{"id":235,"date":"2019-07-18T19:20:26","date_gmt":"2019-07-18T19:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/provincialenglish\/back-matter\/brave-new-world-casebook\/"},"modified":"2023-12-07T16:24:16","modified_gmt":"2023-12-07T16:24:16","slug":"brave-new-world-casebook","status":"publish","type":"back-matter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/provincialenglish\/back-matter\/brave-new-world-casebook\/","title":{"raw":"Appendix D: Brave New World Casebook","rendered":"Appendix D: Brave New World Casebook"},"content":{"raw":"\"Aldous\r\n

Biography: Aldous Huxley<\/h1>\r\nAldous Huxley was descended from two eminent Victorian families\u2014he was the grandson of noted biologist and writer on science, Thomas Henry Huxley, grandnephew of Matthew Arnold, and nephew of Victorian novelist Mary Augusta Ward (who wrote under her married name Mrs. Humphry Ward), Arnold\u2019s niece. His unusual Christian name commemorates a major character, Aldous Raeburn, in the novel Marcella<\/em>, which Mrs. Ward published in the year of Huxley\u2019s birth, 1894.\r\n\r\nBorn in Godalming, Surrey, England, he received his first schooling from his mother, Julia Arnold Huxley. He then moved on to Hillside Preparatory School, Eton, and eventually, Balliol College, Oxford, taking a first in English in 1916<\/span>. Two early blows\u2014the death of his mother when he was only nine, and an attack of keratitis while he was a student at Eton, which left him nearly blind for the rest of his life\u2014may have sharpened his tendency toward introversion. Certainly the latter affliction precluded a career in science, paving the way for a life in letters.\r\n\r\nIn the course of his long literary career, Aldous Huxley published poetry collections, plays, essays, short fiction, travel narratives, biography, and criticism, but, like George Orwell, author of Nineteen-Eighty-Four<\/em>, he is best remembered as the author of a hugely influential utopian satire. Both men used the genre more than once. Brave New World<\/em> began, like Orwell\u2019s Coming Up for Air<\/em>, as a response to H.G. Wells\u2019s utopia, Men Like Gods <\/em>(1923), and Huxley later wrote two more utopian-dystopian novels: Ape and Essence<\/em> (1948) and Island<\/em> (1962).\r\n\r\nAlthough Huxley felt that he was not a \u201cborn novelist, but an essayist who writes novels,\u201d he became an innovative fictional stylist, effectively using cinematic montage technique for the purpose of exposition in the third chapter of Brave New World<\/em>, thereby sparing the reader from that major defect of most utopian novels\u2014the tedious guided tour of utopian schools, hospitals, and factories. With his use of montage and intertextuality, Huxley did for the novel what Eliot had done for modern poetry in The Waste Land<\/em> 10 years earlier. Like Eliot, Huxley often uses multiple references to canonical works. In Brave New World<\/em>, his 50 allusions to Shakespeare help develop theme. He also incorporates ideas of fashionable Freudians, such as Ernest Jones and his interpretation of Hamlet<\/em> to deepen the sense of the Savage\u2019s sexual repression. At opportune moments, he echoes key lines from Gray\u2019s \u201cElegy\u201d and \u201cOde on a Distant Prospect of Eton\u201d to underscore the ignorance-is-bliss theme and key images that recall the utilitarian schoolroom in Dickens\u2019s Hard Times<\/em>. Nor does he hesitate to use bathos: the deliberate contrasting of high culture with popular culture. Excerpts from fictional advertising jingles and popular 1920s-era romances, such as Elinor Glyn\u2019s Three Weeks,<\/em> satirize the contemporary lowering of musical and literary standards.\r\n\r\nOne notes a gradually emerging social conscience in Huxley at the time of his writing Brave New World<\/em>. In fact, his satiric description of the reified workers in a dystopian factory was based on his visit to a Lucas automotive parts factory in Birmingham the previous spring.\r\n\r\nIn Brave New World<\/em>, the novel\u2019s most sympathetic character, Helmholtz Watson, like Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge, finds the silence of the sleeping metropolis to be eloquent: the very absence of the numinous in the wholly materialistic state begins, paradoxically, to suggest a presence. Watson is one of the first in what becomes a steady string of protagonists in his future novels who advocate what Huxley called \u201cthe great central technique, which traces the art of obtaining freedom from the fundamental human disability of egotism \u2026 repeatedly described by the mystics of all ages and countries.\u201d His final utopian novel, Island<\/em> (1962), is, in fact, Huxley\u2019s final word on the subject of how to construct the good society. He died in Hollywood on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.\r\n

Brave New World<\/h1>\r\nHere is where you can read the full text of Brave New World<\/em><\/a>.\r\n

Activities<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n

Brave New World<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nSir Thomas More coined the word \u201cutopia\u201d in his fictional work Utopia<\/em>, first published in Latin in 1516. He created the word by combining the Greek prefixes \u201cou\u201dand \u201ceu\u201d with the suffix \u201ctopos.\u201d Define the two Greek prefixes and the Greek suffix, and then show how the concept of utopia is inherently playing with two different places.\r\n\r\nEpigraph<\/strong>\u2014What is an epigraph? Huxley uses the following quotation from Nicolas Berdiaeff, Un nouveau moyen age<\/em> 1927, p. 262:\r\n
Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus r\u00e9alisable qu\u2019on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment \u00e9viter leur r\u00e9alisation d\u00e9finitive? Les utopies sont r\u00e9alisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-\u00eatre un si\u00e8cle nouveau commence-t-il, un si\u00e8cle o\u00f9 les intellectuels et la classe cultiv\u00e9e r\u00eaveront au moyens d\u2019\u00e9viter les utopies et de retourner \u00e0 une soci\u00e9t\u00e9 non utopique, moins \u201cparfaite\u201d est plus libre.<\/blockquote>\r\n[English translation: Utopias appear to be more realizable than we used to believe. And we now find ourselves facing a deeply troubling question: How to avoid their definitive realization? Life marches towards utopia. And maybe a new century will begin, a century where the intellectuals and cultivated classes will dream of ways to avoid utopias and to return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free.]\r\n

Chapter 1<\/h2>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. Notice the two sentence fragments with which Huxley begins the novel. If a thirty-four-storey building is described as \u201csquat,\u201d then what kind of irony is Huxley using here?<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Look up the word \u201cidentity\u201d in a good dictionary. What aspect of the word is central to the world state\u2019s philosophy?<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Compare Huxley\u2019s use of colour imagery in this chapter with that of Dickens in the second chapter of Hard Times<\/em>.<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Do Alphas and Betas undergo Bokanovsky\u2019s technique?<\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Describe how the government of the brave new world resembles that of H.G. Wells\u2019s A Modern Utopia <\/em>(1905<\/a>) or that of Men Like Gods<\/em> (1923)<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\r\n \t
  6. Write a brief essay in which you speculate that Huxley borrowed ideas from Wells, especially Chapters 14, 15, and 20 from his dystopia The Sleeper Awakes<\/em><\/a>.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

    Chapter 2<\/h2>\r\n
      \r\n \t
    1. What kind of irony<\/strong> does Huxley use when he gives the following line to the D.H.C.: \u201cThe greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
    2. What is the status of the English language in A.F. 632? French?<\/li>\r\n \t
    3. Compare the first two chapters of Dickens\u2019s Hard Times<\/em><\/a> (\u201cThe One Thing Needful\u201d and \u201cMurdering the Innocents\u201d) with the first two chapters of Brave New World<\/em>. How is Henry Foster like Bitzer? What values do they share? Which kind of education do both dystopias\u2014i.e., the brave new world and Dickens\u2019s Coketown\u2014prefer: particular or general education? Or, in other words, vocational or liberal education?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

      Chapter 3<\/h2>\r\n
        \r\n \t
      1. What is the world\u2019s population in 632 A.F.?<\/li>\r\n \t
      2. Brave New World<\/em>, like T.S. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land<\/em>, uses montage technique as in film. This device is especially evident in Chapter 3, where settings and character shift with no transition devices being offered to the reader. Scenic cuts become faster as the chapter advances. In the first two and a half pages of Scene 1, in Chapter 3, we observe the D.H.C. and his students outside the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, watching the children at play\u2014first, Centrifugal Bumple-Puppy, then erotic play; followed by the introduction of the World Controller, Mond; then to indicate a shift of scene and character, comes a double space. Then we see Henry Foster snubbing Bernard Marx at the embryo store as Lenina enters. Scenes shift between the D.H.C. and Mond\u2019s history lesson and the dialogue between Foster, the Assistant Predestinator. Try placing an M for Mond at the beginning of each of his scenes, L for Lenina\u2019s, as they counterpoint, and notice how gradually the interval between Mond\u2019s words and Lenina\u2019s gets reduced. Sometimes only one line intervenes until Mond or Lenina\/Fanny take up their lines.<\/li>\r\n \t
      3. Give one example of Mond\u2019s being depicted as an ironic Christ figure\u2014it occurs near the end of the chapter. How is Mond an ironic Christ figure?<\/li>\r\n \t
      4. How is Mond like one of H.G. Wells\u2019s samurai in his A Modern Utopia<\/em><\/a>?<\/li>\r\n \t
      5. In a brief essay, compare Huxley and Eliot\u2019s use of juxtaposition of past versus present.<\/li>\r\n \t
      6. After reading Mond\u2019s history lesson in Chapter 3, give the chief reason for the creation of the brave new world.<\/li>\r\n \t
      7. The utopian society of the brave new world apparently minimizes the problems associated with old age through hormone treatments (Violent Passion Surrogates, gonadal hormones). Look up the scientists Serge Voronoff (1866\u20131951) and Eugen Steinach (1861\u20131944). Huxley refers throughout the novel to ductless glands, adrenals, pituitary glands, internal and external secretions, and gonads. He is almost certainly referring to the rejuvenation theories of Steinach and Voronoff. (Interestingly, late in his life, W.B. Yeats underwent such rejuvenation therapy and reported positive results.) By 1929, the Marx Brothers famously alluded to this rejuvenation fad in their song \u201cMonkey Doodle-Doo\u201d in their film The Cocoanuts: <\/em>\u201cLet me take you by the hand \/ Over to the jungle band \/ If you\u2019re too old for dancing \/ Get yourself a monkey gland \/ And then let\u2019s go, my little dearie, there\u2019s the Darwin theory\u2026\u201d<\/li>\r\n \t
      8. You might consider writing an essay on Huxley\u2019s use of rejuvenation therapy in BNW<\/em>.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

        Chapter 4<\/h2>\r\n
          \r\n \t
        1. List the uniform colour for Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons.<\/li>\r\n \t
        2. Why is Community Singing encouraged in the brave new world?<\/li>\r\n \t
        3. Notice the special meaning for the word \u201cCorporation.\u201d List a few examples and then clarify what a Corporation is. What European state was known as a \u201ccorporate state\u201d between the wars? Is the brave new world a \u201ccorporate state\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
        4. Before her date with Bernard, Lenina rushes to meet Henry Foster, fearing her lateness will annoy Henry, who is a stickler for punctuality. His efficiency-expert attention to time introduces the satire on industrial rationalization as championed by F.W. Taylor<\/a>, a time-and-motion engineer, dubbed \u201cthe father of scientific management,\u201d and whose books greatly influenced Ford. See first Then, look at the following article: \u201cSophistication of Mass Production\u201d<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

          Chapter 5<\/h2>\r\n
            \r\n \t
          1. The chapter begins with several allusions to Thomas Gray\u2019s \u201cElegy Written in a Country Churchyard<\/a>.\u201d Read the poem, especially the first 50 lines.<\/li>\r\n \t
          2. Make a list of words that Huxley borrows from Gray here. Write a brief essay on the thematic use Huxley makes of the contrast between Gray\u2019s poem and the novel.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

            Chapter 6<\/h2>\r\n
              \r\n \t
            1. Contrast what Henry Foster expects from his relationship with Lenina with what Bernard Marx wants from her.<\/li>\r\n \t
            2. What is the main conflict in this chapter? Between which characters?<\/li>\r\n \t
            3. A key symbol is the electric fence separating \u201ccivilization from savagery\u201d:Uphill and down, across the deserts of salt or sand, through forests, into the violet depth of canyons, over crag and peak and table-topped mesa, the fence marched on and on, irresistibly the straight line, the geometrical symbol of triumphant human purpose.<\/strong> And at its foot, here and there, a mosaic of white bones, a still unrotted carcase dark on the tawny ground marked the place where deer or steer, puma or porcupine or coyote, or the greedy turkey buzzards drawn down by the whiff of carrion and fulminated as though by a poetic justice, had come too close to the destroying wires. \u201cThey never learn,\u201d said the green-uniformed pilot, pointing down at the skeletons on the ground below them. \u201cAnd they never will learn,\u201d he added and laughed, as though he had somehow scored a personal triumph over the electrocuted animals.This image needs to be examined carefully. \u00a0Typically, the straight line symbolizes human reason, science. Notice that man has conquered nature, and that the animals are killed by the voltage in the man-made fence. Just before he was writing Brave New World<\/em>, Huxley was highly critical of Le Corbusier, the famous French\/Swiss architect. Look up Le Corbusier on Wikipedia<\/a>. In his foreword to Urbanisme<\/em> (Englist translation, The City of Tomorrow)<\/em> (1929), he said, \u201cA curved road is a donkey path; a straight road is a road for men.\u201d<\/strong> One thinks here of the myth of Pandora\u2019s box and of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Pride is the common denominator in both myths.Look at the \u201cForays into Urbanism 1922\u20131929\" section of the site mentioned above. Pay particular attention to the photo of Le Corbusier\u2019s sketch of a city for three million people, with its 60-storey buildings, rooftop helipads, etc. Note also that Le Corbusier hoped that politically minded industrialists in France would lead the way with their efficient Taylorist and Fordist strategies adopted from American models to reorganize society. In this new industrialist spirit, Le Corbusier began a new journal called L\u2019Esprit Nouveau<\/em> that advocated the use of modern, industrial techniques and strategies to transform society into a more efficient environment with a higher standard of living on all socioeconomic levels. He forcefully argued that this transformation was necessary to avoid the spectre of revolution that would otherwise shake society. His dictum \u201cArchitecture or Revolution,\u201d developed in his articles in this journal, became his rallying cry for the book Vers une architecture<\/em> (\u201cTowards an Architecture,\u201d translated into English as Towards a New Architecture<\/em>), which comprised selected articles from L\u2019Esprit Nouveau<\/em> between 1920 and 1923.Huxley had a long-standing aversion to Le Corbusier\u2019s urban style, calling him \u201can enemy of privacy,\u201d and BNW<\/em> is an attack on his kind of futuristic city. Is Huxley warning against human pride here, our tendency to try to dominate nature, to improve upon it as Henry Foster is so eager to demonstrate?<\/li>\r\n \t
            4. You might consider writing an essay on Huxley\u2019s critique of modernist architects such as Le Corbusier.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

              Chapter 7<\/h2>\r\n
                \r\n \t
              1. The expression \u201cCleanliness is next to godliness\u201d is not from the Bible. Who popularized the adage?<\/li>\r\n \t
              2. What is John\u2019s mother Linda\u2019s relationship to nature and technology?<\/li>\r\n \t
              3. Explain how Linda\u2019s allusion to the Chelsea Abortion Centre is an example of bathos<\/strong>. Note that Sir Christopher Wren\u2019s classically designed Chelsea Hospital has now become an abortion centre.<\/li>\r\n \t
              4. What key information concerning the D.H.C. is divulged in this chapter?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                Chapter 8<\/h2>\r\n
                  \r\n \t
                1. How does young John react to the relationship between his mother and Pop\u00e9, the man who gave John a tattered copy of Shakespeare\u2019s complete works?<\/li>\r\n \t
                2. John learns to read, but the only book he reads besides Linda\u2019s technical manuals is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare<\/em>. Immediately, the descriptions in Hamlet <\/em>and other plays provide John with the negative vocabulary and another perspective with which to view Pop\u00e9 and Linda\u2019s sexual behaviour: \u201cNay, but to live \/ In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, \/ Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love \/ Over the nasty sty.\u201d (Hamlet<\/em>, 3.4.91\u201394).<\/li>\r\n \t
                3. In Hamlet<\/em>, Shakespeare depicts women as either madonnas<\/strong> (innocents like Ophelia before she falls out of Hamlet\u2019s favour) or else whores<\/strong> (Gertrude with Claudius or Ophelia after her rejection of Hamlet\u2019s love). John will soon begin to idealize Lenina, who is so unlike his aging mother. John had earlier loved the Indian maid Kiakim\u00e9, but at age 16, his heart was broken as she married another\u2014a young, full-blooded Zu\u00f1i man, not an outsider like John. John was also an outsider to the rites and mysteries discussed in the kiva, so the essence of John\u2019s experience is rejection. He will be an outsider in both communities, because of his different race in the reserve, and because of his different values in the brave new world.<\/li>\r\n \t
                4. Notice Freud\u2019s articulation of the whore\u2013madonna theory<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n \t
                5. Look up Ernest Jones, Freud\u2019s biographer. Then read this article titled \"The Sphinx of Modern Literature\"<\/a>, which explains how Jones interpreted Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet<\/em> in light of the Freudian Oedipus complex.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                  Chapter 9<\/h2>\r\n
                    \r\n \t
                  1. Why do you think Mond allows John and Linda to come with Bernard and Lenina to \u201ccivilization\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
                  2. What is the attitude to romantic love in the brave new world?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                    Chapter 10<\/h2>\r\n
                      \r\n \t
                    1. What is the significance of the perfectly synchronized clocks in all 4,000 rooms of the Centre? How does this image link to F.W. Taylor?<\/li>\r\n \t
                    2. In what ways does the brave new world resemble a beehive or ant colony?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                      Chapter 11<\/h2>\r\n
                        \r\n \t
                      1. What scene causes John to repeat Miranda\u2019s famous phrase \u201cO, brave new world,\u201d and how is his meaning different from the first time he says this at the end of Chapter 8? In what later chapter does John utter these lines yet again? Clarify the irony with respect to John\u2019s three separate quotations of Miranda\u2019s words.<\/li>\r\n \t
                      2. Why is it more difficult, according to Miss Keate, to educate upper-caste, one-egg, one-adult students?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                        Chapter 12<\/h2>\r\n
                          \r\n \t
                        1. What is the central paradox in the poem Helmholtz writes? In what way does it resemble William Wordsworth\u2019s sonnet \u201cComposed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802<\/a>\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
                        2. What does it have in common with T.S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cPreludes<\/a>\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
                        3. In a brief essay, analyze Helmholtz\u2019s 24-line poem, beginning \u201cYesterday\u2019s committee\u2026\u201d<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                          Chapter 13<\/h2>\r\n
                            \r\n \t
                          1. Discuss the significance of the promising Alpha-minus administrator\u2019s dying of trypanosomiasis. Try to relate it to one of the main hypnopaedic maxims of BNW<\/em>.<\/li>\r\n \t
                          2. What does John Savage mean when he says \u201csome kinds of baseness are nobly undergone\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
                          3. In what way is Lenina atavistic?<\/li>\r\n \t
                          4. When Lenina grabs John and kisses him, what does he experience and why?<\/li>\r\n \t
                          5. Describe the change in the image patterns found in the poetic lines that John suddenly starts to quote from Shakespeare. Account for the sudden change in the kinds of images.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                            Chapter 14<\/h2>\r\n
                              \r\n \t
                            1. What is the earliest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word \u201ctelevision\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
                            2. Whose name does Linda call out when John visits her in the hospital?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                              Chapter 15<\/h2>\r\n
                                \r\n \t
                              1. How does the historic soma<\/em> and its use differ from the soma<\/em> of BNW<\/em>?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                                Chapter 16<\/h2>\r\n
                                  \r\n \t
                                1. \u201cChapter 16 shows Bernard Marx at his worst.\u201d Do you agree or disagree?<\/li>\r\n \t
                                2. What was the Cyprus experiment?<\/li>\r\n \t
                                3. In the discussion scene between Mond and John, it is hard not to think of another poem by Thomas Gray here, \u201cOde on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.<\/a>\u201d In that poem, Gray contrasts the thoughtless days of youth before the pain of adulthood are known. \u201cRegardless of their doom \/ The little victims play! \/ No sense have they of ills to come, \/ Nor care beyond today.\u201d (ll. 51\u201354). As Mond knows, and as John must learn, the brave new world eliminates all the ills that Gray attributes to adulthood: the Passions of Anger, Fear, Shame, pining Love, Jealousy, Envy, Care, Despair, Sorrow, Ambition, Death, Poverty, and slow consuming age. The inhabitants of Mond\u2019s stable, controlled society, unlike men, are not \u201ccondemned alike to groan.\u201d How can Mond\u2019s position be partly summed up by the last stanza (lines 91\u2013100)?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                                  Chapter 17<\/h2>\r\nHuxley was indebted to Dostoevsky\u2019s famous Grand Inquisitor chapter from The Brothers Karamazov<\/em> in Chapters 16 and 17, with John resembling Dostoevsky\u2019s Christ figure, and Mond representing his Grand Inquisitor<\/a>.\r\n\r\nThe essence of the conflict between John and Mond is whether happiness (Mond\u2019s goal) is the chief goal in human society or whether it is some form of heightened consciousness\/freedom for each person (John\u2019s goal). Dostoeivsky used Satan\u2019s triple temptation of Christ in the wilderness as his starting point. [See Matthew: ch. 4]\r\n
                                    \r\n \t
                                  1. In the context of the Grand Inquisitor, why do you think Mond encourages the Fordian religion? Why does the brave new world bother with religion at all?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

                                    Chapter 18<\/h2>\r\n
                                      \r\n \t
                                    1. Do you consider Bernard Marx a static or a dynamic, changing character? That is, does he grow or change during the novel? Is he any different in his final appearance in Chapter 18?<\/li>\r\n \t
                                    2. Who is Darwin Bonaparte and who might be his modern equivalent?<\/li>\r\n \t
                                    3. In the last scene, what might the references to the compass points suggest?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

                                      Overview<\/h1>\r\n