Critical Response of “the Provocations of Lenina in Huxley's Brave New World”

Critical Response of “The Provocations of Lenina in Huxley's Brave New World” Lenina is an important female character in Brave New World; however, it is also a controversial figure among readers. In David Leon Higdon’s “The Provocations of Lenina in Huxley's Brave New World”, he claims that Huxley had bias towards women and therefore made Lenina a disputable character. The author first proves that Huxley tends to disgust with the whole human species especially women. One anonymous character inside Huxley’s novel Antic Hay compares maggots to human and predicts that the world will become "a pretty sort of bear garden ... a monkey house ... a warthoggery". Another character uses insulting words like “Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs” to depict women in the novel. Even though these characterizations are not directly written in the first person’s perspective but they can be seemed as hints of Huxley’s misogyny. Then the author argues that such misogyny causes serious problems in Brave New World. Though Lenina tends to be more heroic than male characters to resist the Fordian world in terms of her attitudes, decisions and actions, Huxley completely ignores it as a result of misogyny. On the contrary, he takes “an unearned and mean-spirited revenge” on Lenina. Such inappropriate setting threats the stabilization of the text. The most obvious mistake with the character Lenina is the color of her clothes. Different colors indicate different status in the World State. Lenina is not a Gamma but she often wears green clothes which represent Gamma. Since World State is famous for its orthodoxy and consistency, the wrong choice of color can be deemed as unorthodox. If Lenina set as a rebel against the totalitarian world like the men, she left undeveloped because Huxley could not accept a woman rebel; if not, it will be a contradictory which threats the integrity of Huxley’s s closed system and the themes of the novel. At last, the author concludes that Huxley is blinded by his misogyny for he created a character which is at odds with the text. Personally, the characterization of Lenina also confuses me while I am reading the Brave New World. This article points out this problem directly and makes a reasonable deduction that Huxley is a misogynist. The author uses a great deal of evidence from Huxley’s books to make his statement convincing. The large number of quotations he uses from other critics also contributes to the reliability of this article. But the true intention of Huxley to create such an ambiguous character remains unknown.