The story reaches a climax not long after Bernard and Lenina return to London with “Mr.

There, the two encounter a young Englishman who had been raised as a “savage” after his mother was trapped many years earlier, pregnant, behind the walls. When he finally does so, the date leads them to a Navajo Reservation, where Native Americans live in abject poverty within high walls that insulate them from contemporary society. The contrast leads Bernard to shrink in fear at the prospect of asking Lenina for a date.

The story continues on a Navajo Reservation But Bernard is mocked by his fellow Alphas for his short stature, which causes him to overcompensate through arrogance and misplaced assertiveness, while Lenina is a strikingly beautiful young woman who is constantly sought after as a sexual partner. There, babies are born, “hatched” or “decanted,” and conditioned through sleep learning from childhood through adolescence in enormous numbers.īernard is an Alpha Plus, a member of the society’s intellectual elite Lenina is a Beta Minus, a subordinate employee at the Hatchery, but far more favored than the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, who have been conditioned to possess lower intelligence and to perform the less skilled and less desirable jobs. Both work at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center. The story revolves around the relationship between psychologist Bernard Marx and a young woman named Lenina Crowne. Pregnancy and motherhood are crimes babies are raised in “bottles” thousands at a time in massive creches. Society is governed by the motto COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY, an ideal enforced by the universal use of a tranquilizing drug called soma and the encouragement of unrestrained promiscuous sex. The novel is set in the 26th century (AF 632 or “After Ford”). Morgan and Lionel Rothschild) George Edzel (Henry Ford’s son, Edsel) Bernard Marx (Karl Marx) and Sarojini Engels (Sarojini Naidu, President of the Indian National Congress, and Friedrich Engels) and others. These include the society’s deity, “Our Ford” (Henry Ford) Lenina Crowne (Vladimir Lenin) Benito Hoover (Benito Mussolini and Herbert Hoover) Morgana Rothschild (J. More telling still, the names of many of the characters in the novel are derived from Huxley’s contemporaries and historical figures whose influence was still active at the time. The society Huxley describes is grounded in the conflicts and technological debates of the 1920s: the rise of fascism and the prospects for sleep learning (hypnopaedia) and in vitro fertilization, in particular. As a novel, it’s far less satisfying.īrave New World was published in 1932, and it shows. However, the books by Orwell, Atwood, and Dick appear to have been intended as social commentary, whereas Huxley’s is essentially a philosophical reflection on the human condition. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and other highly respected novels that depict a grim future for the human race. Critics today tend to group it with George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Philip K. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s seminal works of dystopian literature.

Brave new world quotes about history