Brave New Essay

Prompt:

Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience. Explain how traveling and exile work in the book Brave New World?

Essay:

               “Community, Identity, and stability,” this is the mantra repeated time and time again in Brave New World. Ironically the World state doesn’t not welcome the idea of personal independence; in fact in the book, the state stresses the exact converse. Citizens are taught to be interdependent on others and the state at all times. For the most part everyone complies and stability is reached, but for every rule there is an exception, this is Bernard. Beginning in chapter six Bernard seeks to visit the savage reservation, most likely to fill his need to see what life is outside the World State. Edwards said that “exile can become a potent, even enriching experience,” and in his quest, Bernard seeks a sense of enrichment separate from the state in order to find his personal identity.

               With such a strong emphasis on dependence of its citizens the world state makes it all but impossible for individuals to have an identity. In Bernard we see this yearning for separation from others, as a reaction to his yearning for identity. Take for instance Bernard and Lenina’s helicopter ride over the English Channel (Chapter 6), where Bernard flies close enough to the ocean that the waves almost lick his craft, just in order to be far from everyone else. In the community Bernard is only a number, but out on the ocean, or the reservation or in Iceland Bernard can start to recognize himself and an individual. This motif is common even in the world today, the book Into the Wild illustrates the true story of a man who needed to escape his “community identity” in order to find enlightenment.

               Even for Lenina who is perfectly content in her bubble of having orgy parties and consuming soma, the idea of leaving her home is “strangely compelling to think about.” The notion is so compelling that she leaves all amenities to go with Bernard to the reservation, where she is met with horrors beyond her comprehension. In that moment we see the real Lenina, without the State, soma or any other dulling agent, we see her identity. The dependence that the state has imposed of this women has made the “rift forced between a human being and a native place” unsurmountable for her. Huxley uses this to show how to much interdependence can cripple a person, Linda’s inability to mend clothes is a prime example of this.

               Huxley’s use of the journey to the reservation underlines the different themes of exile, enrichment, separation, desperation, for his character in the book. If community is stability, the exile is disarray and adversity and in the book Bernard comes to learn that one doesn’t learn from stability, but adversity.