60 pages • 2 hours read
Aldous HuxleyBrave New World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Stability
From the novel’s second sentence, in which we are given the motto of the World State, “Community, Identity, Stability” (3), the theme of stability and how it can be achieved in a society is apparent. As the novel continues through the first and second chapters, in which the society is explained obliquely through the tour the Director is giving, we see that the World State’s conception of stability is founded in great part upon uniformity. Bokanovsky’s process, by which one fertilized egg can be multiplied as much as 96 times, becomes the only sanctioned means of procreation, meaning that the vast majority of the population has thousands of nearly-identical twins. Another aspect of this stability comes from conditioning its citizens, through scientific means while still in the uterus-replacing “bottles,” as well as “neo-pavlovian” and hypnopaedic means after they are “decanted, to be perfectly suited to and content with their role within society. This also means restricting access to books, learning, and history” (4). As the Director says early on, “For of course, some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently—though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible” (4).
Control
With stability being one of the most important tenets of society in Brave New World, the means to that end—control—also becomes a salient theme of the novel. It is by controlling humanity to such a degree that humans are essentially manufactured to specifications that this stability is achieved. The Director puts it rather bluntly at the end of the 2nd Chapter:
Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his lifelong. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions! [...] Suggestions from the State (29).
As the novel progresses, the character of John is introduced. John is born of a civilized woman but raised on the Savage Reservation, and we begin to see him as the antithesis of World State control. One of the World State’s model citizens, the Director himself has, despite all the standard precautions, accidentally naturally impregnated his lover at the time (John’s mother, Linda). Despite the layers upon layers of control placed on every aspect of society, an element of wildness and unpredictability remains, embodied in the character of John.
Simulation Versus Authenticity
Several times early on in the novel, we are introduced to replacements and stand-ins for real experiences. In the bottles in which the World State’s humans gestate, the job that is naturally done by a mother’s movement is simulated by “a simple mechanism by means of which [...] all the embryos were simultaneously shaken into familiarity with movement” (12). Similarly, in Chapter 3, when Fanny is discussing how she has been not herself, she tells Lenina how she has been prescribed a “Pregnancy Substitute,” in which a pregnancy, now considered strictly taboo in this society, is simulated in order to fend off the natural urges and hormones women still feel.
Related Titles
By Aldous Huxley
