In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [76]
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 into 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 American car-czar Henry Ford, god of the assembly line—via communal orgies. Even the “Our Ford” chant—“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 to get a hand in early. Some women are sterile—“freemartins”—and perfectly nice girls, though a little whiskery. The others practise “Malthusian drill”—a form of birth control—and take “pregnancy surrogate” hormone treatments if they feel broody, and sport sweet little faux-leather fashionista cartridge belts crammed with contraceptives. If they slip up on their Malthusian drill, there’s always the lovely pink-glass Abortion Centre. Huxley wrote before the pill, but its advent brought his imagined sexual free-for-all a few steps closer. (What about gays? Does “everyone belongs to everyone else” really mean everyone? We aren’t told.)
Of course, Huxley himself still had one foot in the nineteenth century: he could not have dreamed his upside-down morality unless he himself also found it threatening. At the time he was writing Brave New World, he was still in shock from a visit to the United States, where he was particularly frightened by mass consumerism and its group mentality and its vulgarities.
I use the word dreamed advisedly because Brave New World—gulped down whole—achieves an effect not unlike a controlled hallucination. All is surface; there is no depth. As you might expect from an author with impaired eyesight, the visual sense predominates: colours are intense, light and darkness vividly described. Sound is next in importance, especially during group ceremonies and orgies,