Harvey 1

Lauryn Harvey
Truitt, D.
23.0520020-13 Eng Lit/Composition
5 March 2016

Historicism in Brave New World

The early 1900s served as the revolutionary years not only for the United States, but for
the much of the world. With the Industrial Revolution itself being well in the past, the world was
still feeling many of its long term impacts from political changes such as the spread of
communism to social changes such as the separation of classes. In Aldous Huxleys Brave New
World, the time setting is the distant future, circa 2540, but many of the events that take place are
a satirical representation of the dangers Huxley believed would soon come about as mankind
seemed to be quickly losing faith, and replacing it with technology.
The aim of their society, World State, is universal human happiness, which is very ironic
because essentially no one is human, made the traditional way of man and woman. Everyone is
grown from the female ovum and the male sperm in controlled environments with predestined
futures. In their bottles, the embryos are split into five different caste systems: Alpha, Beta,
Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. As their name states, the Alphas are conditioned to be the thinkers
and world leaders with each succeeding caste a bit less intellectually and physically capable.
Before birth even happens, the citizens are conditioned to suppress emotions and individuality in
exchange for ultimate social stability.
There are two major themes that Huxley plays on throughout Brave New World, the first
being industrialization. In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line which helped for the

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mass production of goods. While Fords creation of the assembly line created jobs, it was
unintentionally dehumanizing the workers. Having them do the same job over and over in a
sense turned them into robots, taking away from the artisan way of producing. Because of his
creation, Ford was seen as a deity in the novel, often times being referred to as Our Ford
(Huxley 31), a pun of the religious phrase Our Lord. They even took it as far as cutting off the
tops of traditional Christian crosses to form a T, representing the model-T car, the first vehicle
Ford made. Recreating these trends in the future tense, Huxley creates this caste system of
people who are programmed not to care about the fact that they are being treated as less than
human, working hard with no reward for half their lives then spend the next half at their leisure.
Another idea the seemed to be played on was totalitarianism and the fear of communism,
known as the Red Scare, that was quickly spreading and causing mass hysteria. An element of
communism is dictatorship, which manifest in the novel in the form of one of the ten World
Controllers, Mustapha Mond. Mond is a very contradictory figure; he reads the works of
Shakespeare, he reads the bible, and he was once upon a time a very individualistic scientist, yet
he controls a totalitarian world state. He opposes the idea of humans with emotions and
believes a stable society exists where there is happiness without relations or individuality.