When John returns to the New Word, he brings with him his knowledge of Shakespeare. Bernard Marx meets John, a ‘savage’ from ‘the reservation’, a small area of the world that has not been subject to social controls. It is not the only aspect of social life which has been rendered meaningless. Promiscuity is the only way to satiate one’s own urges, without the emotional risk of commitment. It is this intimacy that has been done away with in the New World, along with the terms that once described intimate relationships. When our protagonist Bernard Marx sees a ‘savage’ breastfeeding a child, he is ‘surprised by the intimacy’ of the relationship. Words which once described familial bonds – ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘birth’ – are all remembered as expletives, spoken by previous generations of humans. The language of Brave New World reflects this loss of meaning. This is why even children in Brave New World have to engage in ‘erotic play’. Sex has been reduced to the temporary satiation of physical impulses. But the promiscuity of the New World citizens is empty. Huxley was a member of the Bloomsbury set, a group for writers who delighted in attacking and inverting Victorian things like traditional marriage. Sexual promiscuity is seen as a social duty. In this world, ‘Everyone belongs to everyone else’. It depicts a world in which reproduction is tightly controlled by growing babies in mass hatcheries. Huxley’s Brave New World, written 10 years before the essay quoted above, is a novel in which love and relationships have ceased to mean anything. Young people in the 1940s, he said, no longer ‘love with a large L’. If Huxley was sceptical of the nuclear family, he did not see much potential in unrelenting promiscuity either.
He wrote that a ‘sordid and ignoble realism offers no resistance to the sexual impulse, which now spends itself purposelessly, without producing love, or even, in the long-run, amusement’. But he also expressed concern that something important could be lost with this new sexual revolution. In his later life he expressed what was close to revulsion with the Victorian nuclear family.
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