One example of a metaphor in Brave New
World can be found towards the end of Chapter 2. There, the Director has
been showing the students the rooms in which babies are being conditioned through
hypnopaediea. He explains to them how the process works. He then says (and here the
narrator of the book paraphrases) that the repeated phrases the children hear in their
sleep are
drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere,
incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one
scarlet blob.
There are two
metaphors here. The hypnopaedia lessons are compared to drops of liquid wax while the
children’s brains and selves are compared to a rock. As the wax drops on to the rock,
bit by bit, the rock disappears beneath all of the wax. All that is left, it would
appear, is the wax. This helps us to understand how the process of hypnopaedia works to
cover over the children’s minds so that all that is left is what the society wants them
to believe. They have become, to all outward appearances, not themselves (not the rock)
but the sum of what they have been taught (the wax covering).
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