Literature Review, Huxley's Brave New World

Literary Criticism on Huxley's Utopia / Dystopia and The World State

Nov 3, 2009 Nicholas Morine

Aldous Huxley's prescient look into a world beholden to advanced eugenics, social caste, sexuality, and soma is riveting and has aged extremely well.

In a future where there is no hunger and no disease, The World State has created what some might call a utopia in the tradition of Thomas More. However, Bernard Marx – a short, eccentric, and lonely member of the upper caste of Alphas, is not altogether happy.

Eugenics, Social Stratification, Themes of Fate and Predestination

Brave New World is rife for allegorical analysis, an subtly ominous warning against the practices of eugenics and collectivist governance. While all may seem peaceful under the eye of The World State, and while it may be true that in Huxley's Brave New World there is no pain, suffering, or disease – this also means that the human spirit is crushed underfoot.

Interestingly, the practice of eugenics is de rigueur across the globe, the political entity of Huxley's future being The World State – and as such individuals are indentifiably by caste – Alpha plus at the top of the social heirarchy and Epsilon semi-morons at the bottom. Members of adjoining castes might consider themselves to be part of their community, lessening in relationship the further one might venture either up or down – but each caste serves their pre-ordained purpose.

Genetic meddling combined with neo-Pavlovian torture techniques inflicted on lower-caste infants in order to stunt their instinctual curiosity are both methods employed universally to ensure pliable, malleable personalities. Infants are also subjected to hypnopaedia in order to reinforce their class identity:

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The DHC halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.

“Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.”

At the end of the room a loud-speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

“... all wear green,' said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, 'and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are even worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.'

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green.”

Human beings are mediated in their existence from birth till death, behaviorally engineered and pharmaceutically medicated into complacency and compliance – what terrible, invisible bonds that yoke the soul in a fit of pleasure!

Sex, Soma, and Society in a Perfect World

The mythical drug soma, based on a hallucinogenic Indian beverage of the same name (and, it must be remembered, Huxley was no stranger to the world of psychoactives) is center stage in Brave New World.

Tired? Feeling blue? Angry or resentful? Simply pop a half-gramme to a gramme of soma and take the culturally proscribed cure – a restful, blissful soma-vacation.

This is merely one way of maintaining stability and rigidity in The World State – the other being the denigration of sexual experience from lovemaking to simple formality and play. Children are engaged in the process through “play” with each other – adult women are taught to engage in Malthusian drill (what is commonly known as the rhythm method of contraception) in tandem with a hynopaedically habitual daily oral contraceptive.

Sex is free, sex is pleasurable, and remembering the planetary truism of “everyone belongs to everyone else” – monogamy is now a disgusting and barbarous practice.

This combination of baser pleasures utilized to keep the individual spirit happy and subsumed completely under the umbrage of a collectivist world state alongside the ritualistic practice of eugenics and forced abortions wherever the Malthusian drill might make a “statistical error” casts a long shadow.

Aldous Huxley's experimental foray into questions of fate, consumerism, and mass complacency through the agents of institutionalized vice and self-gratification is a compelling and thought-provoking necessity.

Other Articles on Science Fiction and Dystopia by Nicholas Morine

Those interested in darker literature might do well to read literature reviews of George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, or perhaps a little bit of cyberpunk escapism in the form of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

The copyright of the article Literature Review, Huxley's Brave New World in British/UK Fiction is owned by Nicholas Morine. Permission to republish Literature Review, Huxley's Brave New World in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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