The Women of Brave New World: Aldous Huxley and the Gendered Agenda of Eugenics

Eugenics is the belief that the human race can rid of unwanted characteristics by using science. As this belief became more widely known through the Nazi’s raise to power and their use of ideologies maintained by fear, scholars began to take note of its rise in academic circles and the followers behind it. Authors began incorporating these ideas into their novels as a way of commenting on the future of our world if eugenic practices continued. In this article, I discuss how the concept of eugenics is used in dystopian novels, especially during the interwar period. It explores Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the way that Huxley used women as a way to explore a new vision of eugenics. Through discussion of the three main female characters in the novel, I comment on his use of them as a way of explaining why he thinks that gender needs to be removed from society and how fear is used to stop them from revolting against the constraints placed upon them. Other scholars have seen Huxley’s novel as satirical in its vision of a world completely controlled by eugenics; I argue that instead this novel offers a view of where he thinks the world is heading. Through a feminist perspective my article explains how he saw the ever-increasing discussion of eugenics as a way to incorporate a new vision of using eugenics to also eliminate feminine characteristics and the female gender itself. My article will add to the ever-expanding debate of how women are treated within the constraints of the novel and in exploring how the popular topics during the interwar period translated into the novels of the same time.