Aldous Huxley and the Brave New World
Aldous Huxley and the Brave New World
Within any novel, there are always elements taken directly from the author’s life and experiences. Their thoughts and opinions will also be imparted to the novel, delivering a direct message to the reader and perhaps arguing their opinions, to persuade the audience. These influences on and from his environment are apparent in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In the 1930’s, the time the book was written, many world-scale events were taking place, and society was changing as a whole. All of this no doubt affected Huxley, and resulted in one the most powerful, thought provoking novels. His vision of the future gives great insight to an undesirable lifestyle which may not be so different from today’s existing one. The aspect that makes Huxley’s novel so classic is his visionary ability to use these current influences and invent such a fascinating society, and at the time revolutionary new world. This has resulted in a novel that not only affected people of its time, but has also had profound effects on latter day societies.
Huxley’s family all consisted of upper class intellectuals, His father was a biographer, editor, and poet, and his grandfather was a famous biologist. Living around these people, he not only received a superior education in a wide variety of subjects, but had to deal with the constant pressure of living up to their expectations. Living in England, Huxley describes a very harsh class system in his novel, no doubt taken from the same system in his country. There was also an emergence of fascism throughout Europe, coupled with an economic depression, which also made their way into the book. Although fascism was just surfacing in the 1930’s, Huxley saw the impending harms that could result from it, and so decided to use a totalitarian government in the book to illustrate this. Finally we see that social morals were changing, with a more open view of sexuality, more equality between man and woman, and a great deal of consumerism. These social changes sparked an interest in Huxley, and were exaggerated for the book.
When the book was first released it didn’t receive much attention. However when a similar, more popular novel, 1984 was released people began to see the similarities between the two and further realized that Brave New World was a more realistic interpretation. The book touches on subjects of government and civilization as a whole, and the realism of his predictions on them are what shocked so many people. Huxley presents a dystopia, where the government is in total power of its citizens, where people live in constant happiness due to advanced scientific techniques. A debate targets one of the most important questions Huxley feels we must ask, should the state of happiness be the prime goal for mankind, or should free will, at the expense of contentment, be the key. The government in Brave New World decides that keeping people happy will ensure stability, where they all enjoy their lives. The director in the novel explains to the new students how the World State is run; when he explains that extreme conditioning “is the secret of happiness and virtue, liking what youve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.” (1:16).
When John, the protagonist, enters the story, he brings the other side of the argument. Because John has grown up in a lifestyle more similar to ours, he sees the World State in the same respect we do. He sees how the citizens are denied the truth of history, literature, emotion, and ultimately humanity. When John confronts Mustapha Mond, a world leader, he argues these points. Mond explains that stability and happiness are more important than humanity. Although he realizes what John is saying, he insists that social stability requires the sacrifice of the things John values. Mond tells John that “The worlds stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they cant get [And sacrifice of many things is] the price we have to pay for stability. Youve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.” (1:220). John protests that, without these things, human life is not worth living, even with happiness. Mond explains that the government’s plan is foolproof, with the help of soma, a drug which offers a way to deal with unpleasant emotions that lead to inefficiency and conflict, and keep people from trying to change the way they live. He says
If ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme