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Record W1483971641

The Provocations of Lenina in Huxley's Brave New World

2002· article· en· W1483971641 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
David Leon Higdon

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational fiction review · 2002
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicJoseph Conrad and Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBestiaryCivilizationHistoryFace (sociological concept)RhetoricArt historyArtLiteraturePhilosophyTheologyArchaeology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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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How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.030
Threshold uncertainty score0.059

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0110.012
Scholarly communication0.0050.005
Open science0.0000.004
Research integrity0.0020.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0130.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.043
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.216 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations3
Published2002
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueInternational fiction reviewSame topicJoseph Conrad and LiteratureFrench-language works237,207