Huxley’s Brave New World is why I’m a socialist today

Aldous Huxley’s satirical Brave New World is one of the most bewitching and frightening works of literature I’ve ever read. Naive to its context, I didn’t understand any of it when I first came to read it. It was at a time where I had no interest in politics, yet I knew I wanted to be a scientist of some kind and had a very pragmatic worldview. When Brave New World was recommended to me, I expected to escape into a world of science fiction. Instead I fell into a book that challenged my social and economic views. 

I didn’t know what socialism was at that time but that’s where my journey began. 

The novel drew me in with its dark look into the control and manipulation of authority. The prospect of an individual relies on the interaction of nature and nurture, genetics and environment: but the ‘utopian’ state’s chain of command controls both. Naturally, I found this control alarming. To the readership, it challenges one of their deepest anxieties about the possibility of interference on their natural biological endowment, that they will someday be oppressed, exploited and manipulated by authority. Huxley plays on these trepidations to challenge the reader’s ideas of societal norms. He shows the fear that a future World State may rob them of the right to be unhappy. Very few writers were bold enough to challenge their reader’s comfort in this time in history, but Huxley certainly did.

Bernard Marx is a key figure in Brave New World. Self-conscious and bumbling, he is yet an extraordinary individual and, conditioned to think like the rest of his society, he cannot help but have otherwise challenging thoughts. Bernard articulates a desire of freedom in such a world that can only be a freedom from conditioning. As he questions the value of dominant values, he also materialises a discontent. He is the first who develops a taste for solitude, which frightens Lenina, who never questions her society: “No, the real problem is: How is it that I can’t, or rather — because, after all, I know quite well why I can’t — what would it be like if I could, if I were free — not enslaved by my conditioning … Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” Being rejected by society, he spends most time alone, which leads him to comprehend that what looks like “freedom” to the World State is in fact, not, and cannot be much more than voluntary slavery. 

Bernard Marx, contextually, is an obvious allusion to Karl Marx. Marx is one of the most misinterpreted thinkers in history because his ideas challenge one’s beliefs and, when properly understood, he becomes a threat to the elitist class. Huxley knew that with propaganda, most of his readers believe that Marx is to blame for human suffering, wars, poverty, government management, millions of deaths, economic busts and anything else they can point their finger at. Since the elitist class would be extinct if Marxism, as properly interpreted, takes hold in society, it would seem that Bernard Marx was a way for Huxley to challenge norms. What kind of norms are up to the reader to interpret. 

Benito Hoover is the stereotypical ‘Alpha’ who obeys all the social norms, quotes his hypnopaedic learning and happily follows all of the trends associated with the World State. His first name is an allusion to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who had governed with fascist beliefs. Benito fits perfectly into Brave New World as he represents every aspect of the World State’s government. In the World State, it is believed that everyone should follow the same lifestyle and accept the things that are forced upon them. When the novel was published, fascism was beginning to raise its ugly head in Europe, and the novel went far beyond any totalitarian dream and introduced readers to a new nightmarish world controlled by cold, calculating scientific bureaucrats. It seems that Huxley was using the world around him as inspiration for a warning of what is to come, which is shockingly prescient with current issues concerning conformity. 

In the World State, “unpleasantness” has been abolished through the drug Soma. Soma weakens the characters, leaving them incapable of questioning the government’s methods. In Brave New World, the characters take Soma because their lives, like the society itself, is devoid of a higher meaning. John the Savage, by contrast, has a strong resistance. His happiness – and afflictions – don’t drive him to take Soma. Huxley cleverly influences the reader into siding with John as he supports the right to suffer sickness, pain, and fear. When he claims the right to be unhappy; the reader commiserates. The reader may also come to support, like John, “the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” 

John tries to convince hundreds of tired workers to refuse Soma, and instead to live their lives in freedom without this control. John had questioned the riled up crowd and as a result of a nonconformist action, they lashed out, only to be brought down by the police, who oddly enough controlled the uproar by spraying Soma gas to pacify everyone. The irony here confirms that Soma is really more than just a drug, for it is truly a distraction and an answer that fills any void in their dull lives of “Community, Identity, Stability.” This detrimental drug goes beyond the literal meaning in which it is being used and becomes the one thing that everyone actually lives for. With the prevalent norm of ‘ignorance is bliss’, the reader begins to question what today’s Soma is as they do not want to destroy themselves and become slaves to a society where they believe they have free-will like the way Soma does to the citizens of Brave New World

The world that Huxley created, an “idealistic” utopian society has been created with features, specifically the characters, that have been explicitly calculated to alienate the readers as reading the novel elicits the very same unpleasant feelings in the reader which the society it describes has notionally subdued. We see that the formation of this “idealistic” utopian society by the elitist class comes at the expense of the working class. As Marx would say, the “bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.”  

The challenge that the novel offers to the reader concerns the here and now, asking them to challenge their own ideas of norms.  Huxley tells the reader to look at themselves and to recognise what forces within their society and government prevent them from perceiving their world as it really is. 

For someone who at the age of 16 had been void of a political stance, this novel sparked a curiosity in me. While not directly driving me to become a socialist, the novel led me to question what kind of scientist or clinician I can be. I dismantled the long held notion I carried with me that science is just objective. I saw the social and economic issues that held the discipline together and questioned what the impact could be if I did not instil economically equitable values into my work. I read this book over and over again, each time gaining something new. Its insight into what capitalism and neoliberalism does and can do to scientific endeavours is one that does not change for me.

Image by Ubé.

Medusa Waking: How Crowdfunding Helped Independent Live Theatre Return to Hobart

For emerging playwright and UTAS alum Emma Skalicky, the journey to bringing her first full length play Medusa Waking to Salamanca’s Peacock Theatre was not without challenges, but the powerful production speaks to the mythic potential of Hobart’s independent theatre scene.

No stranger to the performing arts, Skalicky has acted in, produced and directed plays since 2014, with a recent short work of hers staged in Sydney at the Griffin Theatre.  Currently employed as a first year English tutor at UTAS, Skalicky graduated from its English Department with Honours in 2019, with her topics of interest including hydrofeminism, hauntings and folk adaptations. 

It was as her Honours project that Medusa Waking first came to be, writing the play with the support of her supervisor Dr Naomi Milthorpe and Associate Head of Research Dr Hannah Stark.

Medusa Waking is a magical realist reimagining of the myth of Perseus and Medusa.  It tells the story of a teenage girl named Maggie, who while struggling to process a traumatic event in her past, locks herself in her bathroom only to be greeted by characters from Greek mythology. 

Crucially focused on the psychological aftermath of sexual abuse, Skalicky took care to ensure that the play’s confronting themes were treated in a way that was compassionate rather than exploitative.  Drawing from personal experience, Skalicky did this through extensive research into the stories of survivors and by punctuating the play with a kind of ‘gentle hope’ that acknowledges the lasting impacts of trauma. 

Central to Skalicky’s exploration of trauma is the mythic figure of Medusa.  From monstrosity to Freudian sexual archetype, the image of Medusa has had hundreds of faces.  It’s only in the last hundred or so years, Skalicky says, that Medusa has been rehabilitated as a visually arresting feminist icon, one particularly emblematic of our current political moment.  Her story rife with injustice and misunderstanding, Skalicky viewed Medusa as an inroads to expressing a multitude of survivors’ experiences:

Survivors come in all shapes and forms. There are thousands of voices telling stories like this, or nothing like it at all. They’re all valid. This play or that Medusa – they’re just one. I feel like Medusa is an archetype that can express that. She’s so evocative, and it gives space for so many voices.”

While Skalicky was found strong support for Medusa Waking in director Natalie Venettacci and Bad Company Theatre, the COVID-19 pandemic proved a sizeable challenge to bringing the play to Hobart stages.  With independent productions struggling to gain traction in the best of circumstances, when theatre did slowly begin to return to Hobart following the easing of gathering restrictions, it was accompanied by significant reduction in government support for the arts through grants. 

In light of this, Skalicky and Bad Company turned to crowdfunding to get Medusa Waking off the ground.  Collaborating with local artists to offer t-shirts, art prints and tote bags as rewards for donors, through overwhelming support from the community (and a viral TikTok), the team behind Medusa Waking managed to raise 150% of their fundraising goal:

“It really showed us how much people care about the arts, about paying artists, and about the story we were telling.”

Boasting strong central performances from Lizzie Jackson as Maggie and Simone Dobber as Mum/Athena, the cast of Medusa Waking succeeds in bringing Skalicky’s vibrant vision to life.  Jackson deftly navigates the nuance of Maggie’s emotional trauma, her performance conveying vulnerability and anger in equal measure, while also communicating an unmistakable kindness and strength.  Dobber’s warm performance as Mum is wholly contrasted by her dual turn as Athena, who commands the stage with her otherwordly presence. 

The central dynamic between Jackson and Dobber deserves to be lauded with praise; Dobber effortlessly portraying the frustration with which Maggie’s mother tries to cut through her daughter’s isolation, culminating in their emotional reconnection at the play’s conclusion.  Noah Casey’s Perseus is also to be celebrated, leaning in to the campness of the Grecian hero archetype with his bombastic timbre and dynamic use of gesture.  The constantly rotating set – a worn bathtub, sink and toilet, provides a disorienting backdrop evocative of Maggie’s processing of her trauma.

An immensely powerful play, as Skalicky so elegantly puts it, Medusa Waking is ‘a story of recovery borne from the recovery of a story’.  Speaking to the dire need for the experiences of survivors to be listened to, Skalicky’s feminist reclamation of the Medusa myth resituates them at the forefront of stories they’re too often forced in the background of. 

Through its intimate exploration of trauma and historically voiceless women, Medusa Waking reaffirms the importance of Hobart’s independent theatre scene in amplifying important artistic voices.

Medusa Waking is expected to tour Tasmania later this year, with hopes of bringing the play to mainland festivals in 2022.