The brave new world of mothering

Abstract

Brave New World (1932) is one of the most lucid and troubling fables about the appropriation of nature by science and one of the primary references for moral panics about the start of life and about test-tube fertilization and what it makes possible. The novel begins with the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning introducing a group of students to the fertilization room, and it is specifically when the Savage sees its product, that is the workforce of cloned midgets, left-handers, and other engineered human machines, that Miranda’s phrase is quoted in bitter irony and bound irrevocably in popular speech with the demonization of science. The tropes of Brave New World became so thoroughly naturalized in twentieth-century culture that today the novel does not need to be specifically mentioned for its cautionary tale to be evoked. For that reason alone, its context requires examination.