Writing in the Style...

            She did not like it when Maude ordered her to clean the steps, and it had happened three times in the past week. It was winter, and the snow lay heavy on the ground. She did not have a heavy cloak, and on the coldest nights she lay shivering and cursing her lot in life. It was pointless, but she found herself cursing anyway. That was when her godmother came to visit

            Mrs. Simms was a tough old broad—rough red skin, small dark eyes that missed nothing. And she could drink more than most men. She was glad to see her though. No one else in this miserable world actually gave a damn about her. Besides, it would be someone to pass the time with while they utilized a little of her stepmother’s ale.

            “Why do you stay here?” Mrs. S. asked her, once they’d settled in for an evening of cold and damp and drink.

            “Where else would I go?”

            “Anywhere. Somewhere.” It seemed as though Mrs. S. had probably started utilizing before she’d even arrived at the castle that afternoon.

            “That’s all well and good,” her young goddaughter answered. “But looking like this is a curse, when you think about it. You can travel all through France and Spain and wherever and nobody will trouble you. I attract unwelcome attention. I’d end up ruined.”

            “Oh, poor me, I’m so attractive!”

           

            “Make fun if you like,” she stifled a burp. “It’s me who’s stuck here with my dreadful stepmother and her horrible daughters. I wish someone would rescue me. I would adore to be rescued.”

            “That’s rot. You’re a clever chap. Rescue yourself.”

            “But I’m not a chap! I’m a helpless girl.”

            “Oh, Lord. I can see I’m going to have to step in. Fix you up. First, we need to get you the hell out of here and into town. If you’re so set on catching someone’s eye, you’ll have to get cleaned up.”

            “I’m so glad you’re here to help!” Cindy sighed happily.

            “Good God.” Mrs. S. rolled her eyes.

            The next day, Mrs. S. took her young charge into town. She produced a few gold coins from the depths of her massive gown, and traded them for a new gown for Cindy. She hired a girl from the village to fix Cindy’s hair. Mrs. S. had never been very good with the female arts.

            That evening, she snuck Cindy into the royal ball. It was a beautiful affair, and half the kingdom was in attendance. The young prince of the realm made a big entrance around ten, and everyone gasped and clapped. He was a tall, well-made boy with golden hair. Predictably, he took one look at Cindy’s face and he was gone. Now that it was actually clean, it was clear she was very pretty.

            Cindy nearly messed up the entire deal by tripping on the way out, but Mrs. S. turned the mix up with the shoe to their advantage.

            The royal wedding was held a few weeks later. Mrs. S. had earned herself a room at the palace, and all the fine wine she could utilize. They all lived happily ever after, until the prince was killed in the war a few years later. That’s the thing about happiness. It doesn’t really last.

           

But wine and riches—if you play your cards right, those can be forever.

O Brave New World!

For today's reaction post, take on the persona of one of the main characters of Huxley's Brave New World. 

Write a narrative from this character's point of view--you may employ either internal monologue or dialogue, or a combination of both.

Minimum word count: 700 words.

Please post your initial reply by class time on 11/12. Post at least one reply to a class member by 11/13.

Here's mine!

            It wasn’t about Lenina, although that’s what they thought—Bernard, Hemhotlz, and the others. How could it have been? She wasn’t real. She didn’t exist. She was manufactured. They all were. Only I was an accident. An actual person. I was as excited as Miranda to see them, that first day, those first few days. The brave new world and the people living in it. But that world doesn’t require bravery, or fear, or heart. It requires only soma.

            I couldn’t live in their world. They didn’t even realize what they’d lost. What had been taken from them. All for their own good. Mustapha Mond told me, “you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave” (Huxley 201). Ignorance is bliss, clearly. But it is not for me. It can never be for me. You cannot unknow. “What’s done cannot be undone.” Pope brought that book of Shakespeare to Linda, and I read it. It became a part of me. Mond read it too, and then he hid it from the rest of the world. Someday, soon, there will be no one who could even begin to understand it.

            But Mond is wrong. There remains tragedy: this world is a tragedy, as long as I live to see it. The words of Shakespeare are all lost. What else is gone to dust, lost forever, that I will never know? We ought to all have been the heirs of everything that came before. But now mankind are the heirs of childish chants and feelies, decanting and soma. Lost—all is lost. And I am the only one who knows or cares. No one here can connect to me, and so I will remain alone.

"Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene”

Wherein we play in." (Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 7)

But the woeful pageants are ended. Happiness revolves in an endless parade. But it is a hollow, empty happiness. How can they appreciate the light when they never know the darkness? They do not even notice when one another dies. The nurse at the hospital could not even give me the most basic, decent, human courtesy as my mother lay dying. Because I committed the unpardonable sin of saying the word mother. She could only focus on conditioning those horrible, endless twins. Those poor little monsters, who were never meant to be. Horrible, terrible magic: to take that one child and split him apart, over and over again, pervert him into something terrible and base, twenty where there should have been one, and all degraded.

That is the worst of it, those poor nameless bastards, and they are everywhere, cleaning and cooking and smiling their stupid smiles. That awful lab where they commit these atrocities: it is like the witches of Macbeth: “How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags! What is’t you do?’ --‘A deed without a name.”

            But in the end it’s not about the girl, or the soma, or Linda, or Mond. They don’t matter, and neither do I. It’s really about that boy who was never born, the egg which was blasted apart, the poison they fed him—he will never be. Could he have been the next William Shakespeare, before he became twenty window-washers with bad manners? It’s not about the loss of Shakespeare. He is dead and gone, his words are of the past. It’s the fact that there will never be another writer. Hemholtz is the last creative man alive, and the best he can do is that trash at the feelies. No more magical words will ever be written. No more songs will ever be written or sung, unless they’re childish rhymes to pacify the Gammas and the Betas. No more poems.

            I could write something so beautiful it would make a man cry. But there are no more men left. The Indians understand only the violence and the blood—Pope left that book on the floor like a piece of garbage. And no one in the brave new world could read anything written about pain, or loss, or real life. It would be a joke to them, just as Romeo and Juliet was.

            So there’s no point. There’s nothing more to do.

“Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?” (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2)