Chapter 3

Summary

The students’ tour continues outside where they are shown children, boys and girls, naked, participating in erotic games.  They are being conditioned to accept that sex has no emotional or moral connotations and such behavior will prevent them having attachments to particular partners. 

Mustapha Mond, one of the 10 Controllers of the World State, joins the group. He lectures the students concerning the evils of family life, and the advantages of social security. He also gives a brief history of Utopia from the 20^th Century until today.  The Controller explains that one of the main doctrines of the Brave New World is to reduce the period of time between wanting and receiving, as this slowly destroys the capability for feeling, and he says “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy and to preserve you, so far that it is possible, from having emotions at all.” 

Meanwhile, indoors, the strange Bernard Marx feels queasy in respect of Henry Foster’s casual behavior towards Lenina Crowne.  At the same time, in the women’s dressing room, Lenina confides in her friend Fanny that she is excited by her monogamous relationship with Henry, she also admits that she still thinks that Bernard is attractive. 

Returning outdoors again, Mond gives details regarding the Nine Years War that began in A.F.141 and ultimately created Utopia. It was a war where both sides used anthrax bombs and poisonous gasses, and the people were left with a choice of either total destruction, or world control.

When peace was achieved, this day was called Ford’s Day.  All books that were published before A.F.150 were banned. 

The chapter ends with details concerning the infant nurseries where children are sleep-taught propaganda concerning the Brave New World.

Interpretation

This is quite a complex chapter in which Huxley introduces various strands of his imagination regarding Utopia.

He suggests that unless mankind changes its evolution, then there will be a future war that will eliminate civilization, as we know it.  He shows that the men in authority in Utopia have rewritten history, just as Communism did in the middle of the 20^th Century.

Huxley ensures that the reader is aware of Mond’s importance, for although he oversees the programming of the human society, he is in touch with the way things were prior to this system. Presumably his knowledge will be passed on to his selected heir.

The students are indoctrinated with the view that all feelings and emotions are abhorrent, and Mond tells them that they should be grateful for this unloading of responsibility.  The philosophy of Utopia is that once feelings are eliminated, then suffering will disappear.  Mond suggests that Christianity and Democracy for a long time prevented the birth of the perfect society that is now Utopia. 

The reader must, therefore, assume that there are very few people in this Brave New World that have a full consciousness, who are aware of the old traditions as well as those given to the current generation.

There is a brief mention of Shakespeare in this chapter. This will become more important further into the novel.