Exploring the Conflict of Values in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Analysis: Chapters 9–10
In these chapters, the interlude at the Reservation ends, and John’s life in the World State begins. The conflict between John’s values and the social mores of the World State starts to become obvious. The shift of setting, from the Reservation in New Mexico to the World State in England, foreshadows the shift that is about to take place in the lives of both John and Bernard.
John’s character is revealed more fully in his confrontations with World State culture. His struggle to suppress his desire to touch Lenina demonstrates the moral code that he has internalized from Shakespeare and from the “savages” on the Reservation. A World State resident would have gone for instant gratification. John finds himself in the unenviable position of living in the World State without World State conditioning. He is attracted to Lenina, but his views on sex are so radically different from hers that conflict is inevitable. The struggle between John’s intense desires and his equally intense self-control is a major facet of his character.
John’s habit of quoting lines from Shakespeare’s plays not only highlights his distance from World State society, but it also serves as a reminder of the distance between our society, in which Shakespeare is revered as a writer with deep insight into human nature, and World State society, in which Shakespeare is unknown and even incomprehensible.
Stylistically, John’s Shakespearean quotations contrast vividly with the utterances of the World State citizens. But there is one notable similarity between them. Both the World State citizens and John habitually speak in quotes and soundbites. Hypnopaedic messages like “A gramme in time saves nine” are on everybody’s lips in the World State. At times, the conversations between John and Lenina degenerate into a war of propaganda, each person spewing memorized phrases without even stopping to think about them. John’s propaganda sounds more palatable than Lenina’s because Shakespeare’s poetic lines put the hypnopaedic messages to shame. Next to Shakespeare, “progress is lovely” sounds cheap and trashy. The juxtaposition of the two contributes to the satirical tone of the novel.
The confrontation between Bernard and the Director illustrates the power of social condemnation. The Director decides to denounce Bernard in front of the other workers in order to make an example out of him. In part, World State members are forced to conform merely by peer pressure and the threat of public shame. Bernard turns the Director’s ploy on its head by shaming him with the spectacle of John and Linda. Bernard’s willingness to use John and Linda for his own gain further helps to portray him as someone who will do anything to gain social standing. By presenting Linda and John to the Director in front of the workers, he not only manages to save his own position but also to spitefully attack the Director and reduce his social standing.
Lenina’s role throughout this chapter is a passive one, for the obvious reason that she is on soma-holiday for most of it. Going on soma-holiday is her only way of dealing with the negative emotions aroused by the Reservation. It is particularly ironic that she goes on soma-holiday in the middle of what should have been a real holiday (her vacation).
Analysis: Chapters 11–12
In this section, John gets a thorough introduction to World State society, which, for the most part, disgusts him. He perceives the culture of the World State to be superficial, inhumane, and immoral.
The relationship between John and Bernard dramatizes the major themes of The Tempest. John, who originally believed he would play the part of Miranda, learning to love the new world revealed to him, becomes known as “the Savage” and takes on a role similar to Caliban’s; Bernard, by exposing John to civilization and expecting that to win John’s everlasting gratitude, plays Prospero to John’s Caliban.
The fate of John’s mother, Linda, demonstrates what Mustapha Mond meant in suggesting that truth and happiness are incompatible. Everyone but John is content to allow Linda to abuse soma, even though they know it will kill her within a month or two. The doctor’s explanation to John demonstrates the World State’s callous attitude that human beings are things that should be “used up until they wear out.” Just as with manufactured goods, when people get old and worn out, they become disposable. Linda goes on permanent soma-holiday, living out the short remainder of her life in a blissful haze of hallucinations and fantasies.
Bernard’s personal reasons for allowing Linda to succumb to soma are even more unpleasant. Everyone in London clamors to see John, but they are equally determined not to see Linda. With Linda safely out of the way, Bernard is free to use John for his own purposes. Through his exploitation of John, Bernard demonstrates that his previous dissatisfaction with the World State had merely stemmed from his desire to enjoy more of its privileges, rather than from any true desire to live as an “adult” (which is how he had presented the matter to Lenina on their first date). When he becomes successful and begins to enjoy the benefits of his Alpha status, he even drops his friendship with Helmholtz, a nonconformist with an increasingly bad reputation. Helmholtz threatens Bernard’s newfound success.
The feely that John attends with Lenina involves some old racist stereotypes, but it is quite complicated in its irony. It begins with a scene in which a “gigantic negro” copulates with a blonde woman. This scene in itself would be highly shocking and taboo to Huxley’s white, middle-class, early-twentieth-century audience, but so far the feely-goers find it perfectly conventional. They even marvel at the realistic special effects. What the audience within the book finds shocking is when the black man, following a blow to the head that erases his conditioning, kidnaps the blonde for a monogamous three-week sexcapade in a helicopter. It’s shocking to them because of the monogamy. Finally, three Alpha males rescue her and order is restored.
This scene reminds the reader of a feature of movies that is even older than Huxley’s novel. Theatergoers love to watch characters in movies transgress against the rules that the viewers themselves have to abide by. This vicarious enjoyment is given a thin veneer of respectability through a decorous ending that restores the status quo. But the fact remains that the audience enjoys fantasizing about the transgression. In part, this whole scene is Huxley’s joke, but it is also possible that monogamy is not as unusual a fantasy in the World State as we have been led to believe.
The scene in which John reads Romeo and Juliet demonstrates the power of conditioning. Even though Helmholtz is fairly unorthodox, he is still a product of World State conditioning. He appreciates the artistic value of Shakespeare’s language, but he does not appreciate the drama of Juliet’s parents trying to convince her to marry Paris. Because John identifies his desire for Lenina with the love between Romeo and Juliet, Helmholtz’s laughter insults both his cultural values and his own innermost feelings. But Helmholtz cannot help it; the situations and emotions expressed in the play mean something very different to him than they do to John.
Analysis: Chapters 13–15
The dramatic riot incited by John is the climax of the novel. John’s growing revulsion against everything in the World State finally propels him into a direct confrontation with it, and the authorities are forced to intervene. The events that immediately precede the riot reveal the conflicting forces that culminate in John’s outburst.
John’s struggle with his physical desires, first introduced on the Reservation, continues when Lenina tries to seduce him. He insists on seeing Lenina as a pure, virginal woman, possessed of complete sexual modesty. To John, Lenina is only an abstract rendering of all the virtuous women he has read about in Shakespeare’s works. He struggles with the physical side of sexuality to the point that he wants to repress it entirely. When Lenina makes a pass at him, he calls her a whore for breaking the rules of a moral code she is not even aware of. “Whore” is the only other category that he has to understand Lenina. It is significant that when he locks himself away from Lenina, he chooses to read Othello, a play about the doomed relationship between a black African man and a white Venetian woman. Like John, Othello veers between the extremes of perceiving his beloved as a chaste statue and as a whore. It is this misperception that leads Othello to slaughter his wife, not an incompatibility between their two cultures.
John’s experience in the Hospital for the Dying demonstrates the dehumanizing logic that the World State applies to death experience. Any tolerance he might once have felt for the practices and people of the World State disappears. He thinks of the Bokanovsky twins as maggots who defile his grieving process. Unfortunately for John, his mother is no help. Drugged on soma, she mistakes him for Popé. John’s fury and agony reflect the growing anguish he experiences when he is not recognized in the World State, even by his own mother. The society of the World State names him “the Savage,” associating him with a set of stereotypical characteristics. When John visits Eton, he watches a group of children laughing at “savages” on a Reservation performing ceremonial self-flagellation purification rituals. He sees himself reflected in their laughter as a curious, comedic spectacle, not as a human being. Bernard uses John as a curious specimen of “savagery” to attract important people into his own social circle. Helmholtz’s laughter at Romeo and Juliet makes John recognize that his struggle with his physical attraction for Lenina is a comedic, offensive spectacle even for one of the World State’s few nonconformists. Worse yet is the fact that he considers Helmholtz a friend with whom he can discuss his feelings for Lenina. The end result of all these separate episodes is that John acknowledges that he, as an individual, cannot exist within World State society. He is forced either to be a stereotyped representative of “the savage” or to succumb to the warped morals of the World State.
John’s attempt to stir the Delta workers into rebellion by throwing away their soma symbolizes his struggle against happiness as the ultimate goal. John would rather see truth and real human relationships—even painful ones—than the near-slavery of soma. His own mother’s death by soma is also a contributing factor. Linda and the Deltas use soma to escape all pain and responsibility. This makes them become infantile, something that John points out when he asks the Deltas why they want to be “babies . . . mewling and puking.” John’s outcry describes the essential logic that produces the “stability” that the World State loves so much. The vast majority of World State citizens remain childlike their whole lives through the use of conditioning, social reinforcement, and soma.
Helmholtz throws himself into the fray when he and Bernard arrive at the hospital, but Bernard hesitates. His hesitation is caused by the conflict between his desire to fit into the World State social machine and his desire to change the way it works. He fears associating himself with the nonconforming blasphemy of John’s revolutionary cry and Helmholtz’s support of John’s actions. Bernard knows that his participation will forever mark him as a dangerous subversive.
Analysis: Chapter 16
The conversation between Mond and John is the intellectual heart of Brave New World. It is here that the issues implied by the rest of the novel are made explicit and discussed in an abstract form.
The rationale that Mond provides for suppressing John’s beloved Shakespeare gives us a crucial key to understanding the rest of their conversation. The mere fact that Shakespeare is old means that he doesn’t contribute to consumer behavior. (Huxley, of course, ignores the fact that people purchase new editions of Shakespeare, Shakespeare college courses, SparkNotes, etc.) While this reason seems superficial in comparison with Mond’s more developed arguments, it draws our attention to the fact that consumerism is central to the world of Brave New World. Like other dystopias, this novel doesn’t simply show us a world that is different from our own; it shows us a world that is a mirror of ours, with the worst features of our world drawn out and exaggerated. One of the central facets of Huxley’s novel is directed against the ever-increasing value it places on consumerism.
By showing a world that suppresses institutions and experiences that are sacred in our own world in order to make way for the development of consumer values, Huxley demonstrates a conflict of values that exists in our own society. The “value” that drives the consumer is simply the gratification of appetites. In Brave New World, this one value has been developed to the point that people are “adults during worktime,” but infants in their leisure time and in their relationships. So Huxley’s first criticism of consumerism is that it is infantile—adults should be capable of other things.
If consumption is the “happiness” that Mond refers to in his description of the World State, the other value that his society is predicated on is “stability.” In Mond’s account, happiness and stability depend upon one another. The stability Mond is talking about is economic stability, the uninterrupted cycle of production and consumption. But emotional, psychological, and social stability are also important because they all contribute to the first kind of stability.
Mond’s argument about the things that must be sacrificed to create a “stable and happy” society may be read, ironically, as an argument that our values are incompatible with consumer behavior and economic stability. The values that Mond sacrifices may be summarized as follows:
- Feelings, Passions, Commitments, and Relationships: Citizens of the World State have no fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children, or lovers because such relationships produce emotional (and therefore social) instability, strife, and unhappiness. While it is easy to think of ways that relationships make people unhappy, it may be difficult for the reader to understand why Mond thinks these relationships fundamentally create instability, when common sense and tradition dictate exactly the opposite, that the family is one of the stabilizing institutions of our society. One answer may be found in Chapter 3, in Mond’s lecture to the students. Here he argues that the most dangerous part of passionate commitments to other individuals is the strength of the feeling involved. Moreover, he maintains that all feelings and passions arise from arrested impulses, such as the longing one experiences when one can’t immediately have the lover that one wants. This is probably the basis for his idea that the consumer’s need for immediate gratification is at odds with long-term human commitments.
- Equality: Mond is quite forthright about the fact that social stability depends upon inequality. Most of society is going to have to perform uninteresting tasks most of the time. This feature of World State society is by no means peculiar to the World State. In fact, it is probably true of every society that has ever existed. It might even be possible to argue that our own society has as much inequality as the World State, and that Mond is just more honest about it, refusing to pay lip service to the ideal that all humans are created equal. However, the complete abandonment of the ideal of equality leads to horrifying results. The majority of human embryos in the World State are altered so that their potential for excellence or growth is stunted. When the comparison is made between the novel’s world and our own, we are left with troubling questions rather than distinct conclusions. Given that economic and social stability depends upon an unequal distribution of labor, does this create destructive contradictions with our democratic ideal that individuals are equal? (This theme is clearly indebted to the writing of Karl Marx, whose ideas are part of the intellectual background of this novel. It is no accident, for instance, that the dissident Bernard’s last name is Marx.)
- Truth: Mond says that science has to be suppressed because a society that is predicated on the search for happiness cannot also be committed to truth. He may mean that science, and the search for truth more generally, has an irresistible tendency to overthrow old, established ways of looking at things. Authority and conventional wisdom both contribute to the stability of society, and in the search for truth, both of these are liable to come under interrogation.
- Art: Art is not a consumer product, and great art draws its subject matter from feelings, passions, commitments, and relationships, which are discussed above.
One final category of experiences that are sacrificed in the World State might simply be labeled “problems.” Huxley might argue that we value problems (old age, death, doubt, even suffering) because we value the responses that they produce in human beings. These Mond dismisses as the “overcompensation for misery.”
One criticism that the reader might be inclined to level at Mond’s entire line of argumentation is that it is self-serving. Mond is at the very top of the ruling class and enjoys exemption from the laws that he makes. One could easily dismiss everything he says on the basis that his real interest is the stability of his own position, and not the stability and happiness of his society as a whole. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to simply dismiss his argument out of hand because it does possess considerable power and subtlety, challenging the reader to dispute it on its own terms.
Analysis: Chapters 17–18
Bernard and Helmholtz leave the scene, and the novel, at the beginning of Chapter 17. By being exiled to the islands, and by accepting their exile, they have lost the fight against the World State. Helmholtz may continue to struggle through his writing. That is the implication of his choice of a particularly harsh environment. But both of them are being physically transported to a location where they can cause little harm to the World State. Only John is left to criticize and debate with Mond.
The discussion of religion carries the book to its most abstract and metaphysical level, and the reader may have difficulty following the thread of the argument from Chapter 16 to Chapter 17, particularly given the long passages of quotation. However, this section goes to the heart of what is wrong with Huxley’s dystopia: the fact that nobody conceives of any purpose for existence beyond the gratification of their own appetites. The passage from Newman that Mond quotes suggests that individuals feel the need for religion as they lose the sense that they are in complete control of their own lives, as they experience loss and the weakening that comes with age. The sense that one is not in control of one’s life precedes the understanding that one is part of something larger (God’s plan). In the World State, no one grows old or experiences loss, so no one ever arrives at religious experience.
In one sense, this can be seen as yet another criticism of consumerism. But Huxley is actually criticizing something larger than 1920s England and America, with its Ford motor cars, diamond rings, and conspicuous consumption. He’s criticizing the way philosophers, economists, and social scientists have been thinking about society for almost 400 years—roughly since Shakespeare’s day. Before that time, political philosophers from the ancient Greeks onward thought of civil society as serving some purpose. What that entailed varied from culture to culture. For Pericles, an ancient leader of Athens, the purpose of the polis (city-state) was to enable the small minority of free men to perform heroic exploits. In the Middle Ages, the purpose of the nation was frequently conceived as being to carry out God’s plan by serving the king, his representative on earth.
Seventeenth-century writers and philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes began to conceive of societies as governed by observable laws, such as the law of supply and demand, which could determine the behavior of large numbers of people. The models of society promoted by Hobbes, and later by the political economists, ultimately generated a sufficient understanding of economic and sociological dynamics to permit governments to effectively promote greater stability, as the government does in Brave New World. But these models simplify human life to the mere struggle to survive and escape starvation, and their insights come at the price of the earlier sense that human lives or societies have a greater purpose. And while the lack of a purpose, divine or otherwise, may be a serious flaw in the worldviews of sociology and economics, Huxley observes a much more dangerous tendency within them: the tendency for the government to produce more and more intervention into human life.
The meaning of the novel as a whole lies in Huxley’s critique of modernity, characterized by technocratic government, social sciences dedicated to the control of society, and rampant consumerism, and the remarkable observation voiced by Mond in Chapter 3, that everything we think of as fundamentally human—love, passion, desire, art, and culture—comes about because of the experiences of loss and unsatisfied desire. It appears that the point of Brave New World is that modernity is developing in a direction that will ultimately change human nature itself. A world in which consumerism is developed to the extent it is in the World State, where desires are immediately gratified, in which “external secretion” is carried to the baby before it has barely begun to cry, would eradicate the most fundamental fact of human existence: its inconvenience.
But at the same time that it points to this conclusion, there are signs throughout the novel that this alteration in human nature has not yet taken place, and perhaps could never take place. Just as we are being told that there are no more jealous lovers, we meet Bernard Marx. Beneath the surface of the “free love” practiced among the higher castes lurks the specter of monogamy and violent passion. Lenina has already dated one man exclusively for far too long, and she indulges with an entire feely-going audience in a scandalous fantasy of monogamy practiced in a helicopter. Routinely, the citizens find themselves having to supplement their soma ration with drugs that replicate pregnancy or violent attachment. And there is the continuing problem of the dissidents who have to be exiled.
The last section of the novel consists of John’s departure to the lighthouse to punish himself. His self-flagellation is a desperate attempt to hold onto his own values—truth over happiness among others—in the face of overwhelming pressure from the world around him. Lenina Crowne symbolizes that pressure. John feels a powerful sexual attraction to her, a temptation to give in to the “pleasant vices” that he finds so loathsome and prevalent in World State society. When she arrives along with the chanting crowd, his resolve collapses and, when he wakes the next morning, his realization that he has succumbed to the very thing he was most set against drives him to kill himself.
The language of these chapters continues in the same tone as in the rest of the book: it is a mixture, at times awkward, of didacticism, satire, and farce. The later chapters have a more serious and didactic tone, particularly in the conversation between John and Mustapha, when issues of free will, morality, God, and society come to the fore. In the last chapter, John’s frantic self-flagellation contrasts with the superficiality of the gawking reporters and crowds that come to watch him at the lighthouse. The comparison between the two groups symbolizes the basic difference between John and the society in which he finds himself.