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Aldous Huxley • Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, southern England, in 1894, into an estabilished intellectual family. He was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, Victorian scientist who had greatly contributed to the diffusion of the theory of evolution. In 1915 he went to Eton and then to Oxford, taking his degree. Then when World War I broke out he was declared unfit for military. In 1932 he write his most most famous work “Brave New World”. In 1937 he moved to southern California and in 1963 he died in America.
The origin of the title Brave New World's ironic title derives from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest:O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't!This line is word-by-word quoted in the novel by John the Savage, when he first sees Lenina.The expression "brave new world" also appears in Émile Zola's Germinal and in Rudyard Kipling's 1919 poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings.Translations of the novel into other languages often allude to similar expressions used in an attempt to capture the same irony.
Setting (the real protagonist) • The novel opens in London in the "year of our Ford 632" (AD 2540) and the vast majority of the population is unified under The World State, an eternally peaceful, stable global society in which goods and resources are plentiful and everyone is happy. Natural reproduction has been done away with and society is divided into five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, each Alpha or Beta is the product of one fertilized egg developing into one fetus, instead members of other castes are not unique but are instead created using clonation. All members of society are conditioned in childhood to hold the values that the World State idealizes, which improves societal stability and quality of life. Everyone is encouraged to consume the ubiquitous drug soma, a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "holidays", and it was developed expressly for this purpose. Recreational sex is an integral part of society but marriage, natural birth, parenthood, and pregnancy are considered obscene. In The World State, people typically die at age 60 having maintained good health and youthfulness their whole life and the conditioning system eliminates the need for professional competitiveness: people are literally bred to do their jobs and cannot desire another so there is no competition within castes.
Plot • In the massified”brave new world”, two young men feel a certain restleness. One is Bernard Marx and the other Helmholtz Watson. Both are belonging to the highest caste.Thinghs come to head when Bernard and his sexual patner, Lenina Crowne,bring back with them a savage,whom they name John.Their destiny is sealed when they are summoned before the World Controller,who sends them into exile.John is kept,as the subject of a scientific experiment.He runs away and refuges in a abandoned lighthouse. Finally he kills himself rather than be deprived of his liberty.
Characters • Bernard Marx, Alpha-Plus but anomalously small, psychologist and one of the main protagonists. He dates Lenina for a short period of time. • Lenina Crowne, Beta-Plus, Vaccination-worker at the Hatchery and one of the main protagonists; loved by John the Savage. • Helmholtz Watson, Alpha-Plus, lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing), friend and confidant of Bernard Marx and John the Savage. • John the Savage ("Mr. Savage"), son of Linda and Thomas (Tomakin/The Director), an outcast in both primitive and modern society. He is one of the main protagonists in the story. • Thomas "Tomakin", Alpha, Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.) for London; later revealed to be the father of John the Savage. • Linda, a Beta-Minus. John the Savage's mother, and Thomas's long lost lover. She is from England and was pregnant with John when she got lost from Thomas in a trip to New Mexico. She is disliked by both savage people because of her "civilized" behaviour, and by civilized people because she is fat and looks old. • Mustapha Mond, Alpha-Double Plus, World Controller for Western Europe
Main themes • Fordism and Society • Totalitarism • Amorality
Fordism and Society The World State is built upon the principles of Henry Ford's assembly line, mass production, homogeneity, predictability, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. At the same time as the World State lacks any supernatural-based religions, Ford himself is revered as a deity, and characters celebrate Ford Day and swear oaths by his name. The biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering; Huxley wrote the book before the structure of DNA was known.
Amorality Soma doesn't merely stupefy, it's "hedonistic" in the baser sense. A synthetic high doesn't force you to be happy for a reason and drug is all about instant gratification. John the Savage, by contrast, has a firm code of conduct. His happiness doesn't derive from taking a soul-corrupting chemical drug, his emotional responses are apparently based on reasons and justified or unjustified, his happiness, like our own today, will always be vulnerable to disappointment. The utopians don't ever grieve or treat each others' existence as special, blind to the tragedy of death and to its pathos. The crucial point is that, potentially, long-acting designer-drugs needn't supplant our moral codes, but chemically predispose us to act them out in the very way we would wish. So we can bootstrap our way into becoming smart and happy while biologically deepening our social conscience too It's true that morality in the contemporary sense may no longer be needed when suffering has been cured, however, specifically moral codes of conduct become redundant. In Brave New World, by contrast, unpleasantness hasn't been eradicated, that's one reason its citizens' behaviour is so shocking, and one reason they take soma. Brave New World is a patently sub-standard utopia in need of some true moral imagination - and indignation - to sort it out
Totalitarism BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for at its pinnacle there are ten world controllers. We get to meet its spokesman, the donnish Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe. Mond governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life, from conception and conveyor-belt reproduction onwards, are determined by the stateCitizens must not fall in love, marry, oBrave New World, then, is centred around control and manipulationr have their own kids.As ever, the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature and Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus controls bothOne of our deepest fears about the prospect of tampering with our natural biological endowment is that we will ourselves be controlled and manipulated by others.Huxley sows the fear that a future world state may rob us of the right to be unhappypulated by others. Brave New World, then, is centred around control and manipulation. As ever, the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature and Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus controls both
Ban,accusation of plagiarism • Brave New World has been banned and challenged at various times. In 1932, the book was banned in Ireland. In 1980, it was removed from classrooms in Missouri among other challenges and in 1993, an attempt was made to remove the novel from a California school's required reading list because it "centered around negative activity".In 1982, Polish author Antoni Smuszkiewicz presented accusations of plagiarism against Huxley.
