Review of Brave New World

 Review of “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

Last week I reviewed “1984” by George Orwell, and I feel like “Brave New World” is sort of a companion piece to that book. Both books are set in a future society of London; both deal with government control, and both deal with issues of sexuality in different ways. While “1984” is a bleak and gloomy totalitarian world, “Brave New World” has a sheen to its world that allows the reader to believe in government control. Author Aldous Huxley created this world borrowing from socialism and capitalism to create a “Utopian” society that conceives people to be content with their role in society. Through conditioning, consumerism, and class, the people have lost their freedom of choice in return for a stable social economy and the illusion of happiness.

In the book, people are produced in a lab and bred for specific job types. Some people are conditioned to be the perfect workers. The director of the conditioning facility says, “But in Epsilons...we don't need human intelligence” (Huxley, pp. 15). This shows that the lower-class people are less intelligent than the upper class of Alphas and Betas. This allows for the upper class to stay in power over the lower classes. Everyone is socially conditioned to view fixing something that is old and worn as anti-social or anti-normative. The phrase they use is “The more stitches, the less riches” (Huxley, pp. 121). This is a phrase I say anytime I have to stitch up some ripped clothing.

“Brave New World” deals with social class systems and how they inform the governmental structure. The use of class systems and the treatment of people within a specific caste exemplify social inequality. The class system, consumerism, and drug “soma” are examples of how the people are not truly free but merely cogs in the economic machine-driven to create social stability. This means that people are happy living in a world when they don't know anything different. The World State government claims that their people are so glad and pride in conditioning them to be happy.

In the book, the world controller, Mustapha Mond, suggests that substituting pain and conflict for the drug soma creates happiness within people. He states that “They're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age” (Huxley, pp. 220). The people are happy because they don't know what they are missing in life. It is an interesting philosophy that can be applied to our current times. If people are happy, does it matter how or why they've become happy? A good question to ponder and something that drives the story.

The book also takes on a more progressive view of sexuality instead of the restricted view that the book “1984” holds. Because people aren't born through sexual reproduction, women are encouraged to visit the clinic anytime they get pregnant. Casual sex with multiple partners is normal and treated as an agreement, without passion. People have been conditioned not to have children.

About halfway through the book, the main point of view shifts to a new character known as savage John. John was raised on a Native American reservation in the United States, a place that the people of the World State find as a tourist destination. They consider Native Americans to be savage because they have children and aren't driven by consumerism. John was raised by his mother, who came from London and was left behind at the reservation. John moves to London and becomes something of an oddity because he doesn't understand and conform to the social conditions in the World State government.

In the end, John is exiled and tells Mustapha Mond that he has a right to be unhappy. This goes back to the original question about people and their happiness. The World State government wants people to be happy but never stop to ask if people don't want to be happy. Because they have taken away a person's free will (to some extent). Huxley does a great job of balancing the lack of free will with the happiness of the people. This book is an excellent example of a dystopia masked as a society of utopia. Huxley highlights the fun and freeing nature of the World State government, and it's not until savage John appears that the book starts to question the government. Huxley says that he was inspired by H.G. Wells' book “A Modern Utopia,” which I might try to read.

If you have read “1984” and haven't yet read “Brave New World,” I highly suggest reading this book. I didn't love the book. I actually loved the first two chapters, then slowly lost interest as the book went on. But that is because I wanted to see more about how technology and science function in the new world. It's still a fascinating book to read.

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Get ready for Halloween by reading my spooky/thriller inspired stories!

"Grave Little Witches"

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Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. (2010). Brave New World. Harper Perennial.

Marx, Karl. (2017) “The German Ideology”,Literary Theory: An Anthology, 3^rd ed. Rivkin, Julie & Ryan, Michael (Eds.), Blackwell publishing, pp. 730-735.