Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [3]
Utopias and dystopias from Plato's Republic on have had to cover the same basic ground that real societies do. All must answer the same questions: Where do people live, what do they eat, what do they wear, what do they do about sex and child-rearing? Who has the power, who does the work, how do citizens relate to nature, and how does the economy function? Romantic Utopias such as Morris's News from Nowhere and W.H. Hudson's A Crystal Age present a Pre-Raphaelite picture, with the inhabitants going in for flowing robes, natural settings in abodes that sound like English country houses with extra stained glass, and lots of arts and crafts. Everything would be fine, we're told, if we could only do away with industrialism and get back in tune with Nature, and deal with overpopulation. (Hudson solves this last problem by simply eliminating sex, except for one unhappy couple per country house who are doomed to procreate.)
But when Huxley was writing Brave New World at the beginning of the 1930s, he was, in his own words, an 'amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete', a member of that group of bright young upstarts that swirled around the Bloomsbury Group and delighted in attacking anything Victorian or Edwardian. So Brave New World tosses out the flowing robes, the crafts, and the tree-hugging. Its architecture is futuristic – electrically lighted towers and softly glowing pink glass – and everything in its cityscape is relentlessly unnatural and just as relentlessly industrialized. Viscose and acetate and imitation leather are its fabrics of choice; apartment buildings, complete with artificial music and taps that flow with perfume, are its dwellings; transportation is by private helicopter. Babies are no longer born, they're grown in hatcheries, their bottles moving along assembly lines, in various types and batches according to the needs of 'the hive', and fed on 'external secretion' rather than 'milk'. The word 'mother' – so thoroughly worshipped by the Victorians – has become a shocking obscenity; and indiscriminate sex, which was a shocking obscenity for the Victorians, is now de rigueur.
'He patted me on the behind this afternoon,' said Lenina.
'There, you see!' Fanny was triumphant. 'That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality.'
Many of Brave New World's nervous jokes turn on these kinds of inversions – more startling to its first audience, perhaps, than to us, but still wry enough. Victorian thrift turns to the obligation to spend, Victorian till-death-do-us-part monogamy has been replaced with 'everyone belongs to everyone else', Victorian religiosity has been channelled into the worship of an invented deity – 'Our Ford', named after the American car-czar Henry Ford, god of the assembly line – via communal orgies. Even the 'Our Ford' chant of 'orgy-porgy' is an inversion of the familiar nursery rhyme, in which kissing the girls makes them cry. Now, it's if you refuse to kiss them – as 'the Savage' does – that the tears will flow.
Sex is often centre stage in Utopias and dystopias – who can do what, with which set of genital organs, and with whom, being one of humanity's main preoccupations. Because sex and procreation have been separated and women no longer give birth – the very idea is yuck-making to them – sex has become a recreation. Little naked children carry on 'erotic play' in the shrubberies, so as