Accommodating Perspectives on Religious History : A Study of Satire and Narrative Structure in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow

Abstract: This essay is an analysis of Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow and how it can be read as exposing social hypocrisy and tracing social flaws through England’s religious history. The analysis uses narratology as a tool for exploring how the author can be perceived as offering a perspective on religious history that might have been controversial in his day. Crome Yellow is Huxley's first novel and is written in the tradition of Satirical literature which can be traced back to the seventeenth century and writers such as Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens in the nineteenth century. As Crome Yellow also has autobiographical tendencies, it has been read as revolving around Huxley's own experiences and perspectives, revealing a vulnerability that none of his later novels seems to have done. Though Huxley was drawn to the religions of the East, the novel refers to the Christian religion, making a distinction between Catholicism and Protestantism. This distinction pertains directly to the characters and narrative structures in Crome Yellow and can be seen as a key in what Huxley might be conveying through the novel. The aim is to demonstrate how the novel can be read as the author’s tracing of his religious roots.