Aldous Huxley Short Fiction Analysis
All twenty-one of Aldous Huxley’s short stories, ranging from the five pages of “The Bookshop” and the six pages of “Fard” to the thirty-eight pages of “Happily Ever After” and “Chawdron,” are gathered in Collected Short Stories, which remains one of Huxley’s books readily available to readers. Omitted from Collected Short Stories are three novelettes scattered in Huxley’s five principal early story collections: “Farcical History of Richard Greenow” (in Limbo), “Uncle Spencer” (in Little Mexican), and “After the Fireworks” (Brief Candles). In nearly all these works, as in his longer fiction, Huxley’s witty prose style is used to expose, with irony and satire, the gap between the ideal and the real in various societies, individual human personalities, and human behavior. An example of how Huxley’s prose style skewers the greed, indolence, and parasitism of the British aristocracy can be found in the following sentence describing the forebears of Baron Badgery—Huxley frequently uses comic names for satire—in the opening of “The Tillotson Banquet”:They had been content to live and quietly to propagate their species in a huge machiolated Norman castle, surrounded by a triple moat, only sallying forth to cultivate their property and to collect their rents.
With adroit irony, Huxley counterbalances his hallmark polysyllabism in “propagate” and “machiolated” with the plainer, parallel, and alliterating “cultivate” and “collect”; he counterbalances the lazy pacifism behind the moated castle with the warlike “sallying forth” not for glory but for money. The pervasive reversal structure or ironic surprise ending of the stories, like Huxley’s prose style, helps convey the discrepancy between what people say or think and what they do, between plans or intentions and results, or between appearances and realities.
Frequently in the stories a main character attempts to impose on the world an oversimplified idealistic mental construct that must and does fail. Indeed, a recurrent theme is the duality in life between mind and body, idealism and pragmatism, or spirituality and high culture versus the physical world or materialism. Such duality is ingrained in the title character of “Farcical History of Richard Greenow,” who suffers a dissociative personality split between a male, antiwar, hard-edged, intellectual essayist of moderate means and a female, jingoistic, sentimental, middlebrow, monetarily successful novelist. In “The Death of Lully,” based on real persons and events, the spirituality of the title character, which drives him to Christian martyrdom in Muslim North Africa, contrasts with the carnality of a young couple on his sea-going transport, as well as with the commercialism of the captain, who wonders how to profit financially from his famous dying passenger. In “Sir Hercules,” the title character, a British baron, whose dwarf stature contradicts his given forename, attempts to build a miniaturized utopia on the family estate, with his equally diminutive, attractive, and aesthetically oriented wife; ironically, their son grows up large, loutish, cruel, and insensitive, spurring his parents’ suicide. In “The Monocle,” the title helps symbolize the story’s theme of defective or partial vision, which almost all the characters have, derived from their single, usually egocentric, focus on something, including young Gregory, the main character, who wears the monocle to appear to be more detached and upperclass than he really is, as well as the intellectual Spiller, who actualizes his name by his continual talk, often oblivious to his immediate surroundings. In “Fairy Godmother,” the rich Mrs. Escobar attempts to create the fairytale role of the story’s title for herself, heedless of the rarity of her good deeds toward the family she is giving charity to, as well as of the reality of what a young child might really want...
(This entire section contains 1993 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
as a gift. Finally, in “The Claxtons,” the parent Claxtons, especially the wife, endeavor to create an idealized spiritual, vegetarian, economical household, despite Mrs. Claxton’s real envy of her rich relations and eventually her clandestine dietary cheating.
“Happily Ever After”
Interconnected with the conflict between ideal and real, mental and physical, is the persistent focus in the stories on romantic love—its sources, development, illusions, delusions, endurance, or transitoriness. In “Happily Ever After,” Huxley uses the fairytale overtones of the title as part of his satire on the real lives of characters, which contradict their romantic illusions; thus Guy Lambourne has the deluded naïveté, suggested by his surname, to believe that he is above the physical side of romantic love, realizing his mistake too late, since he is killed in World War I; also, at the story’s end his sweetheart and his good friend, in sentimentalizing over Guy’s death, unwittingly push themselves toward an affair that will betray him. In “The Gioconda Smile” and “After the Fireworks,” the main male character in each story—Henry Hutton and Miles Fanning, respectively—is an intellectual, art lover, and writer who is flirtatious despite struggling, unsuccessfully, against yielding to a string of sexual liaisons; each pays a drastic price: Hutton is tried and executed for the death of his wife, who was actually murdered by Janet Spence, with whom Hutton flirted and whose Gioconda smile belied such violence, and Fanning wanes in health and in the affection of his young mistress, the course of their affair running as he had understood and predicted. The duality between mind and body in romantic love is also evident in “Cynthia” and “The Rest Cure.”
“Cynthia”
In “Cynthia,” consistently threaded with classical allusions, the skeptical narrator’s university friend, Lykeham (who has actualized his surname—“like ’em”—by a series of love affairs), claims, with apparent romantic hyperbole, to have met an actual goddess at a playhouse; at story’s end, Lykeham, with the narrator in tow, seems, to the narrator’s surprise, drawn into a genuinely supernatural outdoors nocturnal pursuit that leads to union with the goddess; however, the skeptical narrator wonders whether the female, identified as the chaste Cynthia, or moon goddess, would not descend to the physical side of the mythological tale of Cynthia’s presumably very physical union with the carnal god Pan. In “The Rest Cure,” Mrs. Moira Tarwin is transformed by her husband’s jealousy of her young Italian factotum, Tonino, from a neurasthenic repulsed by the sexual component of romantic love to a passionate lover; ironically, Tonino is transformed by Mrs. Tarwin’s passion from an idealistically chaste admiration, to physical rapture, to bored apathy—the last to Mrs. Tarwin’s great distress.
“Uncle Spencer”
How lovers may superimpose imagination on their partner or some other aspect of the relationship is shown in “Uncle Spencer,” “Chawdron,” “Green Tunnels,” “Hubert and Minnie,” “Fard,” and “Half-Holiday.” In “Uncle Spencer” and “Chawdron,” the both gentle Uncle Spencer and the ruthless Chawdron recreate a clearly flawed, self-centered female companion, of opposite temperament to the title character, into an idealized image of a romantic partner; neither achieves a true romantic union, Uncle Spencer’s beloved disappearing as soon as their World War I internment ends, and Chawdron’s beloved actualizing her childishly attention-getting hypochondria into a fatal illness.
“Green Tunnels”
In “Green Tunnels” and “Hubert and Minnie,” the main female character—Barbara and Minnie, respectively—through imagination transforms a male acquaintance into lover and is disappointed when reality contradicts the illusion; Barbara’s illusion corresponds to the symbolism of the mazy green tunnels growing where she is staying in Italy, and Minnie’s illusion corresponds to the symbolism of the passionate thunder of mill water at the inn where she is to meet her prospective lover, which gives way to the silence of the mill being stopped and his reneging on the assignation.
“Fard”
Finally, in “Fard” and “Half-Holiday,” the interrelation of Huxley’s concerns—in these instances, delusions in love and societal inequities—emerges from a household marital contretemps in France and a spat between two dogs being walked at a London park, respectively. In “Fard,” the title derives from the French word referring to facial cosmetics and thus points to the superficiality of Madame, proud of her good looks and sex appeal, who imaginatively overdramatizes a quarrel over acceding to her husband’s will, while ignoring the real health and socioeconomic plight of her maid, Sophie. In “Half-Holiday,” impoverished Peter Brett, on a “half-holiday” walk in the park from his low-paying job, imagines himself a fairytale romantic prince and then attempts to implement his daydream by rescuing a dog belonging to two attractive upperclass young women from a dogfight; but instead of winning a princess, he is offered money, dismissed, and quickly forgotten, being of little notice to the young women’s social class.
“The Portrait”
The topic of the fine arts is pervasive in the stories, related to Huxley’s preoccupation with the collision between mind and matter, imagination and reality, as well as Huxley’s personal interest in painting, music, and literature. As usual in Huxley’s short fiction, as well as in his longer fiction, this recurrent theme is often intertwined with Huxley’s other recurrent themes. For example, in “The Portrait,” the intrinsically interesting and ironic story of a love triangle associated with a painting turns out to be wholly invented by art dealer Mr. Bigger to sell the painting to a prospective parvenu buyer; further expressing the theme of the conflict between art and money in a materialistic society is the climactic revelation that the art dealer has all this time kept the painting’s actual artist disconsolately waiting around the gallery, paying him only a fraction of what will be realized from the sale. The relation between literary art and romantic love may be seen in “After the Fireworks” in how an artist succumbs to the pursuit of a beautiful young female reader, more in love with his art than with him, and in “Nuns at Luncheon,” in which two writers at luncheon in a fashionable restaurant dispassionately discuss as a potential work of art the tragic love affair of a nun seduced by a confidence man who is a prisoner-patient at a hospital where she is a nurse.
Art and Culture
As in “The Portrait,” art or culture versus society’s materialistic concern with money and commerce is also evident in “The Bookshop,” in which the narrator notices that the title’s small repository of culture is squeezed symbolically between a furniture store and cheap diner; in “The Tillotson Banquet,” in which a famous artist is fleetingly retrieved from extreme poverty only because a British aristocrat initially but incorrectly thinks the artist can decorate a room in the aristocrat’s manor; and in “Little Mexican,” in which the narrator, on an extended visit to Italy, is mistaken for a painter because of his hat, a “little Mexican” (that is, sombrero), by an Italian aristocrat, who is interested in business and manufacturing rather than art, and who tries to secure the narrator’s help in peddling priceless frescoes that are degenerating on the degenerating family estate.
“Young Archimedes”
Harking back to the two strains in Huxley’s lineage—art and science—are “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” and “Young Archimedes,” which deal with the interrelation of these two fields. In the first of these stories, the narrator’s friend Emberlin, having read ancient references to the use of mathematics in art, becomes intrigued and then obsessed by arithmetic; he endangers the ideal of the sane and cultured human being, whose interests ought to be diverse. In “Young Archimedes,” set in Italy, a dominating and controlling woman, Signora Bondi, reminiscent of Mrs. Escobar in “Fairy Godmother,” descends on a young impoverished prodigy, Guido, who has talents in both music and mathematics; despite the boy’s greater inclination to pursue science, however, Signora Bondi tries to impose her will and cultural hierarchy on the boy, isolate him from his family, and rigidly steer him into music, resulting in the boy’s tragic suicide. In this story, as well as Huxley’s collected works and life, the implied ideal is a balanced and humane combination of the dualities that pervade existence.
