Brave New World Quote Analysis

As I was reading Brave New World, one quote in particular struck me - "What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder."

Throughout the whole novel, Huxley emphasizes his message of the dangers of over-industrialism and the troubles our world will face if we continue on our path. In the fictional world of the story, every single person is engineered to be exactly who they are at the moment. From before birth they are subliminally trained to be whatever they are assigned to be. Through this quote, Huxley suggest that the characters have become overconfident in their ability to control nature. However, their illusion of totalitarianism is completely skewed because they believe they have conquered nature, but without nature, nothing and no one could exist. What they fail to realize is that for all the supposed control over nature, nature had been silently engineering the same thing since the beginning of time, giving people the characteristics they need to survive, and selecting those which have proved most useful.

Huxley also uses this quote as a way to get the reader thinking on his theme. Because this was said, the reader is led to believe that Society thinks itself unconquerable. However, this cleverly sets the reader up with a little bit of foreshadowing, because the confidence of the statement hints that the Society might not be as all-powerful as they believe. Because Huxley is trying to give a message, this quote could be used as warning to the reader and our society, not to think to much of ourselves. Not to think that we are greater than nature, because the created cannot exceed the creator.


(On a side note, I am still reading the novel, so if the Society turns out not to be conquered, and that Huxley is saying that they can't be toppled, this could all be just mindless ponderings, but, from the foreshadowing, I really son think, and hope, that's not going to happen)

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A Brave "Not So New" World

I am currently reading A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, is a book about a so-called perfectly engineered society. Every person is give a pre-determined destiny. Everything from occupation to social class. Even from fetal development, they are molded to become what they need to be, whether that entails flipping them upside down so as to be better astronauts, or heating them up so they like warmer temperatures and move to South America.
While Reading this book, I did have to complement Huxley on his extraordinary vision into not only the minute workings of the world, but his vision of industrialized society. Many of his predictions about biological developments are correct. However, while reading the book, I could not help thinking of everything that would now be done by computers. This is something I think Huxley, or anyone from his time. could not have predicted. So, as contemporary readers of Huxley's A Brave New World, I see the reader as seeing this as completely plausible. However, one must consider that at the time written, in 1932, it would have been considered extremely fantastic, similar to War of the Worlds when it was published.
So, I think while reading this book, I must keep in mind a Historical Literary context and read it as a reader in 1932. Where this information was not commonly known, and the piece would have been considered fantastic (in the impossible meaning of the word).

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