Fame puts you there where things are hollow

In the middle of the book Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, Bernard Marx brings Lenina to a “savage reservation” where the “uncivilized” people are kept, namely Native Americans. There, they meet John and his mother, Linda, who is a “civilized” person who had went there to the reservation to see what it was like. Bernard Marx quickly and correctly determines that John’s father is the Director who wants to fire him, and arranges for John and Linda to be brought back. Once they get back, John and Linda humiliate the Director, who resigns. Lenina develops an attraction toward John, but John turns her down, believing her and the society to be too free about sexual relations. Meanwhile, Bernard is getting famous for having the “savage” around, because everyone wants to meet him.

I believe a pivotal in the book is when Bernard Marx brings back the savage. Before that point, Marx had felt alone and alienated from the rest of the world, because “too little bone and brawn had isolated Bernard form his fellow men” (Huxley 67). The only other person like Bernard was Helmholtz Watson, whose only claim to being different is that he is too smart. Even in Helmholtz’s presence, Bernard feels alone, because he wishes that “he could have as many girls as Helmholtz did, and with as little trouble” and during their meetings, “it was Helmholtz who did all the talking” (Huxley 68). However, when Bernard bring the “savage,” John, back to civilization, everyone wants to meet him. People disregard the fact that he is controversial, and the fact that he is physically different from them, and for once, Bernard is getting all the attention he wants. “Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head and in the process completely reconciled him... to a world which, up until then, he had found very unsatisfactory” (Huxley 157). Becoming such a success changes Bernard’s opinion of the world he lives in. He is treated well, and he begins to think that it can’t be that bad. After all, “he genuinely liked being a success and having all the girls he wanted” (Huxley 157). He is much happier and no longer feels alone, but the success also shapes his opinion of things. In previous chapters, as discussed in the last post, he believes that in the culture of romance of his society, women are treated like pieces of meat, and so he refrains from doing anything he thinks is remotely degrading of women. When he is in an elevator with Henry Foster, he says, “‘Have her here, have her there. Like mutton’” referring to Lenina, and yet he now that he is rich, he is having many girls (Huxley 45). So now, Bernard Marx, the character who is supposed to represent the more conservative view, the view that is closer to ours, is being corrupted. I believe this is pivotal, because it shifts the focus away from there still being hope that there are people like Marx out there who we consider morally correct, to being mostly disgusted by what we consider morally incorrect actions. There is no longer a character to connect to, in terms of viewpoint, in the book. I think this point in the book signifies a loss of hope.

Who is Marx?

The novel Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, is about life in the future. The book is set in the year A.F. 632, the "A.F." stands for "After Ford," which corresponds to AD 2540. In this future,  everybody is grown in a lab, nobody is born naturally, and people put into certain castes, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, which are also divided into plus and minus, before they are “born.” In order to populate the world, scientists in the future use a technique they call “Bokanovsky’s Process” which subjects the cell to extreme conditions to make it bud and divide, “by which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos” (Huxley 7). After being determined which caste they belong in, the lower caste embryos are subjects to stunting, both physical and mental. All embryos are also subject to conditioning, for example, “a special machine kept [rocket-plane engineers’] containers in constant rotation. ‘To improve their sense of balance’” (Huxley 17). Along with conditioning in the embryo stage, children are also conditioned to do other things, like hate the countryside, and are taught morals through a process called hypnopaedia, in which subjects are told information in their sleep. In the adult society, everyone in each caste is treated equally, and they are taught that everyone is important to the society. They have abolished religion and other non-scientific practices as well. For recreation, they take a drug they call "soma" which makes you happy and has no side effects like hangovers or anything. They also have a saying that “Everyone belongs to every one else” is present multiple time throughout the book, and is representative of the fact that everyone in this society is free to have sexual relations with anyone else; there is no monogamy and no marriage. In fact, marriage, monogamy, father, and mother are all concepts and words that are taboo. Everyone conforms to the norm, and nobody questions it.

One of the characters, Bernard Marx, who is an Alpha Plus, which means he is in the second highest caste, who disagrees with all the principles and policies instituted by the “World State.” His values conform more to those which are present in today’s society. They manifest themselves most when he is with Lenina, a very orthodox woman whom Bernard has a crush on. For example, privacy is not really valued in the future, people talk about everything from business to intimate discussions in public, but Bernard Marx would rather discuss his plans with Lenina in private. He disagrees with the “Everyone belongs to every one else” belief. He is in an elevator with two other men when he overhears them talking about Lenina, “‘Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.’ Bernard ground his teeth. ‘Have her here, have her there. Like mutton’” (Huxley 45). His also doesn't like to take soma, preferring to feel emotion, being mad or sad than to be in a durg-induced happiness.He is also not afraid to share his disagreements with society, and people believe he is weird, and he has a bad reputation. I think that Bernard Marx is supposed to represent how we would feel if we had just woken up in this future world. He represents a bunch of values and beliefs that we have today, and his views conform to our society’s view. Aldous Huxley wrote the book to criticize the path he believed the world to be on, with an emphasis on blaming Henry Ford for these problems. I believe that he set out to create a character that could critique the society in the book, as well as a character we can relate to. I think Bernard Marx is supposed to be the person with whom we agree and through which Huxley is making a point about the direction our civilization is going, one that he doesn’t like.