In the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley we are taken to a world that is unlike any we have experienced, or is it? The imagery is completely unique but the story itself is one that even in today’s culture we experience via power driven Capitalists that is complicated by an over-analytical justification of all the good intentions that only rarely become actuality that mask themselves under the philanthropist's umbrella. In this paper, I plan to explain how the “Controller” aka Mustapha Mond, ran his utopia. Through a Marxist lens was what the “Controller” was going for, a Capitalist one is what prevailed through its consumerism and rank. I also plan on explaining how Huxley intended the book to come across through psychoanalysis of its when, where, why, what, how, and who. By using a Psychoanalytical lens I will flesh out the “Controller’s” (Huxley’s) uncanny need to build his imaginary utopia on the foundation of test tubes, Hypnopaedia, and a parentless society in the Industrial Revolution Great Depression era.
Marxist literary analysis consists of viewing literature from an economic and societal standpoint. Marxism, named after its forefather Karl Marx, takes the theory of capitalism and breaks it down through the middle-class value of labor to explain why we as a society, as humans, do what we do. “The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the land, but eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong to him who buys them.” (Rivkin, Ryan 661) The money that is collected for these hours given is the wage the worker works for. It is given by the capitalist as monetary compensation for the hours of work put in, and after it is given it is used for the life that the worker feels “begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed.” (Rivkin, Ryan 660)
Capitalism, however, is “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a free competitive market and motivation by profit.” (Encarta 2009) Capitalism does not see the labor being performed, only what comes from the labor, the commodity produced. In Brave New World we are introduced to an “economic system” that is solely run by the “Controller” where he has “private ownership” of the entire utopia that he has created; wherein he manipulates the social classes that he has created for the “means of production and distribution of goods”. One of the true, yet central satire, themes of the book is to always remember "The existence of a class which possesses nothing but its capacity to labor is a necessary prerequisite of capital." (Rivkin, Ryan 663) We see this very early on when the “Director” explains to a student
“Flowers and scenery, he pointed out, have one great fault; they are free. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to take away the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to take away the love of nature, but not the need for transport. Of course, it was necessary that they should keep going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to make the use of transport for a reason which was economically better than a mere affection for flowers and scenery. It was solved. ‘We condition the lower classes to hate the country,’ ended the Director. ‘But at the same time we condition them to love all country sports. Then we require that all country sports require expensive equipment. So they buy and use manufactured articles as well as transport.” (Kindle location 139)
This is clearly a market-driven (albeit dictatorial and somewhat communism sounding with its controlling nature) speech that has a clear “motivation by profit” point. This is however masked to society by having classes that give the impression of an upper, middle, and lower class.
“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so clever. I’m really very 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 all wear light brown. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are even worse.” (Kindle location 181)
In appearing to have a social order it gives the society as a whole the appearance of a Marxist society where labor is valued, and while it is, because the “Controller” knows that without a “stupid” labor-intensive working class all of the “clever” ideas of the Alphas would go unproduced, this is all market-driven. Marxist theory is “The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the land” (Rivkin, Ryan 661) but to his self as he values his labor and time. In Huxley’s utopia all Alphas’, Beta’s, Gamma’s, Delta’s, and Epsilons belong to the “Controller” who has classed them as he saw fit to produce happily what is needed to keep society running smoothly, happily working and happily buying in a constant loop. In Capitalism, there isn’t a clear need for social classes excepting a working-class and a non-working class (business owners). So a clever way to disguise a controlled group of people is to give them more social classes to divide themselves amongst giving the appearance that there are levels to intelligence, responsibility, and fun (i.e. other things to think about than the fact that they come from test tubes). Gregory Claeys puts it best when he states that this story is about “the quasi-omnipotence of a monolithic, totalitarian state demanding and normally extracting complete obedience from its citizens challenged occasionally but usually ineffectually by vestigial individualism or systematic flaws, and relying upon scientific and technological advances to ensure social control.”
In a Marxist society, people think for themselves and give value to what they want to work for, in Capitalism they are told what to value and therefore they work to produce that while being essentially told they are only worth their weight in pay via the test tube they were raised in.
Psychoanalytical literary analysis consists of viewing literature from a psychological standpoint. Psychoanalysis, named after Sigmund Freud’s technique of psychoanalyzing the human thought process, aims to see literature through a series of questions that look to answer when, how, where, what, why, and who the story came into existence. It aims to look at these questions through the eyes of the author to analyze all the elements of his/her story. This can be described by Freud’s narcissistic theory of the “ego ideal” or later termed “internalization/introjections” which are “a mental representation that gives expression, according to Freud, to repressed narcissistic libido.” Where “they will come to be seen as representations built up in the self as a way of securing for itself the benefit of relations with others that have become unstable or insecure.” (Rivkin, Ryan 415) In doing these things an author can play out hidden emotions through made-up fictional characters. Psychoanalysis looks to uncover these and explain why these emotions are hidden and how they play out in each specific character.
So when did Huxley write Brave New World? He wrote it during the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression. So it is understandable that this book has revolutionary thought processes with regard to raising children in test tubes and flying transportation as it appeals to the depressed brain of that time period as having possible hope for the future that utopia might be a possibility. Though that is all in the perspective in which one chooses to read the book. Through a psychoanalytical lens, we can dive into the reason why Huxley wanted to write this book, why he felt Hypnopaedia was so crucial as to incorporate it into his book, and why saying mother was worse than swearing since Huxley himself had a better relationship with his mother then he did with his father.
How did Huxley feel during this time period to make this book so impactful? In another book by Huxley’s titled Ends and Means, he starts off “About the ideal goal of human effort…” where he says “There are some who believe – and it is a very popular belief at the present time – that the royal road to a better world is the road to economic reform. For some, the shortcut to Utopia is military conquest and the hegemony of one particular nation; for others, it is the armed revolution and the dictatorship of a particular class. All these think mainly in terms of social machinery and large-scale organization. There are others, however, who approach the problem from the opposite end, and believe that desirable social change can be brought about most effectively by changing the individuals who compose society. Of the people who think in this way, some pin their faith to education, some to psycho-analysis, some to applied behaviorism. There are others, on the contrary, who believe that no desirable “change of heart” can be brought about without supernatural aid. There must be, they say, a return to religion (Unhappily, they cannot agree on the religion to which the return should be made.)” (Huxley, 1)
In this, we can see what he felt so inclined to express as the changes occurring within and around society in this time period. Where “economic reform” comes from the Capitalistic-Marxist classed social statuses that love the sport and buy the merchandise even though they hate the country. He gave the “Controller” “dictatorship” of all social classes, since he made each social class from scratch. Huxley then created his “large-scale organization” of “Alpha’s, Beta’s, Gamma’s, Delta’s, and Epsilons” to run the central business of test-tube baby creating on large-scale “machinery” that creates human life in complete organized controlled settings where
“The sound of well-oiled machinery rose softly from below, the lifts rushed up and down. On all the 11 floors of the Nurseries, it was feeding time. From 1,800 bottles 1,800 carefully labeled infants were sucking down their bottles of artificial milk.” (Kindle location 903)
This “machinery” was complete with sleeping quarters where Hypnopaedia can occur daily;
“They’ll have that repeated a hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months while they are sleeping, then they go on to a more advanced lesson. Sleep-teaching is the most powerful force of all time in social education. The child’s mind becomes these suggestions and the total of these suggestions is the child’s mind. And not only the child’s mind. The adult’s mind too, all his life long. The mind that thinks and desires and decides. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!’… ‘Suggestions of the State.’”
This also allows Huxley to incorporate his notion that there are those “who approach the problem from the opposite end, and believe that desirable social change can be brought about most effectively by changing the individuals who compose society”. It seems to be very important to Huxley, at the time of writing this story, that people be made aware of just how much a person could be controlled and manipulated via one’s subconscious mind. It also seems important to Huxley to make sure that his story’s “Controller” had the power and knowledge to essentially take care of everything, creating the appearance of a safe and calm environment for all at all times. Those reading this book may enjoy the thought of a Marxist social class separation that keeps like-minded people together. Even if someone thinks outside of the proverbial box they were still, in the best-case scenario, being given the opportunity to pick the exile island they wanted to be sent to, which also housed like-minded people.
‘If he had any sense, he’d realize that his punishment is really a reward. That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, are too individual to fit into community life. All the people who aren’t content to be the same as the others, who’ve got independent ideas of their own.” (Kindle location 1443-1451)
Therefore, it would appear that being a puppet had its cushy advantages. The downsides to the “Controller’s” safe and calm “World State” are side effects inclusive of and not limited to, drug addiction, whore like behavior, lack of intimacy, lack of individuality, non-existent mother and a father-to-all called Ford, sexual harassment that you receive but don’t understand is not cool, unexplainable notions to dislike others in social classes not your own, inability to chose your own profession, lack of social outlets, forced to give up your sperm and eggs for harvesting, never knowing how to love someone else, never knowing how to accept love from someone else, subjectivity to wearing the same colors and clothes all the time, and of course having no voice or notion to want a voice of your own ever. All in all, it’s the best dream for a psychotically controlling lifestyle.
Why create this back-handed compliment? Brave New World can put its reader in the mindset of perfectionism as it is the “Controllers” purpose to take away freedoms from his society of people in an effort to stabilize everyone’s emotional happiness. From the very beginning of the story, we are introduced to the “Director” who follows orders that he has been conditioned with over the years just as he directs his subordinates with orders they have been conditioned to follow as they help to condition the next generations and so on to keep the perfect order. Huxley’s Brave New World dives deep into the subconscious of human nature and societal conditioning to creatively explore this universal truth that the goal of society is to constantly create something for all humans to do.
Who was influencing Huxley’s mind when he wrote Brave New World? Though the whole book is not centered on Freudian theories it is clear that the number of psychological studies being explored during this time period, that had Freud leading the pack, was seeping into Huxley’s brain while writing. Huxley suggests that the "Director's" purpose in this grand utopia is to strip what Freud called the Mirror Stage away from the children preventing their ability to assume their own image. By telling the nurses to condition all babies in some way or another at early stages in their development, he is telling them to not allow each child to find their own likes and dislikes. No person is allowed to be an individual as it always has to be about the hierarchy.
Despite Huxley’s public words of distaste for Freud, we also see significant signs of another Freudian theory, the Oedipus complex, with regard to its lack of family orientation. The central and main father is one that is of a Godly stature that is named after Henry Ford, the automotive headmaster, and mother is a completely forbidden word. Where one could possibly get away with saying “father” without saying Ford, saying mother was intolerable; in effect completely abandoning the family concept altogether. This is where“…the Oedipus complex is deemed such a dangerous and powerful force that it (along with the family structure that produces it) has been eliminated from civilized life, as far as possible. Children are no longer born to a set of parents but produced in an assembly-line process from fertilized eggs, which are then “decanted” into bottles and subjected to endless chemical alteration and conditioning. By controlling all aspects of a child’s birth and upbringing and by keeping adults in a condition of infantile dependency on a larger social body, Huxley’s imaginary state has taken over the role of parent and robbed the child of his or her Oedipal potentialities. Indeed, it could be argued that the active suppression of the Oedipus complex is the principal tool of social stability practiced in this future.” (Buchanan 76)
In an effort to keep everything uniform and systematic in lieu of the absentee family dynamic Huxley had his “Controller” make sure each child fell into a specified spectrum in an effort to always ensure the populace of money was continuing to generate and humans are never knowingly unhappy. In the intimate conversation that the “Controller” has with the “Savage” John, the “Controller” explains why he didn’t make everyone an Alpha Double-Plus.
‘Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,’ he answered. ‘We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be restless and unhappy. An Alpha would go mad if he had to do Epsilon work – or start destroying things. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices. His conditioning has determined the life he has got to live. He can’t help himself.’ (Kindle location 1410)
He went on to explain that it’s like an ‘iceberg – eight-ninths below the waterline, one-ninth above.’ (Kindle location 1410) Huxley made this hard for his character John to grasp therefore allowing his “Controller” to continue with his explanation as it would be hard to explain to any general society that in order to have order and calm there must be an equality among the masses that appear to the untrained eye as unequal as we all seem to think that everyone thinks as we do, when in fact they do not. Sleep-teaching or not, the “Controller” (Huxley himself) knew that we all think differently so to run an actual society without levels would never work. Levels can be broken down into minimal numbers of levels but there always must remain a plural, as a singular level ensues unhappy fighting amongst peers for top spot; that is our human/animalistic nature.
In an effort to make this essay run current with today’s day and age I will quickly tie Brave New Word to current thinking. When Huxley wrote this book there was a lot less to consume though there was the theory of consumerism. Through the years and all that the Industrial Revolution and New Technologies that have been made available to us, we have been afforded the luxury of individual identities. The same something that Bernard and Helmholtz sought after and the “Controller” eventually granted them with their exiles. However, these individual identities have become levels themselves now. In Brave New World Huxley created Alpha’s, Beta’s, Gamma’s Delta’s, and Epsilons which coincided with the amount to consume back then, but today we have our own levels that come with sublevels to accommodate the influx in people alive. We are now given these distinctive levels when we are in school, on our taxes by way of our jobs already determined rank and income level, and as well as social rank in our own communities we live in, communities that are also ranked on levels of poor, middle class working, or rich/elite. In today’s age “Human beings buy objects not only to consume them but also to establish and reproduce status and identity. People shop for “identities” in a variety of urban contexts, thereby collecting and consuming many dimensions of the “I”. Increasingly, the “I” itself has become a product to buy. Consumer goods and shopping environments are consumed to create new identities as well as to select those already on the market. In doing so, we as consumers have adopted a mobile lifestyle to find commodities, people, and places to materialize a preferred status and lifestyle (Spierings, 2006). Consumer goods and shopping environments we (do not) want to construct our identity. We need something, someone and somewhere to belong to, to demarcate ourselves from, to define ourselves.” (Spierings, Van Houtum 901)
While Huxley did not make his characters able to shop for their identities as we shop for ours now, that is not to say that he did not set the stage that the original “Controller” didn’t shop for these identities when creating this utopia. Huxley knew of the identity behind the “I” and knew when writing this that to have a utopia there could not be an “I” anymore then there could be a “mother”.
In conclusion, Brave New World is a literary masterpiece that takes a made-up world and society and explains the political, economic, and cultural time period of the Great Depression and Industrial Revolution era with just enough lee-way room that it could still be an applicable foretelling of a future on its way. Aldous Huxley, despite his feelings on Freudian beliefs, incorporated an incredible amount of psychoanalytical material from the Id/Ego to Mirror Stage, and the Oedipus complex in every aspect of the book. He also structured his made-up world off of the appearance of a Marxist society while underlying it with capitalist theories that would translate today to our consumerism of the “I”. When put together Marxism works its best when it can feed off of the psychosis of its society it’s looking to be used in. Marxism cannot flourish without a society full of people who feel the need to outdo someone else in the society. Just as Capitalism cannot flourish in a society where ideas do not form from Alphas and there are no minions to carry out the ideas of those higher class individuals. In order to have classes, a society must have those people whose thoughts constantly feed off of an animalistic dominance in which they will constantly produce ways to fulfill those thoughts and needs for power over others. Therefore, much as in life, we find two lenses of thought, Marxist (sometimes with a capitalists subset) and Psychoanalytical, that effectual can feed off of each other to create dysfunctional yet functioning worlds. Huxley understood this and was able to capture and present a story of just enough satire and out of this world imagery to fool the mind into thinking its fiction when it really depicts a future in slow fruition.
Works Cited:
- Buchanan, Brad. “Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.”Journal of Modern Literature, XXV, no. 3/4, 2002, pp. 75–89., ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edspmu&AN=edspmu.S1529146402300759&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 14 May 2017.
- Claeys, Gregory. “5 The Origins of Dystopia: Wells Huxley and Orwell.”The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010, p. 109.
- Congdon, Brad. “'Community, Identity, Stability': The Scientific Society and the Future of Religion in Aldous Huxley's: Brave New World.”English Studies in Canada, vol. 37, ser. 3-4, 2011, pp. 83–105.3-4, ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgao&AN=edsgcl.312014349&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 14 May 2017.
- Huxley, Aldous (2014-07-01). Brave New World. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
- Huxley, Aldous, and Howard Schneiderman. “Goals, Roads, and Contemporary Starting Point.”Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals, Transaction Publishers, pp. 1–2.
- Murdock, Kayla. “Capitalism versus Marxism.”Capitalism versus Marxism, Grin, 2009, m.grin.com/document/150605. Accessed 1 June 2017.
- Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. “Chapter 3: On Narcissism Sigmund Freud.”Literary Theory: An Anthology Second Edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2004, p. 415.
- Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. “Chapter 5: Wage Labor and Capital Karl Marx.”Literary Theory: An Anthology Second Edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2004, pgs. 660-661,663.
- Spierings, B., and H. Van Houtum. “The Brave New World of the Post-Society: The Mass-Production of the Individual Consumer and the Emergence of Template Cities.”European Planning Studies, vol. 16, no. 7, Aug. 2008, pp. 899–909., ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edswss&AN=000258452800002&site=eds-live&scope=site. Accessed 14 May 2017.