BRAVE NEW WORLD ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION ADAPTED FROM

BRAVE NEW WORLD – ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION ADAPTED FROM: http: //www. shmoop. com/bravenew-world

QUOTES – SCIENCE “Reducing the number of revolutions per minute, " Mr. Foster explained. "The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par. " Again he rubbed his hands”. “The lower the caste, " said Mr. Foster, "the shorter the oxygen. " The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters”. Science is being abused here for purposes of harm; notice that this new world hasn't made smarter men to fill the role of Alphas; it has simply degraded everyone else.

THEME - SCIENCE • Science is subservient to human nature in Brave New World; tools like the Violent Passion Surrogate and the Pregnancy Substitute prove that science must cater to the needs of the human body because it cannot overcome them. • Science trumps human nature in Brave New World; tools like the Violent Passion Surrogate and the Pregnancy Substitute prove that science is effectively able to replace all natural functions. 1. Mustapha reminds John, Bernard, and Helmholtz that science is dangerous and needs to be muzzled, but also that it's useful if harnessed properly. Do the benefits of science outweigh the drawbacks in Brave New World? 2. Does Brave New World condemn science in our own world?

QUOTES - SEX “We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes, " she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness. " The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. Again, we get even more uncomfortable, this time with the notion of sexed-up little kids. And we haven't even gotten to "hunt-the-zipper" yet. “He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed. In most cases, till they were over twenty years old. “ Of course, this is commentary on our own world, or at least on Huxley's in the 1930 s. “Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry? " enquired the Assistant Predestinator. "I hear the new one at the Alhambra is first-rate. There's a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it's marvellous. Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects. “ Simulated sex helps to dehumanize the whole act. The aim is to eliminate all emotion from the act so that, as Mustapha will later explain, loyalty to the state is never in competition with loyalty to an individual. The more that sex pervades every aspect of culture, the less important it becomes, and the less emotion attached to it.

THEME - SEX In Brave New World, sex and violence are portrayed as the two extremes of passion. In this futuristic world, promiscuity is the law and emotional attachment is straight-up illegal. That's right, no more couples and no more love. Sex is no longer used for procreation, but rather for distraction and pacification—kind of like how social media is used today. Sex has been dehumanized and made devoid of passion, treated casually and publicly rather than as a personal matter. Because of this, no space of time ever passes between a desire and the consummation of that desire. 1. Promiscuity is encouraged—no, demanded—in the World State. Is this a subjugation of the natural inclination toward monogamy, or is it catering to the natural inclination of sleeping with as many people as possible? 2. Is the above question different in talking about men than it is for women? In Brave New World, which gender seems more disposed toward monogamy, and which toward promiscuity? 3. Does John have sex with Lenina at the end of the novel? 4. Sex and violence are intricately linked in Brave New World, proving that in order to have passion one must feel the extremes of both pleasure and pain. 5. All the sex in Brave New World is destructive.

QUOTES – POWER “We condition the masses to hate the country, " concluded the Director. "But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks. " All the control the State has over its citizens exists to serve consumerism. "Now—such is progress—the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think—or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to”… It seems as though soma is such an effective instrument of control because of its ability to distract. Any institution's power is threatened by the discontent of those it subjugates, so the World Controllers have eliminated discontent altogether.

THEME - POWER 1. Rather than using violence to enforce the law, those in power in this futuristic society have simply programmed the citizens to be happy with the laws. How do they do it? A freeflowing supply of drugs, an insistence on promiscuity, the denial of history or future as any alternative to the present, and the use of sleep-teaching at a young age. The question is—is this future any better than our current situation? 2. Is Mustapha Mond truly a powerful guy? Or is it possible that he's a slave to his position in life, just like everyone else? 3. Of all the devices the World State uses to control its citizens, which is the most powerful? Which is the most morally abhorrent? 4. Different characters in the novel fight power in different ways. Bernard at first tries defiance; Helmholtz turns to subversive writing; and John leaves to live in solitude at the lighthouse. Are any of these effective? What is the best way to fight the system in this novel?

QUOTES - SUFFERING ”But the tears are necessary. Don't you remember what Othello said? 'If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death. ' There's a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátaski. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning's hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn't stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could—he got the girl. " “Charming! But in civilized countries, " said the Controller, "you can have girls without hoeing for them, and there aren't any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago. " John makes another apt point with his quote from Othello: we suffer not only for the sake of suffering, but also for the rewards that come after. Mustapha misses the point in his reply; he says you can have the reward without suffering. But the idea behind John's philosophy is that sweet isn't as sweet without the bitter.

THEME - SUFFERING Brave New World takes place in a tightly controlled world where technology has all but eliminated suffering and a widely used narcotic called soma dulls whatever momentary pains may arise. 1. Why does John want to suffer? Is it for the sake of suffering, or for the satisfaction of relief once the suffering is over? 2. Religion is tied to suffering in Brave New World. John explicitly tells Mustapha that God is a reason for self-denial. If you take away religion, is there any other reason for experiencing pain in Brave New World? 3. Does John commit suicide to end his suffering, or to accentuate it?

QUOTES - LITERATURE "Do they read Shakespeare? " asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library”. "Certainly not, " said the Head Mistress, blushing. "Our library, " said Dr. Gaffney, "contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don't encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements. “ Shakespeare is outlawed in this society for the same reasons that make John likes it so much (in this case, the fact that interacting with a text is a solitary activity).

THEME - LITERATURE In the futuristic dystopia of Brave New World, "history is bunk, " literature is outlawed, and the only serious writing is the sleep-teachings used to condition children to function as ideal members of society. Two characters in particular try to reject this: John and Hemholtz. John introduces Hemholtz to Shakespeare, where he finds the means to express his own passions. Literature becomes a means of finding the self, of rebelling against conformity, and of seeking both truth and beauty, even at the cost of ignorant bliss. 1. What is the difference between the way John looks at Shakespeare and the way Helmholtz does? Can Helmholtz ever overcome the limitations of his conditioning to appreciate the works as John does? 2. Helmholtz claims that beautiful, passionate prose can only be written if it focuses on beautiful and passionate subject matter. Is this true?

QUOTES - FREEDOM He flung open the gates. The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start and blink his eyes. "Oh, roof!" he repeated in a voice of rapture. He was as though suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor. "Roof!“ He smiled up with a kind of doggily expectant adoration into the faces of his passengers. "Go down, " it said, "go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go…“ The liftman slammed the gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back into the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own habitual stupor. The "Epsilon-Minus-Semi-Moron" working the elevator is a prisoner of his status and his occupation. He has been programmed to feel a sense of freedom when arriving at the roof of the building.

THEME - FREEDOM The citizens of Brave New World's futuristic society are in a constant state of imprisonment. But, just like your trusty family dog, they've been conditioned to love their servitude and no one seems to have any problem with it. Well, almost no one. As one character so deftly points out, being happy all the time is its own sort of prison; being a human is about having the right to be unhappy. The prison bars are made of brainwashing catchphrases, drugs, and promiscuity—not of iron or steel. Because confinement happens in the mind, so too is freedom a mental state. The hypnopaedic phrase "everyone belongs to everyone else" is the perfect epigraph to Brave New World: no one is free, and every one partakes in subjugating every one else. This phrase goes much further than merely the sexual arena. 1. If everyone is always going to be driven by instincts, whether instilled by a recorded voice or by the force of evolution? Can any one ever really be free to make his own choices? Come to think of it, what would it even mean to be free in this novel? And what about our real world? Is anyone really free? 2. Which character is the most liberated in Brave New World?

QUOTES - DRUGS And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them. The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day. “Which will finish her off in a month or two, " the doctor confided to Bernard. "One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can't. " Linda represents the worst abuse of soma as she has a constant and unending need to escape reality.

THEME - DRUGS In Brave New World, drugs aren't just pretty common; they're distributed en masse by the government. Yes, the government. The drug in question here is soma, a hallucinogen described as "the perfect drug, " with all the benefits (calming, surrealistic, ten-hour long highs) and none of those pesky drawbacks (you know, like brain damage). The citizens of the "World State" have been conditioned to love the drug, and they use it to escape any momentary bouts of dissatisfaction. And we mean any sense of dissatisfaction. The problem, as one character identifies, is that the citizens are essentially enslaved by the drug and turned into mindless drones. So while the government may encourage drug use, it only does so as a means of further controlling the population. 1. Everyone makes a big deal out of the fact that soma doesn't have the nasty after-effects of, say, alcohol (hangovers, guilt, shame, pregnancy). If this is true, why do we find its use morally reprehensible? Actually, does the reader find it morally reprehensible? 2. Does soma make its users happy, or does it simply remove all emotion? 3. In what ways is our current society similar to the brave new world concerning the use of drugs?

QUOTES – SOCIETY AND CLASS ”all wear green, " said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta. “ “Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able…" It's likely that the castes are kept separate for the sake of stability; this way there is no envy and no complications from intermingling. Each individual can view members of a different caste as a faceless, nameless "other. "

THEME – SOCIETY AND CLASS The society in Brave New World is split into five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, with a few minor distinctions in between. Because of the technology wielded by the World State's leaders, caste is pre-determined and humans are grown in a manner appropriate to their status; the lower the caste, the dumber and uglier the individual is created to be. As adults, the upper two castes interact socially with each other but never with the lesser groups— that would totally be social suicide. Class is yet another mechanism for stability and control on the part of the government. It's also a big part of the reason that personal identity goes by the wayside in this novel—Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are simply faceless drones in color-coded outfits who exist to serve the more intelligent Alphas and Betas. 1. Huxley pretty much exclusively focuses on characters of Alpha or Beta status. Why do we get so little insight into the lives of the lower castes? 2. Is Mustapha right in his insistence that a society of all Alphas would fail? 3. Do Alphas seem to be the least satisfied of all the citizens in the World State? If Epsilons really are happy with their lives, then what's wrong (morally) with making them that way? 4. Soma is more vital to the upper castes than it is to the lower ones. Soma is more vital to the lower castes than it is to the upper ones. Which statement do you agree with? Why?