Aldous Huxley: biografia e opera

Questo appunto di Letteratura Inglese riguarda lo scrittore inglese Aldous Huxley. L’appunto riassume la biografia dell’autore, approfondisce il tema del romanzo distopico e analizza il romanzo “Brave New World”.

Aldous Huxley’s life

was an English novelist and critic whose works are famous and noteworthy for their pessimistic satire. He his best-known for his novel “Brave New World”, which served as a model for much dystopian fiction produced in the following decades.

was born in Surrey (in the South of England) in 1894 into a family of scientists; his grandfather had collaborated with Charles Darwin. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916. He published his first work in 1916 and he worked on the magazine “Athenaeum” from 1919 to 1921. Then, he focused on his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 30s, when he moved to California. “Brave New World”, published in 1932, marked a turning point in his career. The author was concerned with the negative and positive impacts of science and technology on 20th-century society. He expressed this concern in “Brave New World” but also in one of his last essays. Huxley had a very pessimistic view about life and human condition, which was due to the historical context he lived in. He died in Los Angeles in 1963.

The dystopian novel

Huxley’s most important novels are:

• “Crome Yellow” (1921);
• “Point Counter Point” (1928);
• “Brave New World” (1932), his masterpiece.

Huxley was a modern writer but he was not a modernist writer. His masterpiece “Brave New World” can be described in three different ways:

• Novel of ideas: the novel is characterized by a strong historical, political and social commitment. Huxley used this novel to communicate his social, political, historical and scientific viewpoint.
• Science-fiction novel: Huxley describes a futuristic society based on scientific technological progress.
• Dystopian novel: while utopian fiction describes a perfect society, dystopian fiction portrays a society that seems to be perfect, but is actually undesirable or frightening.

Huxley refused to consider his novel as a novel of ideas or a science fiction novel; he defined it as a dystopian novel. The first dystopian novel, “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler, was published in 1872. This work is a satire on Victorian society. In England there were two famous writers that produced dystopian novels:

• Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World”, which denounces the tyranny of scientific and technological progress;
• George Orwell wrote “1984”, which denounces the tyranny of political parties and the media.

“Brave New World”

The title of Huxley’s most famous novel is taken from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, particularly from the scene in which Miranda, a girl who lives on a desert island, sees other humans and uses this expression. The title of the book is sarcastic. “Brave New World”, which received a lot of criticism, is about a new society created after a terrible nine-year war in London. The novel is set in 632 A.F. “A.F.” means After Ford: Ford was the first to apply the assembly-line in the car industry. This society is apparently perfect; it is completely ordered, balanced and static. Private property has been abolished and the State controls everything. People are classified in different categories that are identified by a letter of the Greek alphabet. Conception and birth are not natural, but artificially produced in labs, and children are manipulated in conditioning centers since they are a few days old. In order to control everything and solve any kind of problem, the State uses a drug called Soma. The main characters are:

• Lenina, a hatchery worker who is popular and beautiful;
• Bernard, a psychologist who has an inferiority complex, as he is shorter than the average man of his class, and criticizes his society’s methods;
• Helmholtz, a talented writer who finds it difficult to use his gift creatively in their society;
• John, a savage who lives in a reservation in New Mexico and knows Shakespeare’s works.

Bernard and Lenina take John to London, and John calls it a “brave new world”. Then, he realizes that he has been taken into a horrible society. He tries to escape, but he is discovered and used for a scientific experiment. At the end of the novel, John commits suicide: his death symbolizes Huxley’s pessimistic viewpoint on the future of Western civilization. In his novel, Huxley describes cloning, genetic manipulation, scientific and technological progress and tyranny. His novel anticipated the idea of creating a perfect society, which was one of the main objectives of Nazi Germany. Moreover, the novel deals with cloning and genetic manipulation, which occurred only in the 1990s. Huxley wasn’t against progress, but he feared that the future world would be dominated by technology and a materialistic philosophy. He used a conventional style and a sarcastic and humoristic tone; he expressed his criticism through irony. “Brave New World” addresses the following main themes:

• The denunciation of modern life
• A bitter view of scientific progress
• The idea that material progress can’t compensate old tradition
• The prophetic denunciation of a society based on violence and the repression of individual impulses.

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