Misogyny In Brave New World

Misogyny in the Treatment of Brave New World’s Female Characters

Society is essentially a rulebook describing how people are supposed to think and how they are supposed to act upon these thoughts. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World explores the importance of questioning the values and societal pressures of the time period you’re living in, however, he still displays his own prejudices of the 1930s in the way Aldous Huxley wrote female characters in his book. In the 1930s, being a submissive and hardworking housewife was the currency you had to have as a woman to have value. In Brave New World, the character Lenina is very different from this expectation due to her being a sexually-active woman who has a well-respected and important job outside

When Bernard takes Lenina to the ‘Savage Reservation’ they witness the very traditionalist lifestyle of the Native Americans and she reacts very negatively to the native’s behavior, “the spectacle of two young women giving breast to their babies made her blush and turn away her face. She had never seen anything so indecent in her life” (75). The way the native’s lived reflect the values of the 1930s, that preferred women to be in domestic roles, however, Lenina is written to be disgusted by these things. Huxley writes Lenina this way because at the time period most female characters were “dependent, submissive, imitative, nurturant” (Clark, et al) because literature at the time was conditioning women to value traits that would make a good mother. Lenina's liberation and empowerment is displayed to the reader as a evil thing, that to be a successful, sexually active woman is a evil thing because that prohibits a woman from being a mother. She is the scary, liberated woman that the reader should be disgusted by. To explain, Huxley is saying that a world where women are not tied to domestic pursuits is evil and corrupt while a world such as the native reservations’ is not because it has a traditional, domestic role for women. Similarly, this message is reinforced again by the way John the Savage interacts with Lenina, “he opened the green suit-case; and all at once he was breathing Lenina's perfume, filling his lungs with her essential being. His heart beat wildly; for a moment he was almost faint” (96-97). Peculiarly, John the Savage’s infatuation with Lenina in the beginning of the book is the first time the reader is shown a romantic interaction that is more than just lust. With all the influence John had from reading Shakespeare, John believes he is in love with Lenina because of her, “pure and vestal modesty” (98). However, this does