Section 12, activity two
Poetry, danger, freedom and sin.
This passage is at the very opening of Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopia, Brave New World. At face value, it’s just the description of a room, and the revelation of what that room is used for. But it’s also so much more than that. It’s packed with imagery, with metaphors, similies, chains of synonymous adjectives, careful rhetorical tropes. All of these work together to create an opening which, in the guise of scene setting, actually sets up the key theme of the novel.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. ‘And this,’ said the Director opening the door, ‘is the Fertilizing Room.’
1. What do we learn about this room?
2. What is the effect of the second sentence opening with the word ‘cold’?
3. What connotations does the term the ‘fertilizing room’ have?
4. How could the symbolism of the ‘harsh thin light’ be interpreted?
5. The light seems to be reaching out for something, but it encounters only what?
6. There are people in the room being described. But what language is used to hint that they have been de-humanised?
7. What are the only things in the room that seem to be ‘alive’?
Check your responses again this fantastic analysis by Dr Sarah Dillon of Cambridge University.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/qPLdJDKcvG8czs3GNpfwL4/close-reading-brave-new-world-by-aldous-Huxley
If you want to explore Brave New World further, either read the book or listen to this audio version.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. ‘And this,’ said the Director opening the door, ‘is the Fertilizing Room.’
1. What do we learn about this room?
2. What is the effect of the second sentence opening with the word ‘cold’?
3. What connotations does the term the ‘fertilizing room’ have?
4. How could the symbolism of the ‘harsh thin light’ be interpreted?
5. The light seems to be reaching out for something, but it encounters only what?
6. There are people in the room being described. But what language is used to hint that they have been de-humanised?
7. What are the only things in the room that seem to be ‘alive’?
Check your responses again this fantastic analysis by Dr Sarah Dillon of Cambridge University.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/qPLdJDKcvG8czs3GNpfwL4/close-reading-brave-new-world-by-aldous-Huxley
If you want to explore Brave New World further, either read the book or listen to this audio version.