Would soma, free love and the feelies be so bad?

Brave New World is a lurid, satirical dystopia in which the hopes and fears of the 1930s are writ large and yet the book seems uncannily prescient about our own time. But why did Huxley feel the need to write it and is Brave New World really as dystopian as we are led to believe?

Discussants:
- David Bradshaw, Reader and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford
- Daniel Pick, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London
- Michèle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London

(MP3)

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Complete entry

Posted by Mark Plus  on  04/11  at  11:09 AM

The discussion on the radio show indicates the Huxley intended BNW in part as a satire on some aspects of American life that he encountered and found unseemly. American conservatives tend to idealize life in the U.S. before the 1960's. But ironically foreign visitors like Huxley often noticed things in the early and mid 20th Century that conservatives tried to pin on later decadent trends. According to the Wikipedia article on BNW, in the early 1930's, after Huxley visited the U.S., he "[was] outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity and the inward-looking nature of many Americans."

This invites comparison with Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qutb's assessment of American life, derived from observations he made while studying at a college in Colorado in the late 1940's. Qutb seems to describe BNW's cult of the "pneumatic" female body when he writes, disapprovingly, that:

"the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs : and she shows all this and does not hide it." Because these aspects of American culture have only strengthened since the early 20th Century (just look at the "reality" shows about vacuous American teens, for example), BNW continues to work as literature that describes a world we continue to recognize as a caricature of our own.

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