Brave New World Essay, Research Paper

About “brave New World”:

In After Ford 632, this is 632 years after Ford has released the first T-Ford ( year 2535 in our world), there is a World Society. People are made in bottles and conditioned to do predestinated work. People have no family, marriage doesn’t exist. People are taught to serve the production, to reach the state’s motto: “Community, Indentity and Stability”.

People also are made in different grades of intelligence. In the “brave new world”, there is no depth of feeling, no ferment of ideas and no artistic creativity. Individuality is suppressed. Intellectual excitement and discovery have been abolished. People are brainwashed in their dreams. The community is presided over by the spirit of the apostle of mass- production, Henry Ford. He is worshipped as a god.

Bernard, one of the main persons, is quite intelligent, but by an error in the Predestination Centre he stayed small and weak. Because of that he is an outcast, and is also often alone. Bernard has a own vision of life. He will be displaced to Iceland. But before he is officially replaced he meets a pretty girl called Lenina. He takes her to a Savage Reservation: There, they meet John and his mother. They take them back to the “brave new world”. John falls in Love with Lenina. She wants to make love to him very soon, it is normal in her society. But John isn’t used to that, he hits her and calls her a stumpet. John’s mother dies of too much Soma. Soma is the drug Huxley dreamed of- half tranquilizer, half intoxicant, which produces an artificial happiness that makes people content with their lack of freedom.

John is furious with the “brave new world”, he tries to make a riot. John and a friend are brought to Iceland. John isolates himself from the society, and starts a living on his own, he wants to depend on nothing and no one.

The press discovers and they chase him. John commits suicide.

It is important to remember that Huxley wrote “Brave New World” in 1931, before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and before Stalin started the purges that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union. He therefore had no immediate real life reason to make tyranny and terror major elements of his story.

In 1937 the Huxleys came to the United States and one year later they went to Hollywood, where Aldous became a screenwriter. One of his films is “After many Summer dies the Swan”. In it the tycoon Jo Stoyle tries to achieve immortality through scientific experimentation, even if it means giving up humanity and returning to the completely animal state.

In 1946 Huxley wrote a Foreword to “Brave New World” in which he said he no longer wanted to make social sanity an impossibility, as he had in the novel. Though World War “2 had caused the deaths of some 20 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union, six million Jews and millions of others, and the newly developed atomic bomb held the threat of even more extensive destruction, Huxley had become convinced and wrote the foreword.

In the 50’s Huxley became very famous for his interests in psychedelic or mind- expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD which he apparently took a dozen times over ten years. He was looking for a drug that would allow an escape from the self and that if taken with caution would be physically and socially harmless. He put his beliefs in such a drug and in sanity into several books, like “Doors of Perception” 1954. ( THE DOORS)

But he warned of the dangers which he got to know during his experiments, too and so he wrote “The Devils of Loudun” .

Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. His wife died in 1955 and Aldous married Laura Archera a year later.

He worried about the dangers that treated sanity and so in 1958 he published “Brave New World Revisited”, a set of essays on real-life problems and ideas you’ll find in the novel, like overpopulation or brainwashing. With this book you can relate his bad new world to the real world.

Huxley produced 47 books in his long career as a writer. In 1959 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Award of Merit for his Novel ” After many Summer dies the Swan”, a prize given every 5 years.

At November 22nd, 1963, the same day that J.F.K. was assassinated, he died in Hollywood. He was cremated and his ashes were buried in his parents grave in England.

Huxleys work was influenced by the experiences in his life, the 1st and the 2nd World War, his travels and his experiences with drugs. He wrote about the problems in our time and was a man with a big “Allgemeinwissen”, he wrote about painting, music, science, philosophy, religion and a dozen other topics. In his books he often uses ironic and sarcasm. He was a brilliant social satirist and also wrote critics, poems, essays. He had a very critical point of view about politics, society and science and he wanted the reader to think about the problems he wrote about. He had a lot of readers, because of his different themes, in which human relations are often mentioned.

Brave New World

by Aldous Huxley

The characters:

The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning

opens the novel by explaining the reproductive

system of the brave new world

loves to throw “scientific data” at his listeners

so quickly that they cannot understand them

“know-it-all” impressed with his own importance

In fact, he knows less and is less important

than the Controller

comes alive when he tells Bernard what an horrible

experience Linda’s disappearance in the Savage

Reservation in New Mexico was for him

John’s return to London leads to

the total humiliation of the Director

Bernard Marx

Alpha of high intelligence, specialist in sleep-teaching

does not correspond to the uniformity that

usually characterizes all members of the same caste

small and therefore regarded as deformed

dislikes sports and likes to be alone, two

very unusual traits among Utopians

dislikes casual sex and is disgusted about

two men who talk about Lenina like she was a bit of meat

is unhappy in a world where everyone else is

happy

at first he seems to like being a nonconformist

and a rebel

but when he returns from the Savage Reservation

with John, he is suddenly popular with important people and

successful with women and loves it

uses John and his mother to gain social acceptance

in the end, he is exiled to Iceland and protests

bitterly

Lenina Crowne

nurse, responsible for injecting embryos with

immunizations against diseases

young and pretty despite having lupus

happy, shallow citizen

her only idiosyncrasy: she sometimes spends

more time than society approves dating one man exclusively

starts dating Bernard in order to avoid any

speculations about her conformity

repeats with little thought the phrases that

have been programmed into her psyche since “birth.”

seems one minute to have a trace of individual

personality and thinking capability that is lacking in the majority

of others

like all well-conditioned citizens, she believes

in having sex when she wants it, and cannot understand that John

avoids sex with her

is not a dynamic character yet she plays an

important role in the life of others, especially Bernard’s and

John’s

embodies the conflict John feels between body

and spirit, between love and lust

triggers John’s emotional violence and provides

the occasion for his suicide when she comes to see him whip

himself

The Controller, Mustapha Mond

one of the ten people who control the World

State

good-natured and dedicated to his work, and

extremely intelligent

understands people and ideas that are different,

which most Utopians cannot do

has read such forbidden books as the works

of Shakespeare and the Bible, and knows history and philosophy

once a gifted scientist, he made a conscious

choice as a young man to become one of the rulers instead of a

troublesome dissident.

one of the few Utopians who can choose, who

has free will, and this makes him more rounded and more

attractive than most of the other characters

concerns with morality, but he uses his moral

force and his sanity for the immoral and insane goals of Utopia

might be the most dangerous person in the B.N.W.

John the Savage:

most complex character in the novel

son of two members of Utopia (the Director

and Linda), but has grown up on a Savage Reservation

only character who can really compare the two

different worlds

trough him the author shows that his Utopia

is a bad world

tall and handsome

as a boy he grew up absorbing three cultures:

the Utopian culture,

his mother told him about

the Indian culture

in which he lived, but which rejected him as an outsider

the culture of

Shakespeare’s plays

real person with real feelings and emotions,

and not a body with a prefabricated mind like the others

is an alien in the Reservation as well as in

Utopia

naive in relations with Utopians

his beliefs contradict with those of the B.N.W.,

as he shows in his struggle over sex with Lenina and his fight

against the system after his mother dies

Linda

John’s mother, a Beta minus who sleeps with

the Director and becomes pregnant accidentally

lives for 20 years in the squalor of the Reservation

grows old, sick, and fat without the medical

care that keeps people physically young in Utopia

sleeps with many of the Indians according to

her Utopian behavior and never understands why the women

despise her or why the community makes John

an outcast

when she returns to London, she takes ever-increasing

doses of soma, always considered to have no side-effects

and stays perpetually high- until the drug

kills her