‘My Hypothetical Islanders’: The Role of Islands in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island

Abstract

Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley’s best-known satirical novel of ideas, appears at times to be the victim of insufficient thought. For example, in a society whose religio-economic basis is Fordism, the ever more expedient mass production of people and goods, no one bothers to explain the absence of automobiles. None of the central characters—Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, Lenina Crowne, and surely not John the Savage—has seen a ‘flivver’; only the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (DHC) mentions it (BNW 37).¹ Assembly lines remain for other purposes, but cars are inexplicably extinct. The Savage’s ability to parse Shakespeare boggles the mind. The Complete Works is a strange birthday present from Popé, who is not plausible as a book lover. An autodidact just turned 12, John instinctively knows that the ‘enseamed bed’ and ‘nasty sty’ (BNW 113) in Hamlet are ‘about Linda and Popé’ (BNW 114). Huxley was too preoccupied with ‘the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology and psychology’ (BNW xliv) to avoid small failures of the imagination. When the Savage disrupts the soma distribution at the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying and the Deputy Sub-Bursar decides to call Helmholtz Watson for help, he looks up a number ‘in the telephone book’ (BNW 186). In A.F. 632, the Brave New World still relies on directories and rotary telephones.