In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [75]
Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor.
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 Revelation 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.…
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; but insofar as they endorse the view that humanity is perfectible, or can at least be vastly improved, they will resemble idealizing romances. 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 plans? … It’s rats in the eyes for you—as in Nineteen Eighty-Four—if you won’t love Big Brother. (Brave New World has its own gentler punishments: for non-conformists, it’s exile to Iceland, where Man’s Final End can be discussed among like-minded intellects, without pestering “normal” people—in a sort of university, as it were.)
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