The peak of a writer’s career should exhibit their most profound works of
literature. In the case of Aldous Huxley, Brave New World is by far his most
renowned novel. Aldous Huxley is a European-born writer who, in the midst of his
career, moved to the United States and settled in California. While in
California, he began to have visions aided by his usage of hallucinatory drugs.
His visions were of a utopian society surviving here on earth. In his
literature, Huxley wanted to make this utopian society as much a reality as
possible. “In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid
impossibilities.” This quote, written by Aristotle, perfectly describes
Huxley’s attitude towards the creation of his imaginary utopia. His only
problem was establishing a value system that would not seem too unattainable.
Huxley has two novels that have the theme of utopia, Brave New World and Island.
Brave New World , which was written before Island , has ideas that are quite
far-fetched, but in Huxley’s eyes, still close to reality. Huxley’s first
portrait of utopia involves having a controlled society of people all being
alike. The year is A.F. 632 (After Ford; Ford is the equivalent to God in Brave
New World ) and with the available technology, citizens are mass produced.
Island is a product of the rethinking of Huxley’s utopia. The ideas are a lot
more real because the people are just ordinary human beings. Both of these
novels have an underlying theme in common. The stability of Huxley’s utopian
societies are centered around the loss of individualism. Individuals are
considered a threat in Huxley’s utopian novels. In the novel Island, the
utopian society is on a small island, named Pala. The leader of the utopian
society, Murugan, is an individual apart from the community. His plans are to
modernize and charge the way the people of Pala live. The reason he has thoughts
that are different from the rest of the community is that he was raised outside
of Pala. He grew up in Switzerland and the neighboring island Rendag, both of
which have been modernized and corrupted by the outside world. Therefore,
Murugan’s mind has been corrupted by his staying in those two places. “Pala
is thus threatened by the outside world,” explains critic Frank Magill,
because Murugan is introducing the modern way of life to this small island and
it is damaging the stability of the community. Rendag was once the same as Pala
but since it has ports for ships to embark, it was exposed to the outside world
much more quickly. Pala has no ports so it was safe from the invasions of the
Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch and English, which Pendag fell victim to. There are
five times types of people made in Brave New World. Alphas, Betas, Deltas,
Gamma, and Epsilons. Bernard Marx, the main character of Brave New World is an
Alpha. Alphas are supposed to be the smartest, most well-built, most
intellectual, and well-conditioned of all the five of the groups made. Yet
Bernard speaks with individualistic ideas that are unheard of in this society
molded around the loss of being a unique person. Bernard’s friend, Helmholtz
Watson is also one who threatens the utopia of Brave New World. Huxley explains
the friendship of the two men: “What the two men shared was the knowledge that
they were individuals.” They are the only characters which openly discuss
their personal ideas. Ideas that in a sense are considered sinful in their
society. In the end Bernard and Helmholtz are ejected from society by being
shipped off to some foreign island so that they will finally be free to expose
their individualism. Through mass production of people, individualism is lost.
In Brave New World, all of the people are products of mass production. “Racks
upon racks of numbered test tubes.#”, [p. 5] is the only way to describe them
before their actual birth. They have no family to give them a background
different from anyone else’s. They all come from the same green bottles. Even
when they are born, all they are given is a name chosen out of a small group of
common names. In our world, having a name is one of the millions of ways we use
to tell people apart and give them a feature unique to themselves. The frequency
of having the same name with so many other people, takes away from a person’s
individuality. Sometimes, “ninety-six identical twins” [p. 7] are produced.
Having ninety-six people looking exactly the same has the same effect as having
the same name, but to a much greater extent. In Island, the babies are born the
natural way, but the children do not have a single set of parents, they have an
“unpredestined and voluntary family”, meaning that they are free to roam
from family to family. They are urged to pick up the cultures of every family in
the town by and by. Individuality is lost in this because one aspect of
individualism is the influence of family on a person. If everyone has the same
relatives, they are likely to all begin thinking alike. The loss of
individualism in Island is not as extreme as in Brave New World, but it is
prevalent. The ideas that Huxley presents to replace religion in both novels
cause loss of individualism. In Brave New World, as children, the people go
through what they call “hypnopaedic conditioning”. This is a process in
which a phrase of moral value is repeated over and over in their sleep until
they live by it. This is their form of religion because this conditioning
instills the people’s values. They are taught phrases such as, “...when the
individual feels, the community reels” [p. 70]. The individuals are taught to
believe that they community is more important than the individual. One critic
explains, “They are trained to live in total identification with society and
to shun all activities that threaten the stability of the community.” A second
example of how “hypnopaedic conditioning” shows loss of individualism is
that if a person belongs to everyone else, then he is not able to make the
choice of belonging. Making one’s own choices is part of being an individual.
In the novel Island, the people follow a mixture of religions that contain a lot
of eastern philosophy. Their religious books have phrases such as “I’m a
crowd,” and “....thou art that, also him.” Both of these phrases preach
conformity of people. The more people become alike, the less individuality they
have. The idea of a utopian society in today’s world would seem impossible. It
would probably be destroyed just as the island of Pala was because keeping unity
of thought amongst billions of free-thinking people is too far-fetched to
consider probable or plausible. However, a future utopian society as in Brave
New World just might be possible. With the speed of advancing technology, the
biological tools needed to mass produce human beings have been made and
experimented on as we speak. Scientists can already clone DNA and make an
artificial person or animal. The novel wasn’t written to talk about scientific
advancements. It was written to depict how the scientific advancements would
effect the individual. A utopian society might work in less extremes than in
either of the two books. The only thing in the way, is that everyone in
today’s world thinks that their views are the “right way of thinking,” and
are rarely open to other viewpoints, at least not to the point of being willing
to have their “being” dictated by someone else.