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Fiction

Notes society, who some hunters had saved. Bernard concludes that John’s mother was the woman
the Director had taken to the reservation twenty-five years ago.
Bernard and Lenina meet Linda, John’s mother, who rejoices at seeing civilized people again. She
complains that there is too much dirt and that she has to drink mescal (alcohol) and use peyote,
a hallucinatory drug, in place of soma. She describes how she ended up on the reservation and
pregnant with John even though she took all precautions with the Director. Although Lenina feels
disgusted by Linda, she feels forced to listen. Linda explains that she used to let all the men
come to her for sex, as civilized people should, but that all the other women got mad. She also
struggled to condition John to the ways of civilized society but apparently failed. She concludes
that John spends too much time with the Indians to become truly civilized. She describes the
Indian way of life as madness and longs for the comforts and cleanliness of civilization.

Analysis

This scene challenges Bernard and Lenina to release their emotions. Since both of them forget
to bring any soma, they cannot hide behind the narcotic’s pleasures. For the first time, Lenina
cannot completely hold back her emotions. The way the Indians live induces an intense amount
of revulsion in her. Bernard tells Lenina that men have lived this way for thousands of years,
but she simply cannot believe it.

The tribal dance shows that although their culture differs entirely from Bernard and Lenina’s,
it is also imperfect because it too enforces the suppression of emotion. The tribe worships a
hybrid of Pookong and Jesus as their deity, which shows how the Indian culture fuses religion
and superstition. Whereas the Indians unemotionally take part in the ritual dance, Lenina
begins crying when she sees the blood of the sacrificed young man. Huxley has characters
view the madness of Indian ritual directly, without the veil of soma, but the tribal ritual
successfully eradicates emotions and sentiment from the Indians even without soma. Huxley
juxtaposes Lenina’s uncharacteristic tears with the uncaring of the very people that supposedly
suffer from unwanted emotions.
The chapter also highlights the natural desire to sequester those who are different as human
nature rather than only as a function of governmental power. Society has outcast the Indians
for their differences, yet the Indians also make outcasts of others, as exemplified by John the
Savage. He is a hybrid, a man who has partial conditioning but who has also learned Indian
ways. He does not belong to either culture and can thus evaluate the relative merits of both.
He is an entirely sane individual caught in an insane environment with a half-insane mother.
Interestingly, although he is of the sanest characters, his mother describes him as being mad.
John also alludes to Shakespeare, whose literature will play a role in later chapters. In Chapter
7, John laments “that damned spot” on the ground, which is the blood of the sacrificed Indian
but which refers to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This reference may symbolize the complicity of
“civilized” society in the destruction of Indian culture.
Notably, the reservation is not just a symbol of human nature or of societal differences, but
also of a representation of events that have occurred in the past. Huxley lived in New Mexico
for part of his life and saw firsthand how others sequestered and maligned Native Americans
and indigenous populations. Huxley saw the tragedy in such situations, and Brave New World
meditates extensively on humanity’s propensity to separate those that are different.

Chapter 8
Summary
Bernard asks John to tell him about growing up in the Indian village. John recalls how his
mother Linda used to have sex with many men. Pope became her steady lover because he

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