By Mars Ikeda
Mars Ikeda’s astute reading of Brave New World through the lens of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” does a number of things really well. It demonstrates an effective close-reading strategy for moving through a text, finding well-selected passages from Huxley’s work and analyzing them with depth and insight. Yet this paper also demonstrates how to apply a lens to an existing text: by focusing on Haraway’s cyborg as a way to view the novel, Mars breathes fresh life into a oft-discussed work, finding a unique and well-crafted angle of approach. In both its direct and applied analysis, this is an exemplary literary analysis paper.
—Zefyr, Lexington Review Editor
Donna Haraway’s cyborg is a metaphor that anticipates alternatives to suicide and ways forward for the character of John the Savage from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. By exploring alternate futures for this character, particularly regarding his relationship to both history and the current technological state, we can also imagine different futures for ourselves. Like John the Savage and Haraway’s cyborg, our humanity is also affected by how society’s interaction with technology changes and shapes our embodiment.
Like Aldous Huxley, Haraway was interested in how technology and society interact. In her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway explored these ideas from socialist, materialist, and feminist perspectives. Their invention of the cyborg was an attempt to create a creature that improved upon — from a socialist, materialist, and feminist perspective — its origins. Haraway saw the status quo of culture as being full of dualisms (e.g., man/woman, mind/body, animal/machine). By contrast, Haraway’s cyborg sees an idea like “two genders” as just one of many options; there could be millions of genders, none, or two, or twelve. According to Haraway, cyborgs play with and confuse boundaries like gender ironically.
If John the Savage had knowledge of cyborg ways of being in a highly technological culture which complicates embodiment and therefor humanity, he could have options besides suicide at the end of the novel. A generative way to explore the differences between John the Savage and the cyborg is by looking at garden and monster metaphors taken from Mary Shelley and the Bible via Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” T.H. Huxley’s metaphor of the garden from his 19th-century essay “Evolution and Ethics” via Elana Gomel’s exploration of contemporary scientific influences on H.G. Wells and the Huxleys (specifically Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous’ grandfather) also sheds useful light on the differences between the cyborg and the Savage.
Seen from the perspective of Haraway’s manifesto, the character of John the Savage exhibits the rigid, black-and-white, dualistic thinking of the status quo which the cyborg emerges from but is not beholden to. By contrast, John clings to his found ethics from his reading of Shakespeare most reverently. Evidence of John’s dualistic thinking includes his abstinence from and rejection of the World State citizen Lenina Crowne because she wants physical intimacy but not traditional romantic love as in Shakespeare, who John quotes extensively during his rejection and throughout the novel. He exits her embrace calling her a “whore” and “strumpet” (Huxley, A. 194). Additionally, his self-exile from the World State after a failed attempt to convert a factory of Delta workers as well as his language during the failed conversion itselfare evidence of his rigid, dualistic thinking. John states, “I’ll teach you; I’ll make [emphasis original] you be free whether you want to or not” (Huxley, A. 213). John’s suicidal ending in the novel also points to extreme guilt and horror at engaging in sexual actions accepted and encouraged by the World State but which rendered John physically and mentally impure by his own estimate.
Haraway equates dualistic, status quo thinking with Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein’s monster. According to Haraway, Frankenstein’s monster expects “its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos.” John the Savage’s illegitimacy stems from both his literal, biological World State father and, more importantly, his intellectual father: the literature of Shakespeare. John so reveres and devotes himself to his understanding of Christianity through Shakespeare’s work — no doubt influenced by the morals and religiosity of culture on the reservation — that when he does not live up to that ideal one time in the orgiastic scene in the novel’s ending, he redoubles his self-exile from society by committing suicide and thus exiling himself from existence altogether. Death is preferable to defilement in the eyes of the internalized and often quoted word-for-word father figure, Shakespeare. This is especially so after John’s own attempted reunion with wholeness in the Garden of Eden via asceticism (extreme purity) in nature is seen as closed off to him by his actions.
Note the difference between the monster in Mary Shelley’s story and cyborgs, who “would not recognize the Garden of Eden,” according to Haraway. No environment or person is capable of being pure to a cyborg. Instead, Haraway writes: “I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection […]” (Haraway). Haraway emphasizes how one of the cyborg’s strategies to avoid annihilation (self or otherwise) is to not define an Other or enemy in society or within themselves. Unlike John the Savage and Frankenstein’s mother, cyborgs do not unintentionally uphold or worship the stories past societies told themselves of how members should work or be interdependent and connected to what already is (i.e., Haraway’s “cosmos”). Lacking such reverence, a cyborg would not self-annihilate because of perceived impurity of action or self. Indeed, Haraway writes that “[t]he cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.” Perversity, or impurity, is desirable to the cyborg, so the loss of purity would precipitate not suicide but curiosity.
If Frankenstein’s monster and John the Savage long for reconciliation with their intellectual forbearers (fathers) and a return to an Edenic garden (the past), what is a cyborg’s relationship to history? An answer can be found in T.H. Huxley’s 1893 essay “Evolution and Ethics” and his trope of a garden subject to Darwian evolution over time. T.H. Huxley was nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his defense of Darwin and his evolutionary theories. Elana Gomel states that in “Evolution and Ethics” T.H. Huxley describes a garden thusly:
Huxley rewrites static oppositions, such as nature and civilization, human and animal, good and evil, as the end-points of a dynamic temporal process. […] A garden is a slice of wilderness that is tended and cultivated until it becomes its opposite. If neglected, it sinks into wilderness again and there is no particular moment in time in which the continuity between cultivation and nature is broken by a sharp divide. And yet, garden and wilderness are commonly perceived as an opposition. ‘Sliced’ at a point in time, a random process presents the appearance of a design. The garden becomes an image of the continuum of evolutionary transformations that by ‘imperceptible gradations’ (Darwin’s favorite expression) links nature and culture. Civilization develops out of nature, and yet it opposes nature […] (Gomel).
T.H. Huxley’s narrative for the garden’s shift from natural to civilized and back again emphasizes that even supposed dual opposites are linked by shades of grey (the ‘imperceptible gradations’), which is very different from a rigid, black-and-white focus on purity, asceticism, and reverence for a return to a different past found in the character of John the Savage. Huxley’s garden is not sheltered from time and change the way the Garden of Eden, beloved of Frankenstein’s monster and John the Savage, is. Huxley’s garden makes much more sense as a desired environment for Haraway’s cyborg, a creature that understands boundaries (such as those between civilization and nature) as mutable and the past and present as subject to change. Being subject to temporal change, the garden and boundaries of the past are not seen as something to revere, but something that can be played with, even with irony. Cyborgs embrace mutations in themselves and their environments.
What the metaphor of the cyborg and John the Savage share with each other is they are both illegitimate offspring, like Frankenstein’s monster. Cyborgs, Haraway says, “are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.” Similarly, John the Savage is seen as a bastard on the reservation until he is reunited with his biological father from the World State as an adult. And yet, ironically, this reunion is in a society where family and fatherhood are seen as retrograde, undesirable, even shameful. In Brave New World, John embodies the negative effects of his illegitimacy more and more, from the reservation culture (which holds him and his mother at arm’s length), World State society (which embraces him, but as a freak, due to his differences owing to illegitimacy), and eventually from his own existence. The cyborg, by contrast, sees the current flaws and potential in its history and environment and thereby embodies its illegitimacy as generative. According to Haraway, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.” And, remember, Haraway, as a socialist materialist feminist, was aware and opposed to the state socialism, militarism, and patriarchal capitalism from which the cyborg emerges; so, this lack of reverence to origins was desirable for positive societal change in Haraway’s view. “Their [cyborg’s] fathers, after all, are inessential,” Haraway concludes.
If John the Savage had been able to embrace cyborg strategies of living and a cyborg perspective which viewed the past with less reverence, he might have recognized the unique knowledge he possessed as a person at the intersections of boundaries of legitimacy. Then, perhaps his character could have had a different ending in the novel and gone on to effect some positive societal change in the World State, the reservation, or both. By adapting (mutating, a cyborg strategy) himself in part as well as holding his ideals based on the received past more lightly (even ironically, another cyborg strategy), John could have survived his loss of purity and gone on to shape his environment such that he could find a home for his adapted, impure self.
In the World State, John the Savage’s status as an object of entertainment and his knowledge of Shakespeare uniquely positioned him to be a storyteller with the jester’s privilege to critique society to its face. With a more nuanced view of his past and environment, he could also attempt more sophisticated, persuasive and subtle campaigns against Soma use than telling people they were slaves he would free by force if necessary. John could have also taken his knowledge of the World State back to the reservation in order to strategize ways to get more resources for that society, or reinforced existing reservation cultural and religious traditions by introducing or enhancing archival methods via technology. None of these alternative endings for John would likely be totally successful in changing the World State or reservation society overnight, or even in his lifetime. However, by employing cyborg strategies, John would increase the likelihood of desired societal movement by “imperceptible gradations” towards a more livable world for actors like himself while simultaneously making it less likely that he and other actors would be overwhelmed by despair or necessary inaction.
As societies and their use of technologies change, we must findways to live with our inherited knowledge of past and fading worlds as we explore, seek to understand, and shape the technologies and societies of tomorrow. Even today, pronatalism is booming in Silicon Valley with fertility research into human embryonic optimization — sometimes using artificial intelligence — as well as artificial wombs akin to hatcheries being funded in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Waters). We are all hybrids of the soma-taking, sleep-conditioned World State citizens and bewildered John the Savages; contemporary people are by turns passive and grateful for technological convenience one moment while we rage against a nagging sense of lost wisdoms and the crumbling of formerly essential structures in another moment, followed by the subsequent despair that not enough other people care in order for positive change to take place. To avoid the ignorance of the World Staters or the suicidal despair of John the Savage, we would do well to learn and explore cyborg strategies ourselves.
Bibliography
Gomel, Elana. “Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel.” Narrative, vol. 17, no. 3, 2009, pp. 334–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25609374. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” 1985. Source: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149–181; Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp.5–80. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.
Huxley, Adlous. Brave New World. Harper Perennial, 1985.
Huxley, T.H. Evolution and Ethics, and Other Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2940. Accessed 16 December 2024.
Waters, Emma. The Pronatalism of Silicon Valley | The Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/the-pronatalism-silicon-valley. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.
Published May 5, 2025
Photo credit: “Medieval Herb Garden, Ypres Tower, Rye, East Sussex.” by Jim Linwood is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
