Capitalist Ideology and Race-Perception in Brave New World

Abstract

While many literary critics have viewed Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a dystopian text, my paper argues against this conception. By analyzing the text through Louis Althusser's "On Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" from Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays and by applying Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception from Phenomenology of Perception to the operations of racialization, I claim that while on the surface criticizing the U.S. capitalist society, Huxley's book actually perpetuates the dominant economic and racist ideologies of the time. In a deconstruction of the text, I find that Huxley not only inadvertently supports the potential positive outcomes of mass production, but also emphasizes a prejudice against the lower classes, mainly the population of people of color, common among upper- and middle-class white society. In showing how subjective reality is altered through and functions within societal beliefs, it becomes evident that Huxley, regardless of his attempt to criticize capitalist culture, is still operating within dominant ideology. Moreover, Huxley's connection to the eugenics movement of the time solidifies the fact that what seems dystopian about Brave New World is actually more closely tied to a utopian standpoint. Because eugenics of the 1920s and 1930s focused on the potential genetic modification of the lower classes, primarily made up of people of color, Huxley's reproduction of the positive outcomes of mass production seems intertwined with the dominant beliefs of the time that advocate for the need to control the lower classes for the benefit of the ruling class.