Huxley’s novel Brave New World has many stylistic aspects of which one could focus. I for one have chosen to focus upon the setting of the work to help make my points about the theme of the work and prove my thesis. By contrasting the settings of the novel-London, the “savage” reservation, and the lighthouse-illustrates Huxley’s view of dystopia as a place where society constructs the individual.
In the first six chapters of the novel, the setting is extremely prevalent, as there is little to no character development or discussion of a plot in these chapters. The layout of the Hatchery and Conditioning center is a short building of only 38 stories. It has several different floors with conveyor belts slowly moving upward with tubes of unborn fetuses on them. At each stage, a different action is taken towards the embryos based upon their predestined class they are to be born into. Based on what they choose the fetus to be, it could have oxygen flow limited to it in order to stunt brain development and kill intelligence, have alcohol introduced to kill brain cells, or even electric shock or extreme cold. The extreme cold would be for the purpose of job training at a stage still unborn, making the embryo hate the cold and thrive when working in a very warm environment. This society has castes for the purpose of being more productive as a society and promoting happiness within each individuals social group of friends, of which they will be most similar to. The Hatchery and Conditioning Center is even separated by different castes being conditioned on different floors, helping to have the setting further show that society shapes the individual.
Society helps construct the individual in a myriad of ways in this novel. Whether it be from conditioning the embryos at the Hatchery to hate the outdoors, but still aspire to go there just to spend their money. The peer pressure people feel to fit in such as Bernard who is just an inch or so shorter than the rest of his caste but yet stands out like a sore thumb do to the way everyone is identical and therefore he feels an outcast. Or perhaps even just the way that Linda was never able to adapt and change to the life on the reservation, she always was molded by the London society and therefore wasn’t able to change the way she behaved. These actions help to show that people are what the society around them makes them. If Bernard’s society weren’t so identical for each respective caste he may not have been ridiculed nearly as much, not become rebellious, and just blended in not looking for a better alternative to the way society is run. If the Epsilons weren’t conditioned to want to go to the countryside even though they hate it they would have more money and society as a whole would have fewer funds of which to spend on improving their society. And of course, if Linda had been able to adapt to the Savage way of life instead of London society’s she may have lived longer and she would have certainly not been as heavily publicly humiliated and called a whore.
According to SparkNotes.com, “It is important to understand that Brave New World is not simply a warning about what could happen to society if things go wrong, it is also a satire of the society in which Huxley existed, and which still exists today. While the attitudes and behaviors of World State citizens at first appear bizarre, cruel, or scandalous, many clues point to the conclusion that the World State is simply an extreme-but logically developed-version of our society’s economic values, in which individual happiness is defined as the ability to satisfy needs, and success as a society is equated with economic growth and prosperity.” (SparkNotes) These points help show Huxley’s purpose for writing this work. He was trying to awaken the people of his time to the troubles that were present at the time or ones that he saw as possibilities on the horizon. He may make points that seem extreme or harsh to the reader, but with a little thought one can see the point Huxley was trying to make and the similarities are stunning how close this terrible vision of the world is to what is actually reality.
Huxley sees certain things in his society and predicts how they will unfold in the future, such as when he predicts how society in the future will have the capacity to be able to genetically engineer human beings through embryonic fertilization and maturation. In most of the first chapter Huxley focuses on how the embryos are conditioned and the processes they go through before they are “born”. One such example of this would be of the five castes-Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon- Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon undergo the Bokanovsky Process, which involves shocking an egg so that it divides to form up to ninety-six identical embryos, which then develop into ninety-six identical human beings. The Alpha and Beta embryos never undergo this dividing process, which can weaken the embryos. The Director explains that the Bokanovsky Process facilitates social stability because the clones it produces are predestined to perform identical tasks at identical machines. The cloning process is one of the tools the World State uses to implement its guiding motto: “Community, Identity, Stability”. (Huxley) The role of the Center is key to this point also, its many efficient levels, its proficient workers, its cold architecture, all give a mental image of this emotionless, heartless, place of business in which people are the by-product and they are about as important to this society as any other product one may manufacture in perhaps a textile factory or a shoe company. The facility is a sort of symbol for the mindset of the society, in the way that it is economical and productive and soulless, much the same way that their society acts.
According to Cliffsnotes.com, “With their Indian guide, Bernard and Lenina enter the Savage Reservation. Lenina finds everything here “queer.” Lenina soon discovers that she has forgotten her soma, so she must experience the Indian village of Malpais as an unmedicated reality. In quick succession, she and Bernard witness old age in the figure of an ancient Indian, Indian mothers nursing their babies, and a hedonistic ritual dance that fuses Christian and Indian religion. This wild dance ends with a coyote-masked shaman whipping a young man until he collapses – a blood sacrifice to bring the rain and make the corn grow. After this bloody spectacle, Bernard and Lenina meet a straw-haired, blue-eyed young man dressed – incongruously, it seems – as an Indian. Strangely, too, the young man speaks like a character from Shakespeare and tells them that his mother – Linda – comes from the “Other Place.” When he also mentions that his father was named “Tomakin,” Bernard connects this young man with the D.H.C.’s visit to the Reservation. The young savage introduces them to Linda – a “very stout blonde squaw,” who tells Lenina and Bernard her strange story of being abducted by the Indians. She has spent much of her life on the Reservation, she explains, where she gave birth to her son, John, the young savage.” (Cliffsnotes) Bernard soon realizes that John is the son of the D.H.C. and decides to bring them both back to London with himself and Lenina for the purpose of embarrassing the D.H.C. so that he could not exile Bernard. The role of the Savage Reservation in the story here is to provide a stark difference in comparison from the society of London. You see Lenina as the prototypical citizen of London society, and her reactions to what she sees in the Reservation are prefectly predictable and to be expected. The reader can imagine that any normal citizen out of London society would have a very similar response to how Lenina reacted to seeing what she saw.
According to Gradesaver.com “Brave New World largely defines freedom through the structures that prevent freedom. Bernard feels these constraints most acutely, as in a scene from chapter 6, when Bernard and Lenina have a conversation about freedom. Lenina insists that everyone has a great deal of freedom – the freedom “to have the most wonderful time.” Soma represents this kind of freedom, as it puts people in a hypnotic state in which they no longer feel as though they should ask questions or defy the structures of society. Bernard insists that this is no freedom at all. Bernard claims that his ideal of freedom is the freedom to be an individual apart from the rest of society. Bernard strives to be free in his “own way…not in everybody else’s way.” Huxley argues here that certain structures in our own modern society work in the same way that drugs like soma work in this fantastical dystopia. Huxley often argues against the use of advertising specifically for the way that it hypnotized people into wanting and buying the same products. Such things keep people within predefined structures, and it quashes free thought, which ultimately restricts freedom.” (Anonymous) John saw things like the use of advertising in London’s society and it was one of the reasons he hated it. He saw all these things that struck him so oddly that he hated whom he had become from being a part of that society, even for a short amount of time.
So, in conclusion this novel by Aldous Huxley is a masterwork that speaks to the eerie direction society could be headed just based off of a small sample size of information. Huxley predicts things to happen in the future and several of them have actually happened. His use of the setting to illustrate his theme is vital. Whether it be the Hatchery where human life is undervalued and mass produced, the Reservation where people live drastically differently from London and are very dirty and unhealthy in comparison, or the lighthouse where John seeks solace from society and all the things about it he hates, however he is unable to escape and eventually commits suicide to be able to escape it for good.
Sources:
Anonymous. *An Analysis of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World*. GradeSaver, 08 December 1998 Web. 15 May 2011.
Higgins, Charles, Regina Higgins, and Warren Paul. CliffsNotes on Brave New World. 15 May 2011
Huxley, Aldous. “Brave New World“. New York: HarperCollins, 1932
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Brave New World.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC.2002. Web. 3 May 2011.