Lenina Crowne? OMF!

I've started to play around with the idea of writing a lengthy essay about my experience of re-reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I read it the first time in my junior year of high school and interpreted it at the time as the ultimate teen boy's fantasy; but much has happened to me since then, so I'll probably have new and different thoughts about the novel this time around.

For one thing, I notice that Huxley's novel assumes a high level of cultural literacy with a cutoff point of circa 1930. He alludes to many people and things in the early 20th Century which mattered greatly at the time; but modern readers probably won't catch or understand the allusions without some kind of study guide.

For another thing, he disrespects his female character Lenina Crowne and fails to use her adequately as one of the novel's interpreters, but she seems to have leaped off the pages and served as a prototype for vacuous women in the real world. I can just imagine Lenina as a young woman in 2011, working for a fashion magazine, hooking up with a series of men, yakking and texting on her cell phone much of the day, taking random digital photos and posting inanities about her life on her Twitter and Facebook accounts. When the male characters in the novel approvingly refer to Lenina's body as "pneumatic," I wonder if Huxley had intended ironically for that word to convey its other meaning, because Lenina has many "spiritual" sisters in the early 21st Century.

And for a third thing, the discussion between Mustapha Mond and the "Savage" about the rationale for the utopia's social model and its absent need for a god anticipates recent theorizing about the role of safe, modern environments in causing the implosion of religious belief in many developed democratic countries.