Student Study Packet
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AN
INTRODUCTION
THE
UTOPIAN IDEA
I. If we were to survey the body of writings about Utopia, we might note in some of the historical examples many of the ingredients that compose Brave New World.
A. Utopian literature dates from the fifth century before Christ.
1. It was early seen as a sound technique for promoting ethical teaching within a pleasing framework which had some meaning of its own.
2.
The form soon became quite popular with readers,
especially as the fable and the religious and secular allegory of the Middle
Ages.
B. The Greek Aristophanes, in his play The Birds, sketched a Utopian city in the air meant to highlight the corruption of imperial Athens.
1. Aristotle discussed the ideal community somewhat indirectly in those of his works which have a political tinge, notably in the Nichomachean Ethics.
a. It was, however, in the hands of Plato that the scientifically organized cooperative community received systematic treatment and full expression.
b. He was the first to note that in any Utopia some means of selection and regulation of its populace would be essential.
2. In the search for the common good—or justice —within a system of political economy, imagines a controlled superstate where each man's role is based upon a biased view.
a. Plato accepted as obvious that there were natural rulers and natural subjects, the former of course in clear minority.
3. In Socrates' idealized community philosophers were to be the born rulers (reminding us of Mustapha Mond in Brave New World), because they were wise and therefore honest.
4. Below them, keeping order, would be the larger class of warriors,
a. and below these the huge mass of workers.
5. In Plato's society, as in Huxley's more rigid one, children were nurtured by the state.
6. There was no marriage, since wives were held in common.
7. So we see that eugenics [LM1]and political repression were major factors in the earliest Utopias.
a.
But the most critical factor was the hierarchy.
C. In the Middle Ages, the influence of The Republic was seen in the ideal state suggested by Sir Thomas More in the volume which gave its name to this type of literature as a whole, Utopia (1516).
1. The name is actually a play on two Greek words meaning "no place" and "good place."
a. Already, however, in More's thought the social notions of Plato have undergone a change.
i. The book presents an indictment of the harsh justice prevailing in Elizabethan times, wherein More maintains that crime is a result of the perverted social order.
ii. Instead of punishing crime, the state should correct the societal abuses which cause it.
a)
The worst of these abuses is private ownership of
property, which breeds envy, greed, and crime.
b)
Property should be enjoyed by all, regardless of birth.
II. In the second part of Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, the hero, visits the Utopian island, which contains fifty-four well planned cities.
A. Here, population is kept constant, agriculture is regulated, and the produce of the state is distributed directly to the public at community markets.
B. Love of money and finery are particularly discouraged, and the citizens are taught farming plus a craft.
C. The work day has been deliberately shortened so that everyone may have time for some relaxation and for education, which is state sponsored and compulsory.
D. There was absolute tolerance in the case of religion, but agnostics were not permitted to hold office.
E. Laws were kept to a minimum and were so simplified that all could understand them, making lawyers unnecessary.
F. War
was waged only to relieve the oppressed or in self-defense.
III. A kindred branch of more or less prophetic writing was the religious allegory of late classical times and the early Middle Ages.
A. Here, as in St. Augustine's City of God or the much later Pilgrim's Progress (1675) of Bunyan, the theme is one of finding individual or group salvation, commonly within a society not devoted to Utopian ends.
B. The theme of Tommaso Campanula's City of the Sun (1623) was salvation.
1. The book advocated a type of communism and a biologically controlled society, ruled by a priest-king and three ministers of state.
a.
Actually, the scheme reflected Campanella's dream of a
united mankind converted to Catholicism in a world state under the leadership
of the pope.
C. The Renaissance promise of science as liberator and universal benefactor sounded in More was very vigorously proclaimed by Francis Bacon in his unfinished New Atlantis (1627).
D. Through skillful research and discovery, an isolated society completely harnessed nature to do man's bidding.
1. Bacon was able to predict the microphone and the telephone, among other more fantastic improvements.
2.
Science plays an extremely important part in Brave New
World; there it has helped enslave man rather than liberate him, but Huxley is
always careful to distinguish between pure and applied science.
E. Huxley has most often been likened by his critics to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), who has been called the most versatile, powerful, and withering of English satirists.
1. Huxley resembles him not only in being the possessor of a vast wit, but in acting like him as a gadfly [LM2]to the state.
a. From the Battle of the Books (1697) to A Modest Proposal (1129), nothing escaped Swift's scorn, and there was scarcely an institution that did not come under his unflinching scrutiny.
i. He
resembles our present author in that his early wit and trenchant powers of
analysis gave way at the end of his career to high despair.
F. Almost all of Swift's moralistic major works are allegories, each examining and assessing some facet of public life.
1. The celebrated Gulliver's Travels (1726) was a masterpiece of semi-Utopian narrative, and has been one of the most widely read books of all time, both for children and adults.
a. On the surface, it is a book of travels into highly improbable lands and hence a story of adventure.
b. Underneath it is a fierce satire in which Swift attacks the pettiness and grossness of man, and unleashes his bitterness against fate and human society.
c.
It is not without its imaginative Utopian gimmicks: a
race of very tiny people; another race of beings sixty feet tall; a society of
philosophers and scientists (one of whom has spent eight years in trying to
extract sunbeams from cucumbers —a jibe at the Royal Society); and a truly
Utopian land which is ruled in peace and integrity by a horse-like people.
IV. Another strain in Brave New World stems from what might be termed the literature of escape.
A. It calls for that simplification of personal want and naturalness of living that we find on the part of the outcast inhabitants of the Savage Reservation in Brave New World.
B. The historical apostle of this way of thinking and feeling was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
1. The eighteenth-century philosopher advocated an appeal to the simple dictates of nature in politics, religion, education, art, and living in general.
2. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," announces the Social Contract (1762), and for an excellent poetic description of this predicament we need turn only to Huxley's Utopian state.
3. Rousseau blamed whatever misery man usually suffers on an overabundance of "culture" and complexity of civilization.
a. He was an outspoken critic of the smug progressive tenets of the enlightenment in much the same way Huxley is of the optimism of the twenties and thirties.
i. Both felt that reason was powerless to perfect the world without the guidance of feeling.
ii. Rousseau's
championship of the noble savage has obviously found its more modern
counterpart in the warm and sympathetic portrayal of John in Brave New World.
C. The idea of achieving perfection by escaping the impact of culture through individual retreat is abundantly treated in literature, secular as well as religious.
1. A good American example is Thoreau's Walden.
a. The idea of retreating to nature and the natural state held much attraction for Huxley, though it was unsuccessful for his character, John. It played a part in Huxley's own life, as seen in his migration from Europe to the Caribbean to the New Mexican desert —to join D. H. Lawrence —to Los Angeles and finally to the California countryside.
b. We know too that Huxley was thinking a lot about political decentralization at this time.
i. This was to be traced to his experiences in fast paced Los Angeles, where he came to feel a deep distrust for democracy and equality.
a)
The idea that the least government is the best
government can be traced clearly in Thoreau and Rousseau.
D. It is perhaps more than coincidental that the title of Huxley's novel is taken from Shakespeare.
1.
The themes
of escapism, glorification of nature, and natural nobility run through
much of that poet's work, and it is Shakespeare which John the Savage uses in
obtaining his entire education in conformity with nature.
E. Following 1600, the output of Utopian literature enormously increased and grew more practical in tone.
1. The ideas of men like Robert Owen in England and Charles Fourier in France resulted in actual experimental models of Utopian communities.
2. Owen himself established one first in New Lanarck, Scotland, and then at New Harmony, in Indiana.
3. Many of these inspired settlements had some religious affiliation: the eighteenth century saw the Mennonites and Moravians, the nineteenth, the Shakers, Mormons, and Zionists; all form specialized societies.
4. Most, if not all of these were earmarked by
a. a simple cooperative economy,
b. private property was discouraged,
c. there was much simplification of custom,
d. cultivation of the land and home crafts were sponsored,
e. and family relations were frequently subject to experimentation.
5. This type of community rarely lasted any length of time, and where one did persist, it usually modified its original character markedly due to pressures from inside and out. One of the most interesting attempts was an American one —Brook Farm.
a. Founded about the time of the Civil War, it was associated with native romantic philosophy and simple cooperative living.
i. Thoreau,
himself, had some sympathy with the experiment.
F. In 1872 a notable English example appeared: it was Erewhon (an anagram of nowhere) or “Over The Range” by Samuel Butler. It became quite popular. In it a young traveler discovers the land of Erewhon, a realm of quite different ideals in satiric contrast with Victorian English standards.
1. In the new land, disease is a crime and crime a disease;
2. religion is performed like banking;
3. and machines are banned,
a. it is feared they will become the masters of men.
4.
In Erewhon the plot features a romantic interest.
a. Continuing in the Romantic-Victorian tradition, one of the most popular novels of Utopia was the American Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy,
i. It appeared in 1888 and was one of the number of visionary utterances by the same author. In it, the hero is transported to the Boston of the year 2000.
ii. It
featured an industrial army; nevertheless it was entirely American in scope,
disavowing class war to achieve its aims.
G. The twentieth century saw a flood of literary Utopias.
1. These were mostly "technological Utopias" in which man enjoyed a blissful leisure while work was done by obedient machines.
a.
Some of these were the expression of serious economic
thought, as in the case of Wells; however, most were merely naive
glorifications of mechanical progress.
2. It is curious to note that H. G. Wells (1866-1946) studied science under old Thomas Henry Huxley.
a. Wells came finally to be considered a master of science fiction because his glimpses of the future seemed uncanny, even though they merely extended the limits of the probable.
i. In 1895, The Time Machine divided the earth between master race and resentful serfs — a precursive [LM3]scheme of what we shudder at in Brave New World.
ii. The War of the Worlds (1898) stated that reason would triumph over the instincts of the blood.
a) Wells was a critic who believed passionately in civilization and man.
b) His constant view was that nationalism was anachronistic, and that contemporary systems and institutions were merely transitory and must of necessity give way to a world state.
c) A Modern Utopia (1905) was but one of a series of prophetic novels.
1. A more mature product, The Shape of Things to Come (1933) was written at just about the same time as Brave New World; the two works are comparable, though the respective authors are considered as belonging to two different ages.
' In the Wells
novel, following a furiously destructive World War II, there is a creative
revolution, and then a new government of the world under the Air Dictatorship.
Despite such seeming bureaucracy, the world undergoes what is termed a
"progressive revolution" —science is put to work to level and rebuild
old buildings, conquer disease, and to produce many mechanical conveniences.
The novel is notable for its (sometimes bitter) condemnation of capitalism as
the self-destructive creator of great waste.
H. Written in the same year as the Wells novel, James Hilton's Lost Horizon represented a return to the sentimental, escapist Utopia.
1. In his tale of a valley miraculously cut off from the severe Himalayan winters, the climate is so beneficial that citizens live many times the length of a normal lifetime, and natural resources are more than abundant. Society is based upon the principles of fellowship and benevolence. The exciting plot of this novel made it known to one of the widest audiences.
a.
It added the name "Shangri-la" as a common
noun to the English language.
I. The
use of the device of describing a Utopia as a vehicle for satire or the
exercise of wit is as old as the serious model. The Birds of Aristophanes was
an early example. When the chimerical [LM4]element
in Utopian thinking came to be stressed at the expense of the ideal, it
produced what has been called the "reverse Utopia" or pseudo-Utopian
satire, of which Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell are
examples.
J. In George Orwell (1903-1950), we find the true revolutionist-poet.
1. He wrote his satires in a later and even more complicated world than that in which Huxley produced Brave New World.
2. Orwell was a radical who inclined far to the left of center in politics.
a. And he was no armchair theorist, but insisted on going to Spain in 1936 to fight on the Republican side in the civil war.
b.
One of the overriding factors in his thought was his
rabid hatred for 'what he considered authoritarian ism, as reproduced in two
brilliant satires.
i. The amusing Animal Farm (1946) is the first expression of Orwell's concern about the destruction of individual liberty.
a) It is a satire about life in an animal community under an animal dictator.
b)
Orwell, writing a decade or more after Huxley, had
already had evidence that dictatorship was a legitimate and perhaps permanent
threat to the political future of mankind.
ii. Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) attempted to describe that future.
a) The work was the culminating artistic achievement of Orwell's career.
b) It is a description of life under a dictator, Big Brother, and a vast hierarchy under him.
c) We never meet the despot nor do we know whether he in fact exists, there being dark hints as to his being only an empty and symbolic figure head.
d) Much of the story reads like a spy thriller.
1. There is a love interest between man and woman who plot revolution against Big Brother,
2. but they are betrayed by a member of the Secret Service.
' He is responsible for brainwashing the two revolutionaries by subjecting them to the things they most dread in life.
e) In a tense ending, the lovers denounce each other and embrace conformity to the rule of Big Brother.
f)
The message of the novel is unmistakable: once a power
elite gains even partial control, it is by its very nature bound to advance to
autocracy and to become self-perpetuating.
A LIST OF
TERMS
1. Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons
A. The five castes of Utopia.
2. Anthrax Bomb
A. A pre-Utopian weapon
for germ warfare.
3. Bokanovsky Process
A. A method whereby a human egg has its normal
development arrested, whereupon it proceeds to bud, producing many identical
eggs.
4. Bottling
A. The process of putting artificially created
embryos into sowperitoneum-lined bottles where they may mature.
5. Centrifugal
Bumble-Puppy
A. A complicated ball
game played with complicated equipment.
6. Chemical Persuasion
A. The use of chemical stimulants and tranquilizers to control the
wills of men and thus make them receptive
to suggestion.
7. Community Sing
A. A pseudo-religious
and fraternal meeting for the lower castes.
8. Decanting
A. That process whereby Utopian embryos are
removed from the bottles in which they have matured.
9. Ectogenesis
A. Birth outside the human body.
10. Electromagnetic Golf, Escalator Squash,
Obstacle Golf, Riemann-Surface Tennis
A. Utopian sports played with elaborate
equipment designed to increase consumption.
11. Emotional Engineering
A. The profession whose practitioners prepare
propagandistic diversions for the state's populace.
12. Erotic Play
A. A pastime of the Utopian children in which
they explore one another's bodies — designed to forestall any adult feelings of
guilt concerning sex.
13. Feelies
A. An elaborate motion picture in which the
audience takes hold of two knobs on the seat and thus feels the action taking
place on the screen.
14. Fertilizing Room,
A. The room where human sex cells are
artificially united.
15. Five Step
A. A popular Utopian dance.
16. Ford
A. The Utopian idol.
17. Freemartin
A. A sterilized Utopian woman —the majority.
18. Hypnopaedia
A. Teaching during sleep; used to drum
prejudices into the subconscious of the sleeper.
19. Internal and External Secretion Trust
A. The Utopian organization that is in charge
of hormones and extracts to keep the people young and happy.
20. Liners and Matriculators
A. Employees in the Bottling Room.
21. Malthusian Belt
A. A device to discourage sex in the
unsterilized woman.
22. Malthusian Drill
A. For the unsterilized females —a routine to
prevent pregnancy.
23. Musical Bridge
A. One of the Utopian games.
24. Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning (or simply
Conditioning)
A. An intricate psychological procedure in
which a bad stimulus is substituted for a good one to remove an undesirable
response, or in which a good stimulus may be substituted for a bad one in order
to strengthen a desired response.
25. Orgy-Porgy
A. A semi-religious rite in which
indiscriminate wholesale sexual relations produce solidarity in the members.
26. Phosphorous Recovery
A. That process whereby phosphorous is
captured from cremated bodies and returned to enrich the soil.
27. Pneumatic
A. Said of some Utopian women, buxom.
28. Podsnap's Technique
A. A method of artificially hastening the
ripening of embryos.
29. Power Elite
A. A small group which governs artificially by means of force.
30. Pregnancy Substitute
A. A medical procedure in which Utopian women
are given all the psychological benefits of childbirth without undergoing it.
31. Savage Reservation
A. A place where those persons were confined
who were not considered worthy of converting to Utopian ways.
32. Scent and Color Organ
A. A console that plays concertos of fragrant
aromas and capriccios of colored lights.
33. Sexaphone
A. A popular band instrument in Utopia.
34. Sex-hormone Chewing Gum
A. One of the artificial contrivances to
promote sexual satisfaction without conception.
35. Social Predestination
A. A process whereby a card file of data on
all individuals in Utopia is used to establish a quota system for those types
of persons the state is about to create.
36. Solidarity Service
A. A pseudo-religious and fraternal meeting
for the upper castes.
37. Soma
A. The religion of the people; it comes in
many forms, mainly tablets. It is a pacifier which lulls the passions and
understandings of the people; a major instrument of social stability. (The name
refers to an actual narcotic used by the ancient Hindus.)
38. Subliminal Projection
A. An image presented to the sight or words
to the hearing for a matter of microseconds and superimposed upon visual or
auditory entertainment. What is seen or heard in that lightning-like interval
lodges in the subconscious and tends to be a powerful influence on subsequent
behavior.
39. Super- Vox- Wurlitzeriana
A. A synthetic-music box.
40. Surrogate
A. A substitute for something, or the thing in an adulterated form.
41. T-Model
A. Utopian counterpart of the Christian
cross; Ford removed the top bar, making a T.
42. Violent Passion Surrogate (V.P.S.)
A. Another chemical devised to give the body
the psychological feeling of having had normal sexual relations.
43. Voice of Good Feeling
A. The artificial voice that quells any riot
by lulling the populace with pacific suggestions from loudspeakers.
44. Will-to-Order
A. That compulsion in man which urges him to
create unity out of multiplicity, and hence to over organize things.
ANALYSIS OF CENTRAL
CHARACTERS
Glum, given to melancholy, physically deformed, Marx is a
typical Huxleyan anti-hero—full of ideas but sterile when it comes to action.
He is one we clearly do not wish to identify
with: his inner conflicts make him suffer throughout the length of the
novel and lose in the end—both his struggle
and himself. Small and dark, when he should be tall and fair like the Alpha-plus he is mentally, a social outcast,
he is at heart an opportunist who greedily seizes and savors the little
power he can wheedle as John's mentor. Unlike Watson, his rancorous
nonconformity comes from his bitterness
toward the state and its citizens rather than from ideals and deep conviction.
His loneliness makes him resent even the friendliness of Watson and John.
John (the Savage)
Perhaps he is the most
enigmatic character in the story. Comely and fair, wholesomely educated, often
moved to tears, it is not easy to understand the root of his guilt complex and
his profound need for suffering, particularly since he is often thought to be a
portrait of D. H. Lawrence, a man practically devoid of guilt. John's
self-condemnation may be grounded in the facts of his birth, which were the
principal reason for the enforced exile of his mother from Utopia. He looks
forward with great eagerness to being transported to Utopia where he
anticipates exploring to its depths a world such as the one opened for him by Shakespeare.
He is a symbol of the artist or the monastic striving for ecstasy. His
loneliness is dramatized by his dissatisfaction with both crude nature and with
refined society. When he makes the mistake of leaving the world of art and
mysticism, he finds nothing worth living for in the ordinary world. He is
clearly the image of the great man trying to liberate himself from his own
egotism.
He is dark,
inscrutable, almost sinister, and is a World Controller in the utmost sense. He
would never sully himself with physical violence, nor would he stoop to common
invective. He is the diplomat and perfect gentleman, while ruling with an iron
hand. Long ago he had the choice between his own happiness — nonconformity with
discomfort—and serving other people's happiness —conformity with comfort; he
chose the latter. He knows the establishment of Utopia is irreversible and that
it is a closed system which needs little effort to keep it running. In this
knowledge alone consists his happiness. As Mond says, happiness —it's all
relative. Much of Brave New World reflects the contemporary search for
respect. Tomakin will not make a father image: Bernard snaps his fingers at
him, and Tomakin recoils from John in horror. Mond seems to have the stature
for a father figure: Marx cringes before him and John finds in him a worthy
adversary.
The Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.), who is tall and spare to match his
meanness. He is prim, almost prissy, certainly self-centered. From his little
slips, we can see he pictures himself in the role of World Controller. His rise
to the top has been attributable to his fanatical belief and the fact that he
never stepped out of line. He would be quick to turn on an imagined enemy, and
his vindictiveness would nourish his ego. His age is hard to guess, but he
strives to be something of a Lothario. Linda refers to him as a hard, cruel
man.
Handsome, powerful,
agile, he is darkly rugged and has the strong features of the Alpha-plus. He is
mistrusted by Utopian officials, who think him too clever. He is, however, the
symbol of the ineffectuality of reason, because he feels he has a power for
saying something important for society, but recognizes that what he does say
amounts to nothing.
A voluptuous girl; it
is plain that her life revolves around sex and frivolous amusements, and that
the men find her highly desirable. But she cannot cure her tendency to want to
go steady. Taking her environment on its own terms, she is honest,
straightforward, and healthy. But she symbolizes the unrestrained domination of
sentiment over intelligence, which proves her undoing.
John's mother, who
symbolizes the failure of trying to impose the mores of one effete society upon
a totally backward one. Herself an outcast, she represents the resignation of intelligence
in the face of overwhelming odds. Her failure to realize that the old carnality
of Utopia was possible only with artificial chemical bolstering results in
wearing herself out through debauchery in her own dream world. The parallels
between her personality and Lenina's suggest they are both mother images for
John: he continues to worship them as be begins to despise them. They both echo
Huxley's essential distrust of women.
Really a minor character who exhibits the complete absence of feeling. An ambitious hustler, he is part and parcel of the system. His main function seems to be as a contrast of contentment from orthodoxy with Bernard's misery from nonconformity.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
STUDY GUIDE
CHAPTER 1
1. What is the World State
Motto?
2. What is the year?
3. What are the five social
classes?
4. What is Boknovsky's Process?
5. What is Podsnap's Technique?
6.