I have a lot of feelings about Lenina Crowne.
To start, I don't like her in the slightest. She is annoying,
entitled, and the embodiment of high society. She sees herself as essentially
nothing and yet everything at the same time. She could be in a Leia-style gold
bikini smelling like a flower dipped in ecstasy and ask why the savages were so
primitive. I hate her. However, I really pity her character. Lenina was brought
up in a world without love. That’s sad enough, but nearly every character in
this book was raised without love, so that isn’t my sole reason for pitying
her. I pity her because she falls in love herself and doesn’t know it.
I swear I’m not a romantic person. At least, not really. But
even I can comprehend that John and Lenina’s relationship was tragic in every
sense of the word. For John, who has only ever read Shakespearean romance, this
is love at first sight. This beautiful white woman comes to his village on
vacation. I don’t like the fact that her whiteness is made a trait that makes
her more beautiful than the other girls, but it’s right there on page 78. To
him, she is unique in all the world. He pretty much sees himself as Romeo. He
had his heart broken by Kiakimé (Rosaline)
and found Lenina in her place, his Juliet.
Personally, I hate that story, but I wasn’t raised on
Shakespeare and tears. Moving on.
This meeting wasn’t very special for Lenina. This is how she
reacts to seeing him the first time: “Lenina was smiling at him; such a nice-looking
boy, she was thinking, and a really beautiful body” (Huxley 78). She
experiences physical attraction similar to his, seeing as he, too, is white and
handsome. But for her, who has never heard of love or marriage, he is just
another attractive man to bed.
John wants to remain chaste until marriage like the goody two-shoes
he is. I’m not knocking him for wanting that, but he is a goody two-shoes.
Lenina, as we know, is the opposite of chaste and wants to have sex with John
ASAP. Naturally, tensions rise and John is having a bad time. When Lenina
undresses in front of him and throws herself at him when he says he wants to
marry her, the bomb goes off. John calls her a whore and says he never wants to
see her again.
And Lenina will never understand why this boy left her.
I will not say Lenina was entirely innocent. She made a lot
of bad decisions, including misinterpreting and basically ignoring the idea of
consent from John. But that is who she was trained to be. She’s practically a
sex doll because that’s what society demands of her. In fact, she is constantly
described as “pneumatic”, which means “full of air”. John wants a real relationship
with emotions and a bond that can suffer and still remain strong. When Lenina
is faced with suffering, she takes some soma
and leaves.
To make matters worse, it doesn’t end with their fight.
The book ends with John attempting to live his life in
solitude, paying for his sins (aka his sexual desire for Lenina). A man films
him whipping himself and makes a 4D movie out of it, making John a sensation. A
horde of people appear at his door and scream for the whip. In that horde is
Lenina. She isn’t screaming with the rest of them. She “pressed both hands to
her left side, and on that peach-bright, doll-beautiful face of hers appeared a
strangely incongruous expression of yearning distress. Her blue eyes seemed to
grow larger, brighter; and suddenly two tears rolled down her cheeks. Inaudibly,
she spoke again; then, with a quick, impassioned gesture stretched out her arms
towards the Savage, stepped forward” (175). She feels something. Something that
makes her cry, and it isn’t the pure euphoria she’s used to. And these feelings
are associated with John. We’ll never know what these feelings are since he
then goes on to whip her in an angered frenzy, have sex with her, and hang
himself out of shame. Still, she felt something. Maybe it was something real.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t.
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