Brave New World

Summary

Brave New World is set in the year 632 After Ford, in a World State that has achieved permanent stability. Human beings are no longer born but grown in bottles at hatcheries, divided before decanting into five castes from Alpha to Epsilon, and conditioned in infancy and by sleep-teaching to love their place in society. Family, monogamy, religion, history and serious art have been abolished. Citizens are kept content by constant consumption, casual sex, mass entertainment called the feelies, and soma, a drug that delivers pleasure without hangovers. The novel opens with the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre guiding students through the processes that make this order possible. Bernard Marx, an Alpha psychologist who feels like an outsider, and his friend Helmholtz Watson, a writer of slogans who longs to write something real, are both quietly dissatisfied. Bernard takes Lenina Crowne, a conventional worker at the Hatchery, on holiday to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico. There they meet Linda, a woman from the World State who was stranded years earlier, and her son John, who has grown up outside the system and learned to read from an old volume of Shakespeare. Bernard brings John and Linda to London, where the Savage becomes a celebrity. Linda, the Director's former partner, disgraces him and drifts into soma until she dies. John is attracted to Lenina but repelled by her casual approach to sex, and he is horrified by a society that has traded suffering for comfort. After he tries to persuade a group of Deltas to throw away their soma, he is brought with Bernard and Helmholtz before Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe. In a long debate Mond explains that the state has deliberately chosen happiness and stability over truth, beauty and God. John claims the right to be unhappy. Bernard and Helmholtz are sent to islands for misfits; John retreats to an abandoned lighthouse, is mobbed by sightseers, and takes his own life. The title comes from Miranda's line in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Huxley wrote the novel in 1931 partly as a satire on the optimistic technological forecasts of H. G. Wells and on American mass production, and it has become one of the two or three most influential dystopias in English.

Top Lessons

• Happiness and freedom

  The World State offers comfort in exchange for freedom, truth and deep feeling. Students can weigh what is lost and gained in that trade.

• Conditioning and choice

  Citizens are shaped from before birth to want what they are given. The novel asks whether a choice made by a conditioned person is really a choice.

• The uses of art and suffering

  Shakespeare gives John a language for love and grief that the World State lacks. The novel suggests that great art depends on conflict, loss and longing.

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