Historical Context
When Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 it was at the beginning of a
worldwide depression. The American stock market crash of 1929 had closed banks,
wiped out many people’s savings, and caused unemployment rates to soar. To make
matters worse, American farmers were suffering from some of the worst droughts
in history, leading to widespread poverty and migration out of the farming belt.
People longed for the kind of economic security that Huxley gives to the
citizens of his fictional world.
The effects of the crash were beginning to be felt worldwide, including in
England, where Huxley lived. However much economic issues were on his mind,
Huxley was also very much aware of the social and scientific changes that had
begun to sweep the world in the beginning of the century, and particularly
through the 1920s. Technology was rapidly replacing many workers, but
politicians promised that progress would solve the unemployment and economic
problems. Instead, workers were forced to take whatever jobs were available.
More often than not, unskilled or semi-skilled laborers worked long hours
without overtime pay, under unsafe conditions, and without benefits such as
health insurance or pensions. Unlike the inhabitants of the brave new world,
they had no job guarantees and no security. Furthermore, they often had little
time for leisure and little money to spend on entertainment or on material
luxuries.
In order to increase consumer demand for the products being produced,
manufacturers turned to advertising in order to convince people they ought to
spend their money buying products and services. Also, Henry Ford, who invented
the modern factory assembly line, was now able to efficiently mass produce cars.
For the first time, car parts were interchangeable and easily obtained, and Ford
deliberately kept the price of his Model T low enough so that his workers could
afford them. In order to pay for the new automobiles, many people who did not
have enough cash needed to stretch out payments over time, and thus buying on
credit became acceptable. Soon, people were buying other items on credit,
fueling the economy by engaging in overspending and taking on debt.
All of these economic upheavals affected Huxley’s vision of the future.
First, he saw Ford’s production and management techniques as revolutionary, and
chose to make Ford not just a hero to the characters in his novels but an actual
god. Huxley also saw that technology could eventually give workers enormous
amounts of leisure time. The result could be more time spent creating art and
solving social problems, but Huxley’s Controllers, perceiving those activities
as threatening to the order they’ve created, decide to provide foolish
distractions to preoccupy their workers. These future workers do their duty and
buy more and more material goods to keep the economy rolling, even to the point
of throwing away clothes rather than mending them.
In Huxley’s day, people’s values and ideas were changing rapidly. The 1920s
generation of youth rejected the more puritanical Victorian values of their
parents’ generation. Men and women flirted with modern ideas, such as communism,
and questioned the rigid attitudes about social class. Some embraced the idea of
free love (sex outside of marriage or commitment), as advocated by people like
author Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). Others were talking publicly about sex, or
using contraceptives, which were being popularized by Margaret Sanger
(1883–1966), the American leader of the birth-control movement. Women began to
smoke in public, cut their hair into short, boyish bobs, and wear much shorter,
looser skirts. These new sexual attitudes are taken to an extreme in Brave
New World.
Scientists were also beginning to explore the possibilities of human
engineering. Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) showed that one can
create a conditioned response in animals. For example, he rang a bell whenever
he fed a group of dogs, and over time Pavlov’s dogs began to salivate at the
sound of a bell, even when no food was presented to them. Pavlov’s fellow
scientist, John B. Watson (1878–1958), founded the Behaviorist School of
psychology: he believed that human beings could be reduced to a network of
stimuli and responses, which could then be controlled by whoever experimented on
them. In the 1930s, German Nobel Prize winner Hans Spemann (1869–1941) developed
the controversial science of experimental embryology, manipulating the
experience of a human fetus in the womb in order to influence it. The eugenics
movement—which was an attempt to limit the childbearing of lower-class, ethnic
citizens —was popular in the 1920s as well.
Meanwhile, the fad of hypnopaedia, or sleep teaching, was popular in the
1920s and 1930s. People hoped to teach themselves passively by listening to
instructional tapes while they were sleeping. Although the
electroencephalograph, a device invented in 1929 that measures brain waves,
would prove that people have a limited ability to learn information while
asleep, it also proved that hypnopaedia can influence emotions and beliefs.
Meanwhile, the ideas of Viennese physician Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the father
of modern psychoanalysis, were also becoming popular. He believed, among other
things, that most psychological problems stem from early childhood experiences.
Huxley incorporated all of these technological and psychological discoveries
into his novel, having the Controllers misuse this information about controlling
human behavior to oppress their citizens.
Brave New World was written just before dictators such as Adolf
Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, Joseph Stalin in Russia, and Mao
Tse-tung in China created totalitarian states in countries that were troubled by
economic and political problems. These leaders often used extreme tactics to
control their citizens, from propaganda and censorship to mass murder. Huxley
could not have predicted what was on the horizon. The grim totalitarian state
that would come about would be incorporated into author George Orwell’s
futuristic anti-utopian novel 1984 (1948) and strongly influenced by
Huxley’s Brave New World. When Brave New World was published in
1932 it sold well in England and modestly in the United States, but it
eventually brought Huxley international fame on both sides of the Atlantic. It
was clear to critics that Huxley had written a novel of ideas, in which the
characters and plot were not as well-developed as the book’s themes, which bring
up many important concepts, from freedom to class structure. Huxley used humor
and satire to point out the excesses and shallowness of contemporary
culture.
Today, Brave New World is considered an archetypical dystopian novel
portraying a seemingly utopian world that is, upon closer inspection, a horror.
Critics generally agree that while Huxley was not a particularly innovative
writer, his ideas were provocative and fresh and his writing eloquent. He was
appreciated for both his analysis of post-World War I English life and, on a
larger scale, his promotion of humanistic values through literature.
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