A Touch of Cancer

Thus far into A Brave New World, major themes are as yet still building, and for the most part the key to the novel has remained elusive. However, the novel seems to be highly interested in the negativity of individuality and personal identity. Social continuity and homogeneity maintain themselves as society’s stability, and individuality threatens the entity which is this World State.

The first instance which begins to explore the instrumentality of stripping society of individuality comes in the very beginning of the novel, when the students tour the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The new process for fertilizing eggs and then making embryos results in, for all castes other than Alphas and Betas, results in “Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress” (Huxley 17). Syntactically, these statements represent much of the philosophy of the society. It (the society) does not need to be made up of “complete” individuals, ones with independent mindsets, goals, and outlooks on life. Like these near-sentences, the people of the society can carry out their function without having a full consciousness. This encourages the retraction of individuality, and substitution with hive-minded people, for the sake of a more efficient system. Much like the way Huxley uses only fragments to describe the lack of genetic individuality within the World State, the geneticists and breeders strip the people down to only the necessary elements for their castes. Intelligence, psychological preferences and predispositions, and social mindset are precisely engineered to ensure the human contains only what is exactly necessary to give meaning to the situation, but not enough for any extraneous meanings or opinions to form from the information planted in that person.

Because the society actively puts down individuality, any appearance of difference is heavily ridiculed. Even the individual who appears or thinks differently than the rest of the society notices the difference, and extreme self-consciousness of the difference results. Bernard Marx, while intellectually equal to anyone else of the Alpha-Plus caste, is slightly shorter than the rest of his caste, and as such feels out of place. Because of this difference, “feeling an outsider he behaved like one,” directly characterizing Marx as someone in direct conflict with the goal of the World State society (69). In the case of the type of characterization Huxley employs to expose Marx, the use of direct as opposed to indirect characterization supersedes the importance of the explicit word choice of the statement. Though the others of his caste and his general society have an awareness of the difference between Marx and others conditionately equal to him, Marx has the greatest awareness of this difference. Marx internalizes his difference from others, and even works to make it larger. He consciously separates himself from the rigorous hypnopædia propaganda he was exposed to as a child. He wants to get to know the women he sees, as opposed to having lots of one night stands. His interests directly conflict with the society, and when people see this, they look down on him, more so than they do simply because of his physical “defect,” as it were. Any form of individuality maintains itself as alien to this society.

Furthermore, this individuality greatly threatens the society as a whole, whether Marx knows it or not. The society as a whole cannot function properly if a member becomes different enough to challenge the norms, although, as the Director states, “the social body persists although the component cells may change” (95). Marx’s mentality and challenging of the norms and hypnopædia represents something far more dangerous than simply a component cell dying and being exchanged in the metaphorical body of the World State. Newness of thought, innovation of opinion and tradition have the potential to spread like a cancer through this society, destroying it from the inside. Truly, the most dangerous occurrence for this society lies in the possibility that hypnopædia could be overcome, and the past freedom of thought come back. Especially dangerous, because the only people physically capable of this kind of thought are in the upper castes, and as a result, the differences in thought would manifest in the most important parts of the proverbial body, the reproductive system, the brain, the vital organs. A cancer of the support system of the body, the lower castes that keep the infrastructure going, a bone or skin cancer that is slow growing and not quick to metastasize, that can be cut out, cut off, and the body can keep going. But, when a cell in the brain, in the heart, in the major systems of the body becomes cancerous and begins to spread and grow, to overtake the mother organ and then move to others, it takes down the whole body, cannot be removed because as surely as the cancer will kill the body, so would the surgery necessary to remove it. This cancer is fatal. Huxley points out that even when highly conditioned, individuality, social cancerousness exists; to a society completely reliant on uniformity and the stripping of individual identity, the danger this cancer poses is real, and could spread to Stage IV before the body even realizes it’s there. (859 words)