There are several instances in Brave New
World in which Lenina demonstrates the effects of her hypnopaedic prejudices,
but perhaps the most salient ones are in Chapter 4 as Lenina goes on a date with Bernard
Marx. Here are some:
Everyone belongs to
everyone else
When Bernard invites Lenina to
the New Mexico reservation, she tells him she would be delighted "if you still want to
have me." With her words, Bernard flushes and becomes uncomfortable, asking if they
should not talk about their future sexual encounter somewhere else. Lenina thinks to
herself, "As though I'd been saying something
shocking."
Disdain for nature / Desire for
consumption
After she and Bernard arrive on
the roof of the building, Bernard draws a deep breath, looks up at the sky and around at
the blue horizon: "Isn't it beautiful?" he asks with a voice trembling with the emotion
of the glory of nature. Instead, Lenina notices nothing except that the weather is
favorable for a game one pays for: "'Simply perfect for Obstacle Golf,' she answered
rapturously."
Later, when Bernard wants to be together with
only Lenina by the sea and moon, Lenina is disturbed.
In
later chapters in which John has come to the New World, Lenina offers herself to him,
and he is repulsed, calling her a strumpet--she does not understand why when she had
been conditioned to think that promiscuity is the
norm.
Class
consciousness
As Bernard and Lenina in the
helicopter to fly over a field that is "green was maggoty with fore-shortened life."
Then, they see two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles playing Riemann-surface
tennis:
"'What
a hideous colour khaki is,' remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopaedic prejudices of her
caste."
Disgust
with the old world, its ways and
values
When Bernard acts out of the norm
for an Alpha, Lenina is disturbed. Uncomfortale with his emotion, she suggests that he
take soma. Then, when she asks if Bernard enjoyed having her, she
is perplexed by his lack of enthusiasm:
He began to talk a lot of incomprehensible and
dangerous nonsense. Lenina did her best to stop the ears of her mind; but every now and
then a phrase would insist on becoming audible. "...to try the effect of arresting my
impulses," she heard him say. The words seemed to touch a spring in her
mind.
"Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have
today," she said gravely.
"Two hundred repetitions, twice a
week from fourteen to sixteen and a half," was all his
comment.
At the Reservation,
Lenina is revolted by the idea that John has a mother. In fact, when "Lenina was left
to face the horrors of Malpais unaided" by her soma, she is very
distraught. On the other hand, Bernard finds the mother/son relationship "wonderfully
intimate."
Believing that "Civilization is Sterilization,"
Lenina is also disgusted by the unsanitary conditions of the
reservation.
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