Learning about the Utopian worlds

An idea has been developing in my head. Specifically, I was trying to answer this question: how is the technique of storytelling in Brave New World different from the other works we’ve read?  I was hoping to talk about this during class, but lo and behold there was snow! So I said to myself, why not kill two birds with one stone, and write a blog post about it? Here we go:

Christopher Columbus, from oceanexplorer.noaa.gov

All of the previous literary utopias (from Thomas More’s Utopia onward) have been told from an outsider. More had Raphael Hythloday, a world traveler, describe the titular island; Unveiling a Parallel by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant told their story through an unnamed man who travelled to Mars on an “aeroplane”; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere both had “deep-sleep” narrators, who both left their own world to wake up in the future; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland had a similar device to More’s narrative, in that three men physically travelled to an unknown location.

All of these narrators lived their own lifestyle in their own world before travelling to these utopian locations. They all are easily able to compare and contrast these new people and cultures to their own. In many cases, we learn about the utopian culture by the narrator simply asking questions to the natives.  

"Brave New World;" wikipedia.org

 

However, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, we don’t have that leisure. Our main characters, Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx, live in this society and know the culture and daily life of the World State just like we would know our own. There’s no real need for these characters to ask questions.

So, how does Huxley try to explain this new world without spoon-feeding it to us? How can he help us explain the intricate reproductive details of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre without breaking the fourth wall?

The novel opens up with students taking a tour of the facilities. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, along with employee Henry Foster, gives realistically simplified explanations about the technology and ethics of this world, including the highest record of siblings from a single ovary (pg 19) to the so-called “Bokanovsky’s Process” (17-18). We, the reader, even learn about what the children don’t know – such as what a “parent” is (32). In this way, the reader can study, through the children’s questions and answers and the Director’s explanations, how this world of Huxley differentiates from our own.

Personally, I think Huxley was a genius in this way. Where all of our other readings had an outsider to explain the differences of cultures, he uses a realistic medium (young students) to explain to us, the reader, what this world is like. We learn about the World State by people within the culture, not outside it; this adds a whole new depth to the novel that we had not seen before.