Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Aldous Huxley brings a futuristic novel, riddled with human follies and satire. Huxley wrote during the progressive and post-depression periods, which is reflected by the issues in which he satirizes. Brave New World is a futuristic novel that explores the hypothetical advancements of technology and effects or improvements on society. The novel sets a social system similar to that of medieval England in which people are “born” into castes. This sets the stage for the numerous social battles, which ensue as the novel develops. But, the very core of all the drama lies not within social statuses but within oneself.

Brave New World opens in London, nearly six hundred years in the future (“After Ford”). Human life has been almost entirely industrialized—controlled by a few people at the top of a World State. The first scene, offering a tour of a lab where human beings are created and conditioned according to the society’s strict caste system, establishes the tone and the theme of dehumanized life. The natural processes of birth, aging, and death represent horrors in this world.

Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus psychologist, emerges as the single discontented person in a world where material comfort and physical pleasure—provided by the drug soma and recreational sex—are the only concerns. Scorned by women, Bernard nevertheless manages to engage the attention of Lenina Crowne, a “pneumatic” beauty who agrees to spend a week with him at the remote Savage Reservation in New Mexico, a place far from the controlled, technological world of London.