not perceive as a problem?