Background Knowledge
Comprising 18 chapters Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is undoubtedly a novel. The title is taken from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest V,1,181–184:
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
The characters in Huxley’s work, however, are not necessarily “goodly creatures” and the “new world” is not an ideal community.
The setting
Brave New World is a novel of Utopia, a novel of a place which does not exist: the story opens in a London of the future, in 632 A.F., with A.F. standing for “after Ford”, since – according to Huxley – the entrepreneur’s introduction of mass production marked the beginning of a new era. In Huxley’s novel, Ford has taken the place of God and human beings are “massproduced” in a process of in-vitro fertilization. This sterile environment stands in total contrast to life on the savage reservation, which represents a primitive, original, but also barbarous world.
The characters
These opposing concepts are illustrated by various characters in the novel:
- Lenina Crowne, for instance, is the perfect product of the system.
- Having grown up on the reservation, John the Savage is naturally influenced by the rites and beliefs of the Indian culture.
Other characters seem to primarily represent abstract ideas:
Helmholtz Watson is the perfect embodiment of an Alpha-Plus, the highest caste in Brave New World. His deep longing to write something really important marks Helmholtz as a nonconformist. As a specialist in hypnopaedia (sleep-teaching), a non-violent form of manipulation, Bernard Marx is responsible for instilling appropriate moral attitudes and standard behavioural codes. Yet he himself is physically unattractive, which is highly unusual in a member of the elite of the brave new world. Since he seems to be different, Bernard feels isolated and finds it difficult to adjust to the prescribed patterns of behaviour.
The detailed descriptions of the setting as well as the characters account for the length of the narrative. Simultaneously this gives room to develop and explore abstract and frequently opposing concepts such as
- individual freedom and the totalitarian state,
- behaviourism and media control,
- science and technology, in particular genetic engineering and biotechnology,
- drugs and euthanasia.
Huxley has created a dystopia (an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be) in representing and discussing these thematic aspects. Thus Brave New World is often regarded as a very complex and highly theoretical novel of ideas.
