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BRAVE NEW WORLD
by Aldous Huxley
Plot and Chapter Summaries
Overall Summary:
The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is introducing a group of new students to the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center. They observe the process by which eggs are fertilized, embryos are engineered (according to their future class in society), toddlers are conditioned, and children are indoctrinated in their appropriate class’s attitudes by sleep teaching. Humans are shaped as Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, or Epsilons. No mothers, fathers, or families are involved in the process; everything is scientifically managed on a world scale.
The group is surprised by Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for Western Europe, who tells them about the way things were before the time of (Henry) Ford, and how events led up to the enlightened present age. While he speaks, the day shift is released from work and men and woman speak of the pleasures that await them that evening. Henry Foster and Lenina Crowne play Obstacle Golf, eat at his place, go to a cabaret, and then make love. Bernard Marx spends the evening commiserating with his friend Helmholtz Watson. Bernard has trouble fitting in with society. Even at Solidarity Service, he has trouble achieving the ecstasy everyone else finds easily.
When he finally is out with Lenina Crowne, Bernard Marx wants to share some of his feelings with her, but she does not understand his desire for solitude, and at last he conforms, taking soma (a harmless narcotic that everyone uses) and taking her to bed. But he is uneasy at their next meeting and says dangerous things. They plan to go to the Savage Reservation together, and Bernard stops by the Director’s office to get his signature permitting the trip. He already has the permission of Mustapha Mond, so the Director cannot object. But the Director does reminisce about his own experience at the Savage Reservation years ago and how he left a girl there. Bernard and Lenina make the trip and prepare at Santa Fe for the next jump. The Wardens sign their permit, but before they enter the Reservation, Bernard discovers in a telephone conversation with Helmholtz that the Director plans to have him sent to Iceland. Even so, Lenina convinces Bernard to take some soma and they fly to Malpais.
Ascending the mesa is difficult, and for Lenina the life of the Indians seems strange and offensive. Bernard and Lenina witness a corn ritual with a flogging. When it is over they meet a boy named John, who is evidently not Indian but who lives among the people. He takes them to meet his mother, who turns out to be Linda, the woman whom the Director left in the Reservation years before. To her shame, she bore John by natural means, and now she is fat and ugly, living a sordid life as an outsider with an outcast lover. While she tells Lenina about her life, John tells Bernard enough to make him realize the full story of his origins. Bernard formulates a plan and gets permission directly from Mustapha Mond to bring John and Linda back when he returns.
The Director has prepared a public humiliation of Bernard Marx for his subversive and anti-social behaviour. He plans to banish him to Iceland in disgrace. Instead, Marx introduces Linda and john to the assembled crowd. Their words and the Director’s reactions prove the Director’s guilt, and he rushes out, never to return to his post. Now Bernard Marx basks in the notoriety of the Savage whose care he has been given. And he changes from society’s outcast to a popular figure who indulges in every aspect of the society. His head is so swelled by his new fame that he forgets himself in his reports to Mustapha Mond, who bides his time to strike at this impudent man.
The Savage becomes increasingly disillusioned with the new world which his mother recalled with such delight. Linda meanwhile takes increasing doses of soma and slowly dies, although she is unaware of the process. The Savage has always liked Lenina, and he goes with her to the feely (movie with a picture and physical sensations) Three Weeks in a Helicopter. Lenina is sexually aroused by it, but the Savage (John) is repulsed. He still thinks she is a sweet, virginal girl. He thinks of her in the romantic terms that Shakespeare used for his most chaste heroines. Finally, when Lenina tries to force a relationship on him (sex), the Savage gets angry at her at threatens to kill her. Just after this, the Savage is called to see his mother.
The Savage has rejected the new world’s technological wonders by the time he visits his mother in the Hospital for the Dying. She is having a soma experience, and when he startles her into reality, she dies. In grief over her death, the Savage encounters a scene of Deltas about to receive their soma from a bursar. He hurls the soma in handfuls out the window while proclaiming the Deltas’ freedom from the poisoning drug. The Deltas become a mob, ready to tear him apart. Fortunately the police arrive and break up the mob, but not before Helmholtz and Bernard arrive to assist the Savage. The three friends are taken to see Mustapha Mond.
The World Controller speaks mainly to the Savage. In the course of the talk, Bernard breaks down and has to be taken to another room to be tranquilized. Mond gives Helmholtz a choice of islands to which to be exiled, and Helmholtz chooses the Falkland islands. Finally, when Helmholtz has gone to see if Bernard is all right, Mond and the Savage discuss a subject not discussed before in the novel - God. Mond, who knows Shakespeare, reveals The Bible and other theological (religious) works. Although he claims that God is known now only by an absence, the Savage disagrees. The Savage chooses to live with pain in solitude.
The Savage tried to make a life for himself in a lighthouse in Surrey, but he is discovered there and before long is plagued with visitors from the press and one feely-maker (movie maker). Now he is not a recluse, but a celebrity. A horde of visitors rushes on him after the release f a film taken of him in one case of his angry self-beatings. The crown calls for the whip, and Savage produces it. Lenina shows up, and the Savage has a focus for his frustration and rage. He beats her and then himself, but the crowd gets excited and joins in, in an orgy of beating. When the Savage wakes up the next day, he is ashamed of himself. When more curious visitors come that day, he is found, having hanged himself under the beams of the lighthouse.
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