Allusions in Brave New World

1. Allusions in Brave New World

2. Lenina • A variation of Lenin -- Nikolai Lenin, the Russian Socialist, who had a tremendous influence in the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the present-day Russia.

3. Bernard Marx • Marx is an obvious reference to Karl Marx, a German Socialist, whose best-known work, Das Kapital, expresses his belief that the fundamental factor in the development of society is the method of production and exchange. Karl Marx called religion the opium of the people; in Huxley's Brave New World, soma is substituted for religion.

4. Bernard Marx (cont’d) • George Bernard Shaw-writer and socialist George Bernard Shaw (author of Pygmailon)

5. Helmholtz Watson • Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz – scientist who made important discoveries in physiology, optics and math • John B. Watson – psychologist/behaviorist, did experiments at first on animals then on children, together with Rosalie Rayner conducted controversial "Little Albert" experiment.

6. John B. Watson, after observing children in the field, was interested in finding support for his notion that the reaction of children, whenever they heard loud noises, was prompted by fear. Furthermore, he reasoned that this fear was innate or due to an unconditioned response. He felt that following the principles of classical conditioning, he could condition a child to fear another distinctive stimulus which normally would not be feared by a child.

7. As the preliminary to the experiment, Little Albert was given a battery of baseline emotional tests: the infant was exposed, briefly and for the first time, to a white rabbit, a rat, a dog, a monkey, masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc. During the baseline, Little Albert showed no fear toward any of these items. Albert was then placed on a mattress on a table in the middle of a room. A white laboratory rat was placed near Albert and he was allowed to play with it. At this point, the child showed no fear of the rat. He began to reach out to the rat as it roamed around him. In later trials, Watson and Rayner made a loud sound behind Albert's back by striking a suspended steel bar with a hammer when the baby touched the rat. Little Albert responded to the noise by crying and showing fear. After several such pairings of the two stimuli, Albert was again presented with only the rat. Now, however, he became very distressed as the rat appeared in the room. He cried, turned away from the rat, and tried to move away. Apparently, the baby boy had associated the white rat (original neutral stimulus, now conditioned stimulus) with the loud noise (unconditioned stimulus) and was producing the fearful or emotional response of crying (originally the unconditioned response to the noise, now the conditioned response to the rat).

8. Benito Hoover • Benito Hoover combines the names of two men who wielded tremendous power at the time Huxley was writing Brave New World: Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, and Herbert Hoover, the American President.

9. Ford • An important figure in the formation of the World State. His utilization of the mass-production technique influenced social, political, and economic life. • In Huxley's Utopia, the life, work, and teachings of Ford are the sources of inspiration and truth. Even time is reckoned according to Ford. • Henry Ford – maker of first car – the Model T, developed the assembly line, paid his employees the high base-wage of $5/day (in 1914)

10. Mustapha Mond • Mustapha - Founder of modern Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. • Mond- Monde-- "world" or "people" in French

11. The Malthusian belt:Thomas Malthus • This English political economist believed that unless the population diminished, in time the means of life would be inadequate. Improvements in agriculture, he predicted, would never keep up with expanding population, and increases in the standard of living would be impossible. In the World State, mandatory birth-control regulates the growth of population.

12. Neopavlovian Conditioning • Conditioning is defined as the training of an individual to respond to a stimulus in a particular way. The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov conducted experiments to determine how this conditioning takes place. In Brave New World individuals are conditioned to think, act, feel, believe, and respond the way the government wants them to.

13. Sigmund Freud – Austrian creator of psychoanalysis, known for his terms “id,” “ego,” and “superego,” and for his belief that dreams revealed the unconscious

14. “Brave New World” • Brave new world • Miranda:O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new worldThat has such people in't! • Prospero:'Tis new to thee. • The Tempest Act 5, scene 1, 181–184 Exiled from Milan, the former duke Prospero and his admirable fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda have been stranded for twelve years on an uncharted isle in the Mediterranean. Miranda's entire experience of mankind has, until very recently, encompassed only her bitter old dad and his deformed slave Caliban [see THIS THING OF DARKNESS]. • After reading up on white magic, Prospero succeeds in ship-wrecking his old persecutors on the island and, after sufficiently humiliating them, produces them for his daughter's inspection. Miranda, trusting first impressions, finds these new "creatures" "goodly" and "brave." By "brave" she doesn't really mean "courageous," but rather "handsome" and "noble." Their wrecked ship had struck her as "brave"; her new fiancé Ferdinand looked pretty "brave" too; the whole pack of Italian princes and courtiers (most of them villains) are thus also "brave." Prospero has seen their inner workings, and knows how old this new world is, and how far from brave. • The phrase "brave new world" was your ordinary, not-terribly-quotable Shakespeareanism until Aldous Huxley put it on the map with his 1932 novel, Brave New World.