Aldous Huxley and the In an essay entitled "Mother" (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1956) Aldous Huxley brought his informed and specu• lative mind to bear upon the female principle in general: . the Great Mother had her . negative as well as her positive aspects. In India, Kali, the Great Mother is sometimes benefi• cent, sometimes terrible. She nourishes and she devours; she is serenely beautiful and she is a , _ , cannibalistic monster. In her bY Gwen Mdtheson positive aspect, she is simultan• eously Nature and Intuition, the creator of spiritual no less than of physical life. She is the Eter• nal Feminine that 1eads us up and on, and she is the Eternal Femin- ine that leads us down and back. caricatures appearing both in his She puts the sweet in "Home Sweet short stories and in such works as Home," after which she drinks our Crome Ye1 low, Point Counter Point or blood.(1) (italics are mine.) Antic Hay--the fascinating vamps and This passage can be taken as a commen• pathetic female masochists, the over• tary.on Huxley's own attitude towards whelming mothers who succeed in women throughout his life as reflected destroying the emotional lives of in the female characterizations of his their children, the child-like and fiction. They exemplify either the incredibly innocent sensualists (as positive aspects of "the Great Mother," well as those who are not so innocent), or more often the negative ones, or very and the women whose intellectual or frequently a combination of both. spiritual pretensions are presented sat i rically. These interesting creations may be seen as largely the result of certain main Huxley was, of course, merely depicting influences on the novelist: the atti• with dramatic exaggeration the behav• tudes and behaviour of the society that iour of women as it results from their provided his material; that is, upper status in a society clinging to tra• middle and upper class England, particu• ditional ideas. It is highly doubtful larly during the turbulent 'twenties that he was consciously aware that the and 'thirties, as well as the wider qualities he attributed to the "Eternal American society that he moved in during Feminine" (chiefly those of the "down the later part of his life; the in• and back" leading variety) might be fluence of literature, for Huxley was an more the result of this society than of any innate tendencies—and equally English major during his Oxford years, doubtful that he could know that his and once remarked that we would not even books would be used as a happy hunting know how to fall in love if it were not ground for female stereotypes in future for literature; his knowledge of psycho• Women's Studies courses. logical theories of the day, particular• ly the works of Freud and Jung; and per• haps most of all, certain private obses• There is at the same time a definite sions resulting from conflicts and evolution in Huxley's portrayals of traumas in the author's emotional life, women which becomes evident during the as revealed in Sybille Bedford's recent• last part of his writing career. In ly published two-volume biography.(2) his last two novels, The Genius and the Goddess (1955) and Island (1962), new types of female characters appear which, Readers of Huxley's fiction will nos• although they might not provide so much talgically call to mind a list of amusement for the reader, reflect an striking although now somewhat dated improved view of feminine capacities. This change can be related to the lished in 1918 Is central to the developing point of view illustrated in theme of sexual conflict in Huxley's Huxley1s wri t i ngs. early Verse. In it he employs his favourite Eden imagery in a sentimental "Passion and reason, self-division's Georgian style to describe a young cause" was a favourite quotation of man's state of innocence and idealism Huxley's from the Elizabethan writer until the inevitable "Fall" when Fulke Greville; and despite his eventual . passion ambushed by the interest in the all-embracing Nirvana aerial shrine of Buddhism, Huxley's thought always Comes forth to dance, a hoofed remained essentially dualistic. His obscenity. .(3) constant attempts to find some kind of fusion between the ideals of the spirit It was natural that for Huxley, descen• and the demands of the world and the dant of the mandarins of Judeo- flesh—as for instance, in Proper Christian Western culture, that the Studies (1927) and The Perennial Phi 1 - darker principle in the universe should osophy (19^6)--were reflected in an be associated with Woman who finds her ambivalent view of sensuality in gen• prototype in Eve. And associated with eral and consequently of women. Hux• such an attitude is Huxley's almost ley's dualism is expressed in the Manichaean obsession with evil and his psychological conflicts of his fic• frequent association of sexuality with tional heroes which provide the main physical corruption and death.(4) focus of his novels and in his even• tual interest in mysticism as a means Limbo, in which Huxley began to concen• of achieving "oneness" or spiritual trate on what was for him the much more unity which in turn led to his final congenial medium of prose further elab• Utopian social vision in Island. orates the dualistic motif in the novelette "The Farcical History of The double aspect of the Jungian Richard Greenow." Here Woman is asso• "anima" or female image is, of course, ciated with other qualities to be re• a universal archetype, but the first pressed besides those of sexuality and signs of Aldous Huxley's obsessive the "flesh," and the encounter between concern with it may be found in his the autobiographical Huxleyan hero and early poetry and short stories which the threatening female is internalized. constitute the most autobiographical and revealing part of his literary This story, partly set in the time of output. the First World War, tells how Richard Greenow, a rather effeminate aesthete The sonnet-sequence "The Defeat of studying at Oxford, develops a second Youth" in the volume of that name pub• personality which is that of a lady novelist. When he retires tor the ing degrees — Philip Quarles and his night after indulging in intellectual wife Elinor in Point Counter Point, for discussions and working for the pacifist instance. Thus dualism not only con• movement during the day, his feminine tributes to character delineation but alter-ego "Pearl Bel lairs" takes over also to the structure of the novelist's his body and writes sentimental novels plots. and jingoistic articles "To the Girls of England" and on the need to "crush "The Farcical History of Richard the Hun." Finally, dying in an insane Greenow" which has a strong autobio• asylum, Dick writes a note willing his graphical basis is also an illustra• body to a hospital for research, but tion of the author's futile attempt to the redoubtable "Pearl," possessing him come to terms with the feminine part for the last time, manages to change of himself—a conflict reflected this to an injunction to "Bury me in a throughout his later works. little country churchyard with lovely marble angels."(5) All of Huxley's fiction, in fact, may be regarded as a kind of autobiography Under the "farcical" aspect of this --a fact now made even more apparent fictional description of an "emotional by Sybille Bedford's massive biography. hermaphrodite" there may be discerned an important key to Huxley's subsequent Bedford quotes Aldous Huxley's cousin fiction. The "feminine" part of Dick's Gervas Huxley as being "the one man to character is, of course, grossly and know" that Aldous had no serious love unfairly caricatured, but it provides affair or attachment before the First the basis for supposedly "feminine" World War due to a Victorian code that qualities and their "masculine" oppo- made romantic love purely platonic un• sites in most of Huxley's later charac• less one had serious intentions of ter portrayals: the "feminine" element marriage. However, Gervas also re• for Huxley is somewhat traditionally called that in the summer of 1913 when regarded as personal, emotional, prac• Huxley was nineteen he picked up a tical and social, as well as being as• young woman one evening, an "au pair" sociated with the pleasures of the flesh girl as he thought, and was later sur• and romantic love; the "masculine" on prised at her "eagerness." (Bed• the other hand is impersonal, detached, ford, Vol.1,57)(It was not widely introverted, intellectual and inclined realized in those days that women could towards abstraction and contemplation. be "eager.") There are indications in There are a number of couples in Hux• Huxley's later writings that this sup-~ ley's novels and short stories who posedly trifling little incident had a exemplify either one or all aspects of deeper influence on him than anyone the Greenow-Bellairs dichotomy in vary• realized. Sybille Bedford makes the claim that the poem "The Defeat of beautiful and pure young Belgian refu• Youth" is about Huxley's overly ideal• gee, Maria Nys, at Garsington. And, in istic older brother Trevenen who com• spite of the fact that her strong- mitted suicide in 1914 apparently over willed mother whisked her away from him a tragic love affair with a young and the wicked Garsington influence, he woman outside his class. (Bedford,Vol. eventually found himself safely married 1, 46) But at the same time it can, to her only six months after the dis• like most of Huxley's other work, be astrous Carrington incident.