In Browning's closet drama Pippa Passes (1841), a young girl from the silk mills of Asolo hopes to improve everyone she encounters on her annual holiday. Instead of God overseeing the universe from heaven, brave new worlders envision Our Ford superintending their affairs from his "flivver," a slang expression for a small, inexpensive automobile, hence a decline misrepresented as apotheosis.
Nevertheless, Huxley reveals an embarrassing contradiction between Robert Browning's robust optimism and the new situation parodying it. Given a bookless society of nonreaders, one doubts the Director knowingly makes a literary allusion. The World Controller's speech to the D.H.C.'s new students about the splendors of the brave new world is undercut by Lenina's growing dissatisfaction with promiscuity and Bernard's penchant for solitude.Ī travesty of religious sentiment, the lines about Our Ford resemble slogans such as "Everybody's happy now," one of many bromides brave new worlders use to reassure themselves that the World State is the perfect place. The opening pages of chapter 3 switch back and forth from Mond's impromptu history lesson to Lenina's conversation with Fanny Crowne about irregularities in Bernard Marx's sex life. Despite the D.H.C.'s piety, all is not "right" in the World State. Huxley's two-sentence autograph addition discredits its utterer, castigates Our Ford, and ridicules the brave new world. Huxley added a fervent outburst from the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning to complete this vignette. Lives in the brave new world are "emotionally easy" Mustafa Mond boasts, because the interval "between desire and its consummation" (BNW 50) has been eliminated. This paragraph becomes the last two of 15 lines on TS 49 the other 13 lines are typewritten and only tightly edited. In the choicest of emendations herein called Americanizations, Huxley writes a new paragraph of two short sentences: "Ford's in his flivver," murmured the D.H.C. Mustapha Mond's jurisdiction forms part of an insanely rational society for which several of Huxley's finest holograph insertions blame America's archetypal technocrat. With Ford as synonym and stand-in, each new uncomplimentary use of his name further condemned the World State for being America writ large. His cleverest expedient was to ink in additional insults to Henry Ford, so that a novel that began as a satiric rendition of the future according to H.G. When Aldous Huxley revised the Brave New World typescript (1) between 27 May and 24 August 1931, he strove to Americanize his dystopia.
Aldous Huxley's Americanization of the Brave New World typescript - Critical EssayJerome Meckier
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