Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [2]
I myself was living in the era of 'elasticized panty girdles' that could not be got out of, or indeed into, without an epic struggle, so this was heady stuff indeed.
The girl shedding the zippicamiknicks is Lenina Crowne, a blue-eyed beauty both strangely innocent and alluringly voluptuous – or 'pneumatic', as her many male admirers call her. Lenina doesn't see why she shouldn't have sex with anyone she likes whenever the occasion offers, as to do so is merely polite behaviour and not to do so is selfish. The man she's trying to seduce by shedding her undergarment is John 'the Savage', who's been raised far outside the 'civilized' pale on a diet of Shakespeare's chastity/whore speeches, and Zuni cults, and self-flagellation, and who believes in religion and romance, and in suffering to be worthy of one's beloved, and who idolizes Lenina until she doffs her zippicamiknicks in such a casual and shameless fashion.
Never were two sets of desiring genitalia so thoroughly at odds. And thereby hangs Huxley's tale.
Brave New World is either a perfect-world Utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view: its inhabitants are beautiful, secure, and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable. 'Utopia' is sometimes said to mean 'no place', from the Greek 'O Topia'; but others derive it from 'eu', as in 'eugenics', in which case it would mean 'healthy place' or 'good place'. Sir Thomas More, in his own sixteenth-century Utopia, may have been punning: Utopia is the good place that doesn't exist.
As a literary construct, Brave New World thus has a long list of literary ancestors. Plato's Republic and the Bible's Book of Revelations and the myth of Atlantis are the great-great-grandparents of the form; nearer in time are Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and the land of the talking-horse, totally rational Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, in which the brainless, pretty 'upper classes' play in the sunshine during the day, and the ugly 'lower classes' run the underground machinery and emerge at night to eat the social butterflies.
In the nineteenth century – when improvements in sewage systems, medicine, communication technologies, and transportation were opening new doors every year – many earnest Utopias were thrown up by the prevailing mood of optimism, with William Morris's News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward foremost among them.
Insofar as they are critical of society as it presently exists but nevertheless take a dim view of the prospects of the human race, Utopias may verge on satire, as do Swift's and More's and Wells's; but insofar as they endorse the view that humanity is perfectible, or can at least be vastly improved, they will resemble idealizing romances, as do Bellamy's and Morris's. The First World War marked the end of the romantic-idealistic Utopian dream in literature, just as several real-life Utopian plans were about to be launched with disastrous effects. The Communist regime in Russia and the Nazi takeover of Germany both began as Utopian visions.
But as most literary Utopias had already discovered, perfectibility breaks on the rock of dissent. What do you do with people who don't endorse your views or fit in with your