The first part of the book is all exposition, and that's good. It really paints a picture of this Utopian futuristic society in which the action will take place. And it was very well written, with quick, sometimes disorienting scene changes, and sometimes vague dialogue, all of which seemed to further illustrate the collectively low attention span of the population. This is also when we're introduced to a myriad of characters; at first we are uncertain as to which characters the story will start to focus around, but after a while, Lenina and Bernard emerge as fully developed, complex characters. Allusions to Shakespeare in this section are almost meaningless because the characters do not know about him.
Which brings us into part two, where the action starts. Bernard feels a little differently about society than everyone else; we can relate to him the most because he, miraculously, holds onto some of our ideas of happiness and success, and we empathise with him because no one in the book can. He takes the seemingly simple-minded Lenina to a Native American reservation in the USA, and everything changes. The contrast between the reservation and the UK is so drastic, and we look at it with wide-eyed curiosity and wonder because it is nothing like anything we've been reading about up to this point, but it's also very different from the world we live in today [or is it?]. In this chaos, we meet John, the "Savage", but not an Indian and unable to fit in in either world. Bernard decides to bring him and his British mother back to England, as if he is a saviour or benefactor.
The last section of this book is ultimately depressing. All the fine thinking that Bernard had been doing, all the epiphanies he might have come to are destroyed, replaced, instead, by thoughts of self-importance and worth. The fame he achieves from bringing John to England has gone right to his head, and consequently, to his penis. John, too, is facing changes. He has a very hard time adjusting to this new way of life, he can't agree with the methods of the Brits because they are so contrary to everything he's learned on the reservation, and he feels himself falling in love with Lenina, but he can't do anything about it because the only way, according to his own beliefs, to have a woman, is to have only that woman, through marriage, for the rest of their lives. In the end, this is what kills him. It drives him to a life in the 'wilderness' in England, but when even that becomes nothing more than a spectacle for the curious Brits, he kills himself. The change was too great, the society was too devolved that it ultimately killed him.
The allusions to Shakespeare throughout the book were an important and helpful tool in the telling of the story. Shakespeare was the only ally John ever really had, and he could quote the plays almost entirely, even before he knew what they meant. The book is especially full of allusions to The Tempest [fitting, because I started it shortly after I had seen the play over the summer, and my school just put it on this past weekend], a mystical story about savages and Europeans, love, and freedom. Of course, from the colonialist point of view that the director took with the college's production, we see the same sort of interaction when the 'civilised' Lenina and Bernard step into the dirty reservation, and when they take John and his mother back, as if they were their saving grace. The title itself, Brave New World, is an allusion to The Tempest. Miranda speaks it when she sees humans other than her father and herself for the first time. It carries many meanings in the context of this novel, the most obvious of which is John's transportation to England from the reservation in America. But it also serves as a nod to the social context of the story: the England portrayed in this novel is drastically different from that of 2009 or of the 1930s, and is, therefore, a brave new world. But, as Miranda was, herself, human, and so the apparitions before her were not truly 'new', the chilling part of a dystopian novel such as this is that this could be us, and is it really all that new to us? Is it really so different from what we have now?
Just some little things~
1: Every once in a while, a section or statement would ring so true and so possible that I would go back to the title page and check the publication date. This book could easily have been written last year, and it is as true now as it was in the 30s.
2: Even though it was written in the 30s, I still imagined 1970s-style clothing, especially whenever Huxley described Lenina's fashion.
No comments:
Post a Comment