Sex is no longer seen as an act of love, one that …show more content…
The World State controls everything. So much so that they have a say as to which women are able to have children or not. Since they are able to produce many children from one egg, approximately two-thirds of the female population are sterilized at birth. When the time comes to reproduce, eggs are surgically removed from the ovaries of the selected women. After this, the embryos are being conditioned to fall into one of the five categories: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The different categories then determine where they will rank in the World State and how prosperous they will …show more content…
This is why it is so hard for Linda when she is left to survive there. Her ways aren’t accepted by the savages so she struggles to adapt. Eventually, Linda’s willingness to sleep with all of the village men, although they have wives, leads to her being beaten by the savage women. In turn, she and her son John are shunned from them and she is left to raise him on her own and he doesn’t get to partake in any of their everyday activities or rituals. However, this doesn’t prevent her from being the best mom possible for him. She teaches him to read using an old Shakespeare book and from this, he adopts Shakespeare’s view on sex and love, that it should be meaningful and you have to work for it. The internal struggle that John battles with between his views and what he feels for Lenina eventually becomes too much to bear and he breaks. Sex was such an influential factor for Lenina that she didn’t know how to be loved without it, which is what John was trying to give her. Ultimately, he couldn’t handle it and hangs himself after realizing what he did to