The totalitarian culture that is meant to be repellent is secured by a wide variety of vernacular pleasures that are, from a readerly perspective, paradoxically engaging. Lawrence's work registers the attraction of the material he claims to reject, the engineered pleasures in Brave New World, including the feelies, exert a frivolous, sleazy magnetism that often contradicts the novel's argument against careless hedonism. It looks at Huxley's vision of futurity, or, as he called it, a “negative utopia,” that is paradoxically organized around pleasure.
In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in Brave New World, from a popular women's romance novel to William Shakespeare to race cinema and nature documentaries.
This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World.
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