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Brooke Harris
Mrs. Jewell
ERWC Period 3
20 April 2022
Brave New World Pre Read
Brave New World is often taught in high school in the eleventh or twelfth grade.
Although Huxley does not use any overtly Marxist terminology or analysis, he imagines a World
State with a planned economy in which citizens are bred, born, and conditioned in lab flasks to
fill the various job niches in the society. The society is a consumerist, pleasure-seeking one,
controlled by a benevolent dictator.

● The World State: Chapters 1-6 introduce the setting, the main concepts, and the main
characters of the novel.
● The Reservation: Chapters 7-9 describe the experiences of Bernard and Lenina on the
mesa and introduce John, the Savage, and his mother Linda, who is from the World State.
● The Savage in Civilization: Chapters 10-18 describe the experiences of John, the
Savage, as he attempts to live in what he calls a "Brave New World" quoting a
Shakespearean character Miranda from the drama The Tempest.

Notes:

- Written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley

- Readers perspective in 2022
- Setting in 2540; 520 years from now
- ‘Modern’ society, too much technology, lack of creativity in society, pills, babies made in
a lab
- Everyone else may be drugged or out of control but there is one man in control
- Programed people, like avatar, gmo people
- A rebellion against the government
- A manipulation of the younger generation and children because they don't know different
- How many generations will it take to make a new society
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Article 1 Notes:

- A Brave New World Predicted Today’s World Better Than Any Other Novel”
- By Scotty Hendricks
- October 13th 2018:
- Dangers of mass media, passivity, and the choice of dictatorship over freedom
- Dystopia: plan on being a perfect world (Utopia) that unravels and falls apart
- Science Fiction Novel
- Henry ford is god in the book, religion is the fordist religion: Consumerism and assembly
line
- One encouragement is buying a lot for no reason and sexually permiscuous and
avouiding unhappiness
- Genetic engineering and Pavlovian conditioning
- keeping everybody entertained continuously with endless distractions
- Offering a plentiful supply of the wonder drug Soma to keep people happy if all else fails
- Drugs come in different forms and have different effects
- Enslaved loves being slaves
- Dictatorship with 10 Oligarchs
- No more boring time, distractions 24/7, abolish boredom
- 3 levels of soma distribution:
1. small=euphoria
2. moderate=hallucinations
3. large=tranquilizer
- Everyone will be happy about the dictatorship
-

Dystopia: What gets in the way of a perfect society?:

- Self interest
- Emotions
- Different values or perspectives
- Complacency
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- Instability
- Morals
- Breeding
- Conditioning
- Free will
- Sexuality
- Self expression
- Consumerism
- Addictions
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Chapter 1

Focus: Introducing the World State

Two reminders:

● Please be try your best as a reader to do your own thinking and learning!!!
● Refer to the book as often as possible by keeping track of page numbers.

Questions: Answer/Notes:

What is the World State? Add page - A city in London after Ford
numbers. - Moto: “Community, Identity, Stability”
- Pg3: A futuristic society with very tall buildings
and baby labs
- The Director:
- (DHC) gives tour of where babies are
being made
- Big teeth
- Long chin
- Full lips
- Unknown age, ageless
- Male only student
- Part of the government?
- Power?
- Fertilizing room:
- 300 fertilizers plunged at once
- quiet room
- New students being trained: tomorrow
they would start, students taking notes
- Microscopes and plates with eggs and
sperm
- Dunked in alcohol
- 96 human beings will be grown where
only one would have been before
- Made in pods or groups like twins
- 8 minutes for x rays from new tubes
- Millions of identical twins
- 1 ovary can produce 15,000 adults
- Predestination room:
- Names
- Distribution information
- Then sent to embryo store
- Multiple floors
- 15 racks of test tube babies
- Heat and cooling conditioning
- Teaching the babies before born

Collect terms/vocabulary related to
World State and define.
Add page numbers.
What questions come to mind as
you read chapter 1? Add page
numbers that keep track of when
this question came to mind.
What predictions do you have about
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- Workers:
- Alpha
- Beta
- Gamma: little alcohol
- Delta: some alcohol
- Epsilons: most alcohol, not able to work
until 18, mature at 12
- Purple eyes and symptoms of lupus
- Adults at different ages
- Alcohol for brain damage
- Pg3: Wintriness: the quality of being
characteristic of winter weather
- Pg4: Hatcheries: The Hatchery destinies each
fetus for a particular caste in the World State.
The five castes are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta,
and Epsilon.
- Pg5: Spermatozoa: the mature motile male sex
cell of an animal, by which the ovum is fertilized,
typically having a compact head and one or
more long flagella for swimming
- Pg7: Epsilons: the fifth letter of the Greek
alphabet ( Ε, ε ), transliterated as ‘e.’.
- Pg11: Demijohns: a bulbous narrow-necked
bottle holding from 3 to 10 gallons of liquid,
typically enclosed in a wicker cover.
- Pg12: Decanting: gradually pour (liquid,
typically wine or a solution) from one container
into another, especially without disturbing the
sediment.
- Pg13: Freemartins: a woman who has been
deliberately made sterile by exposure to
hormones during fetal development
- If the normal building is 34 stories, how many
stories does the tallest building have?
- Do they buy new humans?
- Are there multiple hatcheries?
- Why are they making mass babies?
- Maybe the students will start working and we
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the potential issues/problems within understand their lives more in depth

the World State creation? Add page - There could be too many people
numbers. - The people could get out of control
- The new babies could be unknowingly violet
- There could be a weird reproductive defect