Lenina Crowne, the 21st Century American girl

I've had an on and off project of writing a lengthy review essay about Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (BNW) as a humanist utopia, given that Huxley seems not to have had full control over his own thinking processes when he wrote it, so that it sends messages that Huxley might not have consciously intended. BNW assumes a high degree of cultural literacy which many educated people now lack, and doing a workmanlike job of interpreting it would require me to read the writings Huxley absorbed by early 20th Century intellectuals who disapproved of "modern times." Yet many of these works have fallen into obscurity by now, partly because the world experienced worse problems starting in the 1930's than the ones which engaged intellectuals earlier. I know Huxley wrote BNW partly in response to the various utopias H.G. Wells wrote about a century ago, for example. I've had a go at a couple of Wells's utopian tracts disguised as novels, and I find them deservedly unreadable.

As for BNW's unintended messages, Huxley shows that at least in that stage of his life, he disapproved of promiscuity and other forms of hedonism. Yet generations of adolescent & teen boys, myself included in high school, have devoured BNW for its depiction of a utopia based on sex & drugs. The boys' response to BNW invites comparison to how many of the same boys also read Robert Heinlein's Stranger In a Strange Land, again for its depictions of sexual promiscuity and altered states of consciousness. Only Heinlein, unlike the early Huxley, intended his novel to serve as advocacy for sexual freedom. Apparently Heinlein wrote Stranger because he wanted to propagandize for the swinging lifestyle that I suspect he and his wife Virginia took advantage of in the military community of Colorado Springs in the 1950's. Huxley, by contrast, apparently had a more conventional life and outlook at the time.

Huxley also didn't seem quite to know what to do with the novel's character Lenina Crowne. I wouldn't exactly call Lenina the "heroine" of the novel, but more of a place filler for a necessary female character and a symbol of the debased sort of female personality Huxley wants us to view as a product of his futurist utopia. Yet Lenina to me seems to have grown in stature with the passage of time. She comes across at first as vacuous and shallow. Her locker room conversation with her friend and coworker Fanny could almost have come from a chick movie or a reality series like Jersey Shore. And it wouldn't require a stretch to imagine that Lenina carries a smart phone on her fashionable Malthusian belt, has Twitter & Facebook accounts, and goes to feelies with her boyfriends to see the latest adaptations of Twilight novels. It wouldn't even come as a surprise if Lenina sports some piercings & tattoos, though Huxley doesn't mention them. Yet despite her superficiality and pettiness, Lenina shows signs of developing into a deeper and more complex character as she begins to appreciate the Savage's conservative, traditional view of love & sex; but Huxley kills her off at the end before we get the see her transformation. I consider that one of the novel's inexcusable flaws.

Huxley according to some scholars modeled Lenina literally after young California women he met during a tour of the motion picture industry, accompanied by Charlie Chaplain. Yet I don't think that Huxley realized that the sort of female personality he found both compelling and distasteful would come to dominate in many developed countries, thanks to education, affluence, contraception & consumerism. We have a world full of Lenina Crownes now, in many countries, but especially in the United States. The character he created almost neglectfully as a plot device for BNW has leapt off the page and entered the real world, and perhaps not for the better, according to some advocates of patriarchy.

At least the real-life Leninas usually come across as approachable and nonthreatening, though perhaps a bit "spacey." I don't know if I would care for a world full of women like Lisbeth Salander, who incorporates goth, computer geek and warrior woman tropes from the 1990's. Given the potentially long journey into the future that I and other cryonicists could make, however, we might encounter women even odder than the ones we've known in our current lives. Perhaps both the Leninas & the Lisbeths, along with many other types of women, could find places in our hearts in the coming centuries.