It’s rats in the eyes for you – as in Nineteen Eighty-Four – if you won’t love Big Brother. Forced re-education, exile, and execution are the usual choices on offer, in utopias, for any who oppose the powers that be. What do you do with people who don’t endorse your views or fit in with your plans? Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself a disillusioned graduate of the real-life Brook Farm utopian scheme, pointed out that the Puritan founders of New England – who intended to build the New Jerusalem – began their construction efforts with a prison and a gibbet. The Communist regime in Russia and the Nazi takeover of Germany both began as utopian visions.īut as most literary utopias had already discovered, perfectibility breaks on the rock of dissent. 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. 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, as do Swift’s and More’s and Wells’s but insofar as they endorse the view that humanity is perfectible, or can at least be vastly improved, they will resemble idealizing romances, as do Bellamy’s and Morris’s. In the nineteenth century – when improvements in sewage systems, medicine, communication technologies, and transportation were opening new doors every year – many earnest utopias were thrown up by the prevailing mood of optimism, with William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward foremost among them. 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. Plato’s Republic and the Bible’s Book of Revelations 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. Sir Thomas More, in his own sixteenth-century Utopia, may have been punning: utopia is the good place that doesn’t exist.Īs a literary construct, Brave New World thus has a long list of literary ancestors. ‘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’. And thereby hangs Huxley’s tale.īrave 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. Never were two sets of desiring genitalia so thoroughly at odds. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.’ It’s a tribute to Huxley’s writing skills that although I didn’t know what knickers were, or camisoles – nor did I know that zippers, when they first appeared, had been denounced from pulpits as lures of the Devil because they made clothes so easy to take off – I nonetheless had a vivid picture of ‘zippicamiknicks’, that female undergarment with a single zipper down the front that could be shucked so very easily: ‘Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. It made a deep impression on me, though I didn’t fully understand some of what I was reading. I first read Brave New World in the early 1950s, when I was fourteen. It was Huxley’s genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity
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