Lecture Topic Technique: Bottle Imagery

Another motif
Though not as prevalent as the animal motif that Huxley develops, bottles are an equally significant image that Huxley returns to across the text. The overarching idea is that not only is the population of the World State born/produced in bottles, but that they remain bottled throughout their lives. So, in literary terms, the bottle is both a literal and functional device (they are things in the world of the novel that allow it to exist and function as it does), as well as a metaphor for the lives that these humans live (their lives are bottled, restricted, caged). What you can probably guess is that were looking at yet another way in which Huxley undermines the World State. He takes something fundamental to its existence (and something they see as inherently positive) and uses it as a device to show the prison like (read negative) nature of the world.

Lets have a look at how it works...

The somewhat subtle version

As Henry and Lenina dance on their date before heading home together we get: ...they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate... Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henrys room on the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations... - Chapter Five

Unpack it...
...they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate... So, their dancing in being connected all the way back to their production in the test tubes. Essentially, Huxley is connecting their growing intimacy to their infancy. He is basically saying is was like they were back in the test-tube again, rocking away together in the smooth motion of the tubes on the racks. This is not an appropriate image for two consenting adults coming together. Why must all of Huxleys images of intimacy be tainted by the manner in which he describes them? Probably has something to do with the way in which the World State keeps its citizens in a state of infancy, which Huxley sees as deeply problematic. Their intimacy isnt their free choice or an expression of their emotions, it is simply learned behaviour forced into them since their very conception.

Unpack it...
Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henrys room on the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations...
There is no escape from the bottle imagery for Lenina and Henry here. Every action they take is framed as taking place within a bottle. This is an unusual usage simply in terms of grammar. We might imagine, drunk, they crossed the street, or excited, they crossed the street, but bottled doesnt make sense. Except for where Huxley has already explicitly stated what the purpose and function of bottles are in the World State. They are the places in which the citizens are predestined, their lives predetermined for them. Huxley is expressing here that Lenina and Henry continue to be bottled throughout their lives - they are trapped within the cages the World State places them in from the moment they are conceived. This is a lovely expression of the idea that they are never free of this cage.

The blunt, less literary version...

Huxley isnt always very subtle with his writing. Basically, all that close reading and interpretation present in the last couple of slides is outlined by Mustapha Mond when he says: "Even after decanting, he is still inside a bottle an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of coursegoes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. - Chapter Sixteen When Mond says he, he is meaning humankind in general (both Mond and Huxley are ultimately misogynists). His point is important though because he is confirming what weve been talking about in the previous slides. What Mond is explaining is that even after decanting, the citizens of the World State are still completely at the mercy of the World State. Their ability to determine their own fates and control their own futures is completely denied. He does this by talking specifically about the people remaining as infants and embryos. Infants need looking after, infants have no control over their lives, infants are at the mercy of those in charge. This is a flat indictment of the World State. Huxley is basically saying that it denies people their right to choose, their right to grow up and their right to determine their own fates. I think what were getting at is that the price of stability is personal freedom. Huxley wants to explore the idea that this version of utopic stability is ultimately totalitarian. Our humanity is bound up in our ability to choose (and to choose wrongly) and any system that denies us that choices, denies us something very human.