In the reader’s first glimpse of the dystopia, Huxley drives home the significance of his futuristic world with the motto “Community. Identity. Stability.” All the technology, planning, and conditioning of this World State exist solely to support and maintain these ends.
The Fordian world does not seem so menacing and sinister as Orwell’s 1984, but the reader can see even in the first chapter that the cheeriness masks a dark reality. Personal identity—perhaps even humanity itself—is strangled by the demands of community and stability.
On the tour, the D.H.C. briskly explains the technology of fertilization—the most intimate human activity—as the carefully calculated, sterile procedure to produce identical people. In a brilliant adaptation of Ford’s assembly line, the Central London Hatchery turns out (nearly) interchangeable human beings, who, like the D.H.C. and Henry Foster, can complement one another effortlessly, even to the point of completing each other’s sentences.
Stability requires both the elimination of differences (except with regard to caste) and the end of dissatisfaction. The eugenics lab answers the identity challenge; conditioning manages satisfaction. The D.H.C. announces piously that virtue and goodness spring from the work of the social predestinators, whose job is “making people like their inescapable social destiny.” With this statement, Huxley introduces a major theme—the role of choice and even pain in becoming a full human being. The D.H.C.’s dogma will meet a challenge with John, the “uncivilized” character (introduced in Chapter 7).
Huxley employs several narrative techniques to introduce his dystopia in the first chapter. The tour for new students affords a realistic opportunity for Huxley to explain the theories and practices of stability while immersing the reader in the physical world of the dystopia. A brief reference to the Hatchery itself—a “squat” building of “only thirty-four stories”—also gives a sense of the surrounding landscape, a city, by implication, of lofty heights. And, to further orient the reader, Huxley fixes a date—a.f. 632—the number as well as the “a.f.” emphasizing the difference between the reader’s world and the futuristic world of the novel.
Note especially Huxley’s comparison of technology with nature and his point of making technology more alive than nature itself. In the first chapter, Huxley describes the sunlight as cold and dead, except when it hits the tubes of the microscopes, which turn it a buttery, sun-like yellow. In this world, artificiality itself is a kind of power, competing with and augmenting the forces of nature.
Note, too, the inclusion of early twentieth-century prejudices in the dystopia; for example, in the racially charged (and unscientific) comparisons of human ovaries and in the all-male student group. Such details remind the reader that any futuristic fiction reveals as much about a writer’s response to the present as hopes or fears for the future.
