Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World begins with a telling scene, in which a government official, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.), conducts a group of young schoolboys on a tour of the facility he directs. It quickly becomes clear that this is the facility, in which the new infants of this future society are scientifically manufactured to fulfill pre-defined roles in the world. Not only does the D.H.C. make clear that natural viviparous reproduction is a thing of the past, but that the very notion of motherhood, in the sense of both giving birth and childrearing, is now regarded as a form of “smut” (Huxley, Brave New World 17). Indeed, motherhood itself seems to be regarded as one of the most embarrassing and taboo ideas in this society, standing in stark contrast to the traditional glorification of motherhood that was typical of Huxley’s own world. However, a close examination of these seemingly opposed attitudes toward motherhood reveals that both are based in fundamentally patriarchal notions about women.

An understanding of the complex hegemonic ideas of motherhood and normative ideals of family construction in modern Western society is essential in order to interpret the absence of traditional motherhood in Brave New World. This chapter applies Judith Butler’s concept of maternity as a social construct to examine the figuration of motherhood in Huxley’s novel, demonstrating that this construction is actually similar to that of motherhood in modern Western society, but representing the opposite extreme of the spectrum. I also draw upon Michel Foucault’s idea of the gradual refinement and expansion of mechanisms of control and discipline in modern society, which reveals the micro-powers and technologies of control at work; I then argue that the vision of motherhood in any patriarchal society is going to be problematic for women. According to both Butler and Foucault, attempts at social reform in pursuit of greater personal freedoms are inevitably manipulated to become techniques of domination.

As opposed to the horror of motherhood in Brave New World, social pressure to have children has turned motherhood into an institution in modern Western society; the need for women to have children is a requirement for women and is regarded as a natural product of maternal instinct. In both cases, social and cultural perspectives demand that women adapt to certain cultural norms and principles that influence reproductive decision-making—whether or not to become a mother, and how to go about doing so. What I intend to show is that this social construction of motherhood manipulates language and symbology, in order to control women and to ensure a stability and emotional norm consistent with social ideologies.

The demography of motherhood in the United States has shifted strikingly within the past two decades. Eighty percent of American women are mothers, which is a decreased number from a study conducted in 1990 by Gretchen Livingston and D’Vera Cohn. For example, “today’s mothers are older and better educated; they are also less likely to be Caucasian and less likely to be married” (Livingston and Cohn). However, the desire and instilled need to be a mother remain, and society still considers motherhood to be a woman’s most important role—and her greatest accomplishment. In today’s Western culture, the principal social role of women is and has been considered to be as the tenders and nurturers of children (Ehrenreich 494). Though more permissive than past decades, social norms demand that women raise children to the exclusion of roles and responsibilities outside the home; girls are brought up with the concept that motherhood is an inextricable part of a woman’s identity, even to the point of being considered a second nature. In such culture, any woman who fails to adhere to this ideal is discriminated against socially.

The modern concept of motherhood is an all-encompassing identity rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning. It is a symbol of an “untainted humanity so powerful as to infatuate a century of European writers, philosophers, and thinkers”—an inspiration to men such as Freud, Darwin, Marx, and Engels (Rubin 50). It is an idealized role, described as an expression of perfect love toward something or someone, for whom one actually has feelings of both love and hate. The hate is ignored and so kept from consciousness, while perfect love is unrealistic to achieve.

In patriarchal Western society, men are the primary policy makers, who govern most societal infrastructures. Under the modern patriarchal Western institution and its ideology of motherhood, the definition of mother is limited to heterosexual women who have biological children, while the idealized concept of good motherhood is further restricted to a select group of women who are white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied, married, thirty-something, in a nuclear family with usually one to two children, and (ideally) full-time mothers. Clearly, while mothers are nominally celebrated, some are more celebrated than others. Mothers who do not fit normative requirements are looked down upon by society. Mothers who are single parents are socially stereotyped as inappropriate or incapable of properly raising children. In addition, adults and children in nuclear families are viewed more favorably than adults and children in other family structures (divorced, remarried, and single); voluntarily childless women are also stigmatized, and abortion is described as emotionally and psychologically injurious to women. On the other hand, women themselves continue to describe the “exhaustion, guilt, anxiety, and loneliness” that come with being a mother in contemporary Western society (O’Reilly, Twenty-first-century Motherhood 27).

The modern patriarchal social expectation is that a relationship and maternal bond will be created and shared between mother and son that will influence his future character, as well as his self-esteem and confidence—considered most important because men will inevitably exert the most control over the modern social structure. Feminist scholars over the last two decades have vigorously challenged this patriarchal construct and called for new and expansive definitions of maternal identity. For example, feminist mothering seeks to reclaim power for mothers; to implement a mode of mothering that mitigates the ways that patriarchal motherhood, both discursively and materially, regulates and restrains mothers and their mothering, drawing upon the distinction made between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children,” and “the institution—which aims at ensuring that that potential and all women—shall remain under male control” (Rich 13).

In contrast to this utopian project, Brave New World is a dystopian account of scientific planning leading to dehumanization. Ten controllers of the World State determine all aspects of society; children are born in state hatcheries, where they are given or denied certain elements that are critical to proper development, according to the social class pre-determined for them. These decanted babies are medically and psychologically manipulated, so that they have only the appropriate intelligence, strength, and attractiveness to fill the social and economic positions for which they are intended. They are raised and indoctrinated in conditioning centers so that, by the time they are old enough to work, their only ambitions are to perform the tasks for the positions they were raised to fill. Their loyalty is to the state and to the preservation of the community and stability.

The citizens of Brave New World are happy and content with their simple lives: “We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability” (172). In order to maintain that stability, the World State has severed all personal ties among its citizens and manipulated the language itself so that “family” and associated terms have become obsolete concepts. The result, however, is more sinister than simple obsolescence; the World State maintains stability by obliterating individual personality. Persons of the same caste are largely interchangeable by design, literally manufactured in identical batches via the “Bokanovsky process.” Few personality traits are left to chance, and people are encouraged (through promiscuity, which spreads their emotional energies among multiple partners) not to form strong bonds with other individuals.

As familial bonds are perceived to be strong, as well as major factors in self-identification, familial terms such as “father” and (especially) “mother” are transformed into profanities in order to eliminate them. David Sisk asks, “By controlling language, can a speaker also control the thoughts of others who speak that language?” (Sisk 1). Dystopian societies, of course, often seek to manipulate language. This language can thus control the thoughts of the people in these societies; and if a society is conditioned into thinking through the filter of the official ideology, then the state has the ultimate power to manipulate the people. Most famously, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance, the totalitarian government attempts to do away with the common language and replace it with the artificial and highly restrictive Newspeak to achieve control over the people. Brave New World also depicts language as a means of control, though a somewhat more complex one that arguably started out with at least some good intentions. One might compare here the presumably utopian society of Anarres in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, in which the very language (“Pravic”) has been structured to reflect complete gender equality. Thus, there are no words in Pravic for sexual intercourse that indicate possession of one person by another or something being done by one person to another, except for one indicating rape. Instead, sexual verbs in the language are all plural, indicating mutual activity. Still, as Walter Meyers has pointed out, even this well-intentioned strategy has a downside: since languages tend to evolve over time, the society of Anarres is forced to adopt extreme measures to prevent its ideal language from changing (Meyers 208).

The situation in Huxley’s novel is similarly problematic. The paternal law in Brave New World structures all linguistic significations and so becomes a universal organizing principle of culture itself. It influences meaningful language, and hence meaningful experience, through the repression of primary libidinal drives, including the dependency of the child on the maternal body. As Judith Butler points out, this could theoretically be a good thing: once the latter ceases to be socially influenced, “the culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities” (Gender Trouble 119). Unfortunately, while the elimination of motherhood could be seen as part of an attempt to achieve gender equality, the society of Brave New World is still, in fact, highly patriarchal, as critics, such as June Deery, have shown.

The concept of maternity in Brave New World can be thus explained by applying Butler’s argument that the notion of “maternity” is a social construction, and that maternity preceding or defining women is itself a product of discourse (Butler, “Body Politics” 115). Today’s traditional Western social representation of motherhood is compulsory in ways that limit women and ascribe to them a pre-defined set of expectations upon which their subjectivity depends. It is a “compulsory cultural construction,” one that assumes “the female body as a maternal body” (Butler, “Body Politics” 115). This body is a cultural construct, both prone to cultural variations in how it is understood and amenable to alternative cultural possibilities. The presumption of the female body as dominated by drives is the effect of “a historically specific organization of sexuality” (Butler, “Body Politics” 118), one that establishes motherhood as mandatory for all women and therefore creating a “compulsory obligation on women’s bodies to reproduce” (Butler, “Body Politics” 115).

The concept of motherhood is defined by specific social rules; the role of ‘mother’ is thereby institutionalized. Motherhood is one of the most enduring roles in human societies; its definition and resulting expectations have been constructed and reconstructed with each passing political, social, and cultural wave, partly because it has traditionally been necessary for the survival of the species, regardless of the social context. In Brave New World, this necessity is removed, presumably changing everything in this regard. Motherhood has been redefined to the point of removal from society and from the identity of women entirely, dramatizing Butler’s argument that the concept of motherhood is a social construct that can be instilled or removed from society through means of social manipulation.

In both modern Western society and the society of Brave New World, the social construction of maternity is dominated by patriarchal ideologies and is thus limiting and damaging to women. Normative social influence is a type of conformity that leads people to exhibit public compliance—but not necessarily private acceptance—of the group’s social norms. The implication seems to be that the imposition of any normative vision of motherhood is problematic, no matter what that vision might be because it positions any woman who does not meet that normative vision in a difficult situation. “Normal” is also used to describe behavior that conforms to the most common behaviors in society—known as conforming to the social norm. In the case of contemporary Western society, the concept of a normal woman is one who desires to become a mother and naturally possesses motherly instincts. The “normal” mother is married, naturally loving, and devoted to nurturing her children (and, by extension, her spouse). Any woman who does not fit into these normative visions is regarded as abnormal, and is, therefore, denied the approval of society. As long as there is a fixed vision of what is “normal,” there will be a counterpoint notion that everything else is “abnormal,” possibly even morally deviant, as in the suspicion directed toward single mothers and the downright demonization of “welfare” mothers by the American political right in recent years. Norms imply that violators will be punished or sanctioned. Most norms attempt to encourage behavior that neither directly harms anyone, nor threatens the society with chaos and disintegration. They are intended to make a statement about what is considered by some, many, or most members of a society to be the normal and correct behavior. They embody certain principles of moral correctness that is separate from and independent of what they do for the society’s physical survival (Butler, Gender Trouble 93).

Foucault repeatedly frames his work as an examination of the relations among knowledge, power, and human subjects. One of Foucault’s crucial concerns in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere is with the role played by the “normal” in modern Western societies—defining “deviants” and “delinquents” as “abnormal.” The power is that of disciplinary technology and its aim is normalization. The concept of norm violation appears to be a simple, objective criterion for determining what is deviant and what is not. This term refers to rules or expectations for behavior that are shared by members of a group or society. The concept of social norm has been honored by a long tradition of sociological theory and research that views consensus as a basic fact of organized social life. According to this sociological tradition, consensus, or shared agreement, exists in all organized groups and societies about what behaviors are appropriate and expected of members. This consensus is expressed through social norms; shared rules that channel behavior in various areas of social life into orderly and predictable patterns. Behavior that deviates from these normative patterns, according to the normative definition, is deviant behavior; deviants are those people who violate the normative consensus of organized society. In From Motherhood to Mothering, Adrienne Rich distinguishes between “motherhood” as experience, “motherhood” as enforced identity, and “motherhood” as political institution by using the example of an unwed teenager who may experience motherhood as a rare source of self-affirmation, while society deems her motherhood to be illegitimate and deviant. Society’s construction of motherhood and its image of what constitutes a good mother versus a bad mother facilitates male control over all women. Women who fail to meet the ideal of motherhood (unwed mothers, “unfit” mothers, and women who do not become mothers) are stigmatized for violating the dominant norm and considered deviant or criminals (Roberts 5). Martha Fineman calls motherhood “a colonized concept—an event physically practiced and experience by women, but occupied and defined, given content and value, by the core concepts of patriarchal ideology” (Fineman 289–90).

This concept of social normalization is well described by Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, which is related to punishment and, more specifically, part of the prison model. However, disciplinary power is also tied to normalization. This involves the construction of an idealized norm of conduct and then rewarding or punishing individuals for conforming to or deviating from this ideal. This normalization, exercised in both contemporary Western society and in Brave New World, is one of an ensemble of tactics for exerting the maximum social control with the minimum expenditure of force, which Foucault calls “disciplinary power” (Foucault 27). This is a crucial aspect of social structure in modern societies; normalization is what distinguishes the abnormal, the delinquents, and the deviants, from the rest of society—the “normal.” In a similar manner, a specific action is deemed a crime when society decides that the action is not “normal” behavior. Those who do not act in the “normal” manner of society are locked up, shipped off, or placed into mental institutions. Without normalization, the manipulation of the individual by the power structure would be minimal. Control of the society’s power emerges from the ability to manipulate the individual into the larger social norm, but this normalization can only be established by the dominant aspects of society (Foucault 30). What is crucial, of course, is the internalization of the “normal,” causing individuals to desire to be normal, even without coercion. This can be seen very clearly in Brave New World in the way individuals have accepted the notion that motherhood is obscene and disgusting.

Foucault argues that the eighteenth century introduced a new form of power: discipline, a power relation, in which the subject is complicit (Foucault 55). Literally manufactured to be happy with the roles intended for them in society, the citizens of Huxley’s World State are the ultimate complicit subjects, so Foucault’s vision of the working of disciplinary power in modern bourgeois societies describes them well. Of course, given M. Keith Booker’s description of the World State as a “bourgeois dystopia,” one would expect this to be the case (Booker 47–67). Indeed, in the case of Brave New World, the exercise of power is a paradigmatic case of what Foucault refers to as “productive”: citizens are conditioned to obey happily, not coerced against their wills. If they do not conform, they are simply excluded from society, exiled to a place of misfits.

This system is very good for enforcing conformity; it does, however, make it difficult to fit in for those who deviate from the norm for any reason. Bernard, for example, is extremely troubled by his obvious difference from other “Alphas.” Similarly, Linda, having been abandoned, pregnant, on the Savage Reservation, cannot function well on the Reservation due to her prior conditioning; on the other hand, she cannot successfully return to her old society after years of absence and retreats into a drug-induced haze. Much of her difficulty surrounds her role as the mother to John, the son born to her on the Reservation. Shamed by the fact that she has given natural birth to her son, she chooses to withdraw and deal with the repercussions of her abnormal and perverted act of mothering. We see the character struggle to figure out her role as a mother, which brings with it guilt, anger, and helplessness; she has never had a mother herself and was programmed to consider that same act or role as a deviance and abnormality. In her son’s reminiscence, she becomes upset with him because his very existence reminds her that she’s broken a fundamental rule of society. In one instance, however, as she reaches to hit him, she finds herself suddenly overcome with maternal joy and instead hugs and kisses him all over.

Once Linda had violated the social rule against motherhood, there was little chance she could be reintegrated into the society of the World State. But, as she had been conditioned in the state, there was little chance that the “Savages” would accept her into their world, unaccustomed as they were to her strange behavior, promiscuity, and lack of emotion. Instead, she was mistreated and ridiculed for not fitting into their society’s own concept of “normal.” Her passionate, intense, and sometimes incoherent narration to Bernard and Lenina captures effectively her plight among the Savages. Like her son, she dreamt of escaping the reservation and returning to the new world. When Linda returns to London, however, the society of the World State rejects her as well and ridicules her for the flabbiness and slovenliness acquired from living long years at the reservation. Unable to show emotion, she cannot even turn to her son John for comfort, even though he longs for closeness with his mother. As a result, she lives in a soma stupor in order to be able to tolerate her existence. Her perpetual overdosing leads to ill health and eventually death, arousing the reader’s sympathy and understanding her as the victim of both worlds/societies.

The World State in Brave New World has consciously and intentionally constructed a new vision of maternity as disgusting and horrifying in order to prevent strong individual emotional attachments, which enhances the concept of motherhood as a product of discourse. The novel implies that the key to stability is the absence of individuality. The government has internalized this concept; one of the ten controllers of the World State declares that there is “no civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability” (Huxley, Brave New World 31). The need for stability creates a government that believes stability to be achievable if people think and look the same. Stability, in effect, prevents chaos—and in particular prevents the repetition of the conditions of the apocalyptic Nine Years’ War that haunts the deep memory of this society, nearly 600 years after it occurred. The main source of personal chaos is emotion. Watts echoes this as he defines man as “a creature marked by confusion, fear, and deathlessly individual awareness” (Watts 79). Emotions drive a person to act, to assess their life, to grow, to learn, and to love. Emotions are so personal and intimate that the government in Brave New World (like the governments of many dystopian societies) discourages these intense human characteristics and regards them as a threat to the stability of their world. Emotions are thus controlled in Brave New World.

Control and stability can best be achieved when everyone is contented. The government attempts to eliminate any painful emotion, which means every deep feeling, every passion, is removed. Huxley shows that the government recognizes the dangers of negative emotions when the controller states, “actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery” (Huxley, Brave New World 170).

In this society, the suppression of emotion begins even before birth, by ensuring that embryos grow in a sterile, artificial environment, rather than inside the wombs of mothers who will already have developed an emotional attachment to them by the time of birth. As Schmerl puts it, “Humanity is dead; the creatures of Brave New World, spawned in bottles, fed on slogans and drugs, leading an utterly meaningless life whose only purpose is to perpetuate the meaninglessness” (Schmerl 37). The implications of the engineered cloning process of babies are tremendous; with the destruction of the family, the government has single-handedly prevented family emotions and ensured that the only loyalties felt by individuals are to the state. There are no mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, or grandparents. There are no husbands or wives, or even committed lovers. Individuals are raised to consider the language of sexual promiscuity as normal, expected, and accepted, while the language of the family is obscene. The rulers of the World State clearly believe that, in order for a society to achieve complete social stability, a loss of individuality and the outlawing of natural biological function must occur. Successfully engineering these conditions produces a world where people live contentedly, free of disease and crime, but at the cost of close familial or other personal bonds.

On the surface, the figuration of motherhood in the society of Brave New World is precisely the opposite of that in modern Western society, though both are ultimately patriarchal and limiting to women. However, the cognitive estrangement produced by Brave New World can potentially give us a different perspective from which to view the apparent glorification of motherhood in our world, enabling us to see that there might be an element of revulsion just beneath the surface there as well. The virtual demonization of welfare mothers as expressed by the political right in the U.S. demonstrates this quite clearly, showing that mothers who have escaped patriarchal control by having children within a family structure that is not dominated by fathers are particularly disturbing to our own social order. Thus, the divide between the disgust shown toward motherhood in Brave New World and the apparent elevation of motherhood in our society is not as clear as it seems.

The patriarchal construct of “mother” as a biological and essential category is problematic to women by its very nature, regardless of its specific contents. In Of Woman Born, Rich writes: “We do not think of the power stolen from us and the power withheld from us in the name of the institution of motherhood” (275). There are many ways that patriarchal motherhood, both discursively and materially, regulates and restrains mothers and their mothering. Motherhood as it is currently perceived and practiced in patriarchal societies is disempowering if not downright oppressive for a multitude of reasons, ranging from the societal devaluation of a mother’s domestic work to the endless tasks of privatized mothering and the impossible standards of idealized motherhood. O’Reilly argues that modern motherhood functions as a patriarchal institution, “one that has largely been impervious to change despite forty years of feminism, because of the gender ideology that grounds it: namely, gender essentialism and the resulting naturalized opposition of the public and private spheres” (O’Reilly, Twenty-first-Century Motherhood 19). Only by unearthing and severing the ideological underpinning of patriarchal motherhood can we develop a politics of maternal empowerment and a practice of outlaw motherhood.

Scholarship on motherhood, whether concerning mothering as institution, experience, or identity, has focused on how motherhood is detrimental to women because of its construction as a patriarchal entity. Scholars, such as Julia Kristeva—who have seen motherhood as a very positive experience for women and are interested in the experience of motherhood—argue that the gender inequities of patriarchal motherhood cause the work of mothering to be both isolating and exhausting for women, while those concerned with ideology call attention to the guilt and depression that is experienced by mothers who fail to live up to the impossible standards of patriarchal motherhood (O’Reilly, Twenty-first-Century Motherhood 2). Any form of patriarchal society denies women their potential as full human beings. As Adrienne Rich argues, institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal “instinct” rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, and relation to others rather than the creation of self. Motherhood is ‘sacred’ so long as offspring are “legitimate”—that is, as long as the child bears the name of a father who legally controls the mother (42). As long as society is patriarchal, any vision of motherhood (or any other role for women that is defined by men) is going to be problematic. This simple fact is one of which Huxley, in Brave New World, seems blissfully unaware.

Works Cited