The Provocations of Lenina in Huxley's Brave New World

As befits Juvenalian satirist, indignantly, bitterly, misanthropically chastising his culture, Aldous Huxley often expresses outright disgust with entire human species. In Antic Hay (1923), his second novel, an anonymous old man tells Theodore Gumbril, protagonist, as they look at London's suburban houses, What disgusts me is people inside architecture. The numbers of them, sir. And way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them, creeping about face of country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go; ruining everything. (1) He then forecasts that world will soon become a pretty sort of bear garden ... monkey house ... warthoggery (264). Five years later, in Point Counter Point (1928), this vision has deepened into modern Bestiary of parasitical animals, who damned, destroyed, irrevocably corrupted. (2) Here Spandrell complains Mark Rampion that beings around them ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on other, (3) excellent metaphors for satirist become fabulist. It is equally obvious, however, that Huxley reserved especial bile for female of species, whose presence provokes even more heated rhetoric. In Antic Hay, for example, Mercaptan tells Myra Viveash, ces femmes! They're all Pasiphaes and Ledas. They all in their hearts prefer beasts men, savages civilised beings, and anonymous gentleman, watching Myra as she walks down London's King Street, acidly thinks: Vicious young women. Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs, dipsos--thoroughly vicious nowadays, thoroughly vicious. (4) Indeed, he is correct so far as women in world of Antic Hay go, because they depicted as dangerous predators, ranging from serpent-like Rosie Shearwater sullen and ferocious Zoe, Sphinx-like, bored Myra who announces that `to-morrow ... will be as awful as to-day'. (5) These women pale, though, when compared Lucy Tantamount of Point Counter Point. Lucy, the consummate flower of this charming civilization, bluntly warns that she needs victims, and Philip Quarles describes her as man-eater (6) She wants to be herself ... ruthlessly having her fun. (7) These characterizations, misogynist as they are, do not get in way of Juvenalian vision, but they do hint at potential imbalance in this vision. The misogyny, everywhere evident in novels written before 1931, does become serious narrative issue and thematic problem in Brave New World (1932). A careful consideration of Lenina's attitudes, decisions, and actions shows that overlay of misogyny careened Huxley into contradicting his ideas, into failing see that Lenina is more heroic in her resistance Fordian world than men his narrative praises, and into taking an unearned and mean-spirited revenge on Lenina. In brief, Lenina's resistance goes unnoticed in novel because of novel's misogyny, but it can go unnoticed no longer, given feminism's attention such marginalized characters. This misogyny has, of course, not gone completely unnoticed in Huxley criticism. In one of more inclusive discussions, Milton Birnbaum notes that women in world are seen chiefly in relationship males and only occupy satellite position. And in an enlightening general discussion of misogyny in dystopias, Deanna Madden concludes that men in Brave New World have spiritual dimension that women lack ... mired in physical, women interfere with or prevent men from achieving spiritually and that Huxley's misogyny has its obvious roots in more general inability accept body. (8) At least once in his career, then, misogyny disastrously impeded characterization, theme, and intention and virtually deconstructed his book before eyes of his readers. …

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