Brave New World Feminist Analysis

The marxist and feminist perspectives are both utilized to gain a deeper understanding of literature. The feminist lens deals with the role of gender within literature, and the marxist lens focuses on the context of culture and society within literature. Each perspective plays off the other to create a cohesive approach to analyzing Brave New World. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World highlights the issues associated with a society with a disproportional basis in manufactured social and gender structures. These dysfunctional social and gender structures are created through a fundamental irony: knowledge both unifies and destroys humanity. Knowledge “being a conjunction of power relations and information-seeking” (Mills 69) structures utilized
The “civil society” (Gramsci 673) is made up of the different members of the caste system while “the State” (673) is made up of the “Ten World Controllers” (Huxley 20). These world controllers are “the intellectuals [of] the dominate group” (Gramsci 673) and they are “deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.” (673). It is through the Controller’s will that knowledge is used to maintain a fabricated social caste system, through conditioning. The Controller’s had to utilize knowledge and scientific advances to create the caste system: “’The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘the shorter the oxygen.’ The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters’” (Huxley 7). The science used for reproduction is also their first controlling societal factor. They are able to use science to genetically and physically condition the exact type of citizen needed to obey the rules and express dominance over. Then the State goes a step further and makes sure they are able to do the thinking for the different castes through mental
In the case of the caste system, the citizens of the World State believe their lives are fantastic due to conditioning. In their world “’they’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all their lives’" (Huxley 12). The civil societies hatred for books and flowers all stems from conditioning; thus, they will always have an imaginary existence, false sense of truth, in regards to books and flowers. Ultimately, “The brave new world is the end of history. It is what is left in a society when you take away the possibility of revolt, revolution and critique, a world in which radical change is rendered not only impossible but also undesirable” (Diken 153). The fabricated civil society is meeting this fate due to the controlled caste system, that is created from knowledge; however, it is also through this fate that humanity’s ability to learn, experience, and reproduce, is destroyed. This officially creates a world of class superstructures based in a false sense of truth and are only controlled due to the intellectual power of the knowledge welding political society, the World