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Desire and Empathy in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
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© The Author(s) 2018 147 T. Horan, Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism, doi/10.1007/978-3-319-70675-7_
CHAPTER 7
Desire and Empathy in George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four illustrates George Orwell’s faith in sexual desire as a source of social responsibility. When considering the likely shape of things to come, Orwell looked backward to the sexual repressions of medieval Catholicism: “What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police. There is very little chance of escaping it unless we can reinstate the belief in human brotherhood without the need for a ‘next world’ to give it meaning” (1940/1968d, p. 17). Here, Orwell presents both the problem and the solution. As Ian Slater (1985) makes clear, Orwell believed that the empathetic sense of shared humanity and responsibility for each other that ideally flowed from belief in God must be restored without reviving faith in divinity:
Orwell did not want to reinstate the Church’s influence, for he believed that because the ideas of submission to God and of human control over nature are felt to be inimical, the Christian churches are on the whole hostile to reform [....] What needed to be done, said Orwell, was to “reinstate” the belief in brotherhood, the belief that no matter what differences exist between us, we are responsible for each other. (pp. 81–82)
A sense of “brotherhood” among people necessarily starts with trust between individuals, which is why the Party endeavors to keep personal relationships as adversarial as the basic functioning of society will allow. In
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Nineteen Eighty-Four the personal empathy that reignites social empathy originates in Winston and Julia’s reciprocal erotic passion. Certainly sexual desire for Julia’s mind and body is the starting point of Winston Smith’s tentatively hopeful outlook. Once they start seeing each other, Winston begins to imagine a whole network of illicit affairs that he thinks can germinate into actual pockets of political resistance:
I don’t imagine we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there—small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can carry on where we leave off. (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 156)
Winston’s newfound sense of responsibility to himself, others, and future generations constitutes a burgeoning morality originating in eroti- cism. As his social conscience grows, his attention shifts from personal grievances to a cooperative struggle for change. Though his life is fragile, his situation precarious, and his chances of personal survival slim to non- existent, Winston’s sexual desire leads him to do what he believes is right. This is the moral compass which Orwell, though an atheist, believed we lost with the decline of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and which—as he insisted in his column in Tribune from March 3, 1944—we must recover within ourselves:
There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is [....] I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole [....] One cannot have any worth-while picture of the future unless one realizes how much we lost by the decay of Christianity. (1944/2000a, p. 103)
The Winston whom Orwell imbues with a belief in the spirit of humanity is a far cry from the restless man who believed at the beginning of the story that his diary would reach no one, apart from the Thought Police: “How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impos- sible” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 9). His dreams of organized resistance are of course unrealistic, but they demonstrate how sexual desire changed him from a hapless victim of fear and propaganda into a daring revolutionary of sublime vision, inspiring him to openly confront O’Brien about the Brotherhood.
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the bond between Winston and Julia, enabling their sociopolitical con- spiracy. For Orwell, the trust between individuals that makes their indi- viduality possible and ultimately facilitates a culture of ethics and justice originates with sexual desire, not the grace of a particular god, which is why the Party employs traditional mechanisms of institutional religion such as sexual repression. Orwell, like the other authors in this study, asserts that as much as totalitarian regimes need to control the flow of desire, they can never do so absolutely. Sexual hunger always re-emerges as the catalyst for rejuve- nating tendencies. Jenny Taylor (1984) points out that as with We, a sex- ual relationship is at the core of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
It is the very centrality of the relationship between sexual and political repression in 1984 that makes the novel seem so recognisable today [....] Its plot is almost identical to [...] We [...] a futuristic dystopia in which the hero D-503 is moved by desire to political rebellion by the Other—E330— though he finally betrays her. (p. 26)
Taylor’s claims about the plot similarities between We and Nineteen Eighty-Four are exaggerated, but she is right about the pivotal importance of desire in both novels. Like the relationship between D-503 and I-330, the sexual relationship in Nineteen Eighty-Four is again between an essen- tially orthodox character (Winston) and a radical seductress (Julia). Calling Winston orthodox is admittedly surprising since he abhors Big Brother and disbelieves in the principles of INGSOC. But at the begin- ning of the novel, his helplessness and resignation ensure that he is no real threat to the Party: “Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no dif- ference. The Thought Police would get him just the same” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 20). When we meet Winston, he is in a state of despair. He has decided that he is doomed to be arrested and shot, so the risks he takes are irrelevant. Julia, on the other hand, firmly believes that she can get away with her subversive behavior and find happiness, not only for her but for Winston. Blu Tirohl (2000) rightly argues that though we first see Julia from the perspective of Winston’s frustrated desire, it is she who takes the initiative to launch the sexual relationship:
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Julia’s seduction (it is she who makes the first move and subsequent liaison arrangements) of Winston serves three functions for him. Firstly, she pro- vides an outlet for his sexual needs [....] Secondly, she demonstrates a failure in the Party to control her sexuality, since she adores intercourse and any- thing which corrupts The Party inspires Winston. Thirdly, she offers Winston loyalty and the message that he is not alone in his thoughts. (p. 58)
Tirohl could extend his perceptive analysis even further. The satisfaction of Winston’s lust does more than provide him with a companion for his bed and thoughts—it transforms him from a restless defeatist into a willing soldier for the Brotherhood. The satisfaction of an erotic fantasy begets a pragmatic optimism:
“In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win.” She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated [....] She believed it was some- how possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose [....] “We are the dead,” he said. “We’re not dead yet,” said Julia prosaically. (Orwell 1949/1977, pp. 136–137)
Both characters, of course, realize that organizing an open rebellion is impossible, but while Winston dwells on the hopelessness of overt resis- tance, Julia, perhaps naïvely, believes that they can beat the Party at its own game behind masks of apparent loyalty. In this, as Plank (1984) observes, Julia is admirably fearless: “[I]t is Julia who provided much of the courage to make the liaison last” (p. 37). Anne Mellor (1983) emphasizes Julia’s insightful realization that her sexuality is a means to bring people together and generate ethical bonds:
Julia recognizes that her sexuality threatens more than the Party’s efforts to control the reproductive process. By giving immediate pleasure to the indi- vidual, sexuality also paves the way toward an experience of personal com- mitment, of a pair-bonding that is felt as a love for an individual and not for a system. (p. 120)
Mellor’s analysis shows that Julia, perhaps inadvertently, emerges as the novel’s moral voice and arguably the character who most threatens the Party. Before her relationship with Winston, she had led other Outer Party members to rebellion through her sexuality (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 126),
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Thus, although Winston’s conscious disaffection makes him appear to be an outside observer, Bail recognizes that Julia’s perspective is more objective, accurate, and subversive. The reader can only speculate as to the amount of damage her extensive sexual experiences have done to the Party. At the beginning of the novel, just as he accepts that achieving regime change is impossible, Winston believes that he will never sleep with Julia. His thoughts regarding her are a sexist mixture of frustrated lust and libidi- nal rage: “Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind [....] He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax [....] He hated her because [...] he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 16). Though these fantasies are appall- ing, the desire underlying them results in empathetic, compassionate behav- ior. When Julia falls on her injured arm, Winston instinctively helps her:
In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him; in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body. (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 107)
Before he has time to think, Winston’s sexual passion for Julia, an appar- ent mortal enemy, sparks empathy and socially responsible behavior. Winston’s desire for Julia soon changes his mind. Lurid and undeniably chauvinistic thoughts give way to dreams of consensual sex as he begins to recognize the utopian potential and significance of Julia’s body. His fanta- sies about her begin to be set in the Golden Country, Winston’s imagined, pastoral utopia reminiscent of the forest beyond the Green Wall in We:
The girl with the dark hair was coming toward him across the field. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into noth- ingness. (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 32)
Julia’s exposed sensuality channels Winston’s meek disaffection into impassioned hope. Whereas his heretical thoughts were previously vague
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and unfocused, they have now located themselves on Julia’s body, which he recognizes as a potential substitute for the current body politic. By tearing off her Party uniform, she rends the fabric of cultural repression that binds the Party together, implicitly suggesting that she and Winston can create their own world beyond the grasp of the Thought Police. When he and Julia eventually have sex, they experience it as an act of sociopolitical resistance. “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 128). Daphne Patai takes issue with Orwell’s “idealized portrayal of female maternal figures” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984, p. 88). Yet since all political dystopias need to regenerate, it is difficult to conceive of any kind of rejuvenating relationship without procreation because it alone affords the possibility of societal continuity into the future. Patai’s claim that Nineteen Eighty-Four idealizes maternal figures is also complicated by the novel’s presentation of Katherine, Winston’s wife, who in her commit- ment to conceiving a child and becoming a mother serves as a foil to Julia. Both Katherine and Julia are physically attractive, though Katherine is presented as more classically beautiful and dignified:
Katherine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in their married life he decided [...] that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 67)
Despite her good looks, Katherine’s banality and intellectual laziness make her unattractive to Winston. She is sexless because the Party has condi- tioned her to be stupid, and this deadening influence extends to every part of her personality. Not surprisingly, just as sex brought about the liberation of Winston’s spirit, it is the medium through which the Party reasserts its anaconda-like grip on his soul. Though Winston suffers physical torture at the hands of O’Brien, he responds with overwhelming feelings of desire: “He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O’Brien [....] [H]is heart seemed to turn-over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out a hand and laid it on O’Brien’s arm. He had never loved him so deeply” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 255). Here, probably without the author’s cognizance,
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Winston is figuratively penetrated by the Party and becomes a receptacle for its dogma. In contrast to his joyously consensual liaisons with Julia, his re-education in the Ministry of Love assumes the brutal, psychologically destructive nature of rape. O’Brien’s startling revelation that he authored the book of political her- esies supposedly written by Goldstein is crucial to Winston’s re-education: “‘I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is pro- duced individually, as you know” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 264). Admittedly, we cannot tell if O’Brien is lying when he claims authorship of the book, yet its contents confirm O’Brien’s claim. The book inveighs against the Party, yet reaches the conclusion that the Party cannot be overthrown: “Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not pos- sible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 211). The book is cunningly crafted to seduce enlightened malcontents into hopelessness. Given that the book is just more Party propaganda, how can we trust the validity of its claims? The Party may be far more vulnerable than it says and far more vulnerable than Winston believes. As Claeys points out, “Returning to the textual evidence, we see that, internally, clues of vari- ous kinds as to the possible instability of the system are indeed scattered throughout the book” (2017, p. 433). Effective resistance may therefore be possible. We cannot even be sure that Oceania is as vast as its leaders would have its citizenry believe it is. Airstrip One may be the whole of Oceania; Orwell’s dystopian Britain may be an isolated pocket of totali- tarianism like present-day North Korea. All that matters is that the peo- ple of this new Britain believe that their empire is great, giving them a jingoistic connection to their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forbears. Because Winston and Julia’s own sexual revolution fails, many critics have concluded that Nineteen Eighty-Four refutes the idea that desire can effect change. Booker (1994), for example, argues that their ill-fated sex- ual relationship accomplishes nothing: “Indeed, the sexual rebellion of Smith and Julia turns out to be entirely ineffectual” (p. 76). Raymond Williams (1958/1983) goes further, claiming that the bleakness of Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects Orwell’s supposedly nihilistic assessment of the twentieth-century political landscape. Politicians, like O’Brien, are consciously wicked, and the mass of simpletons they govern neither know nor want anything better:
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In Nineteen Eighty-Four, [...] the hated politicians are in charge, while the dumb mass of ‘proles’ goes on in very much its own ways, protected by its very stupidity. The only dissent comes from a rebel intellectual: the exile against the whole system. Orwell puts the case in these terms because this is how he really saw present society, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is desperate because Orwell recognized that on such a construction, the exile could not win, and then there was no hope at all. (p. 293)
Williams distorts the message of the novel in many ways. Despite all that he experienced in the decade preceding World War II, Orwell never suc- cumbed to pessimism and indeed rebuked others for doing so. Consider the following passage from his essay aptly titled “The Limit to Pessimism,” in which he reviewed The Thirties by Malcolm Muggeridge:
What Mr. Muggeridge appears to be saying is that the English are powerless [...] because there is no longer anything that they believe in with sufficient firmness to make them willing for sacrifice. It is the struggle of people who have no faith against people who faith in false gods. Is he right I wonder? The truth is that it is impossible to discover what the English people are really feeling and thinking, about the war or about anything else. It has been impossible all through the critical years. I don’t myself believe that he is right. (Orwell 1940/1968c, p. 535)
When Orwell speaks of the English people in this essay, he refers to com- mon people everywhere. He does not pretend to know what the masses think or feel (or by extension what they are capable of), yet Williams accuses Orwell not only of knowing but also of taking the dimmest pos- sible view of ordinary humanity. Nineteen Eighty-Four suggests otherwise. When a convoy of war prisoners with “Mongol faces” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 118) passes through a large crowd, the proles—unlike the Party members—show no hatred: “At the start there had been a few boos and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 117). Here, the dingy, supposedly unenlightened masses react more naturally and humanely to ethnic difference than the compara- tively privileged middle and upper classes. Orwell consistently maintains that workers are not stupid: they simply lack the perspective that comes with education, leisure, and financial security—privileges in some measure enjoyed by the middle class. Though politically dormant, they are to Orwell fundamentally unconquerable
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We should not mistake Winston’s perspective for the author’s. For Orwell, common decency is all that is required for meaningful change, and like the sex drive through which it emerges in the story, the virtue of the people is instinctive:
My chief hope for the future is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code [....] I have never had the slightest fear of a dictatorship of the proletariat, if it could happen, and certain things I saw in the Spanish War confirmed me in this. But I admit to having a perfect horror of a dictatorship of theorists. (1940/1968b, p. 532)
Here we see Orwell’s suspicion of the very intellectualism that Winston embodies. The Party has successfully manipulated Winston—and presum- ably people like him—for years, but its degenerating influence does not extend to its vast labor force. Crick asserts that the proles are so immersed in a culture of debasement that the Party need not keep them under surveillance: “They did not need watching, they were so debased as to be no political threat” (2007, p. 153). Plank concurs, likening the proles to the sexually satiated citi- zenry of Huxley’s World State: “Orwell’s proles, erotically nourished with state-sponsored pornography, are the equivalent of the citizens of Brave New World who are encouraged to be openly erotic” (1984, p. 33). But Slater wisely points out that their lack of exposure to telescreens has kept the proles firmly grounded in reality: “Unlike the members of the Party, however, the proles’ consciousness is not deliberately blunted by active ideological indoctrination—at least, not by anything beyond the standard news” (1985, p. 233). Although the book attributed to Goldstein would have its readers believe that the proles are ineffectual, Nineteen Eighty- Four suggests the opposite, which is why Slater describes Orwell’s satire as “a return to Orwell’s faith in the virtues of the working class” (1985, pp. 232–233). Even in the book we find inadvertent admissions that the proles are politically dangerous: “Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted among them, who might pos- sibly become nuclei of discontent, are marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 210). If “nuclei of discon- tent” can arise among the proles, then there is no need for a middle-class vanguard of people like Winston. That gifted, potentially subversive indi- viduals continue to emerge from the working class suggests that revolu- tion need not stem from the middle class, despite the authors of the book attributed to Goldstein insisting that it must (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 203).
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Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the unsubstantiated claim that revolutions are always initiated by members of the middle class, Lawrence Phillips (2008) points out that the Party has failed in its attempt to segregate these groups:
[T]he experimental fabric of London is a vast network of individual itinerar- ies and stories that create, circulate and preserve a past that the Party attempts to rename, appropriate, or rewrite but clearly fails to repress entirely. That Party members can sally out into London (even at the risk of being picked up by a patrol) points to the potential development of indi- vidual consciousness of the past beyond Party control. Indeed the very scar- city of day-to-day consumables forces the outer-party member to undertake such expeditions [....] The failure by the Party to supply personal necessities draws Winston and presumably others before and, one must presume, after him into the streets of London and among the Proles. (p. 73)
Whether effective leadership emerges from either the working or middle class, the two groups maintain sufficient contact to allow for the possibility of collaboration. The nexus of the working and middle classes is also exemplified by Julia, a character who moves fluidly between different social environments. In contrast to Winston’s white-collar desk work, Julia, a machinist, labors with her hands: “[H]e had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner—she had some mechanical job” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 11). Her employment is closer to a prole’s than to Winston’s. Like a prole, Julia is motivated by personal loyalty rather than political ideology. Claeys explains why Orwell’s association of Julia with the proletariat and their instinctive wisdom demonstrates her superiority to Winston and calls into question the claim that Orwell’s presentation of her is reductive:
This is why she has to doze off while Winston reads to her from “the Book” which discloses the regime’s inner secrets: it exhibits her impenetrability. She thus represents one of Orwell’s key themes here, the instinctive conti- nuity of the human [...] which the proles also embody. (This is also why he makes her clever with machinery.) This corresponds in part to Orwell’s con- ception of nature, as does the large prole woman Winston observes frequently washing and singing as she works, who is also a crucial symbol. Julia’s humanity is expressed through her animality. It is more material, more real than Winston’s whimsical abstractions and metaphysical conun- drums. (2017, pp. 412–413)
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will be eradicated. But his story illustrates the kind of insight that is still possible and even probable within particular individuals in both the mid- dle and working classes. In addition to taking a reductive view of Orwell’s portrayal of the pro- les, Williams is wrong to cast Winston as a discouraged exile from the community. From the beginning of the novel, Winston feels at home with his job at the Records Department and has friendly associates in Syme and Ampleforth, as well as a companion in Julia, with whom he believes he can attempt to subvert the machine from inside. He is secretly restive but not alienated. Williams’s misunderstanding of Winston stems from his assump- tion that Winston is a proxy for Orwell. He uses the phrase “a rebel intel- lectual: the exile against the whole system” to refer to both the author and his character, and he tends to attribute Winston’s observations to Orwell (1958/1983, p. 293). Referring to the scene in which O’Brien plays a recording of the atrocities Winston agrees to commit to help overthrow the Party, Whalen-Bridge (1992) rightly points out that Orwell intended for his readers to distance themselves morally from Winston:
O’Brien plays back the tape to discredit Winston in his own mind and there- fore to break him. But the reader is likely to understand the significance of the scene differently, and notice that, however true it may seem that one must “become a dragon to fight a dragon,” those who would resist totali- tarianism by becoming totalitarian forfeit the moral ground on which they have staked their resistance. (p. 74)
Ironically, this is a realization that London failed to make. As discussed in Chap. 2, he portrays his revolutionary terrorists as capable of maintaining their integrity despite engaging in tactics identical to those of the Iron Heel. By misreading Winston as a representation of Orwell, Williams furthers his mistake by erroneously concluding that Orwell was an exile who could recognize and articulate the injustices of society but offer no viable solutions:
Orwell’s socialism became the exile’s principle, which he would at any cost keep inviolate [....] The exile, because of his own personal position, cannot finally believe in any social guarantee [....] [A]lmost all association is sus- pect. He fears it because he does not want to be compromised [....] Because he is so quick to see the perfidy which certain compromises involve. (1958/1983, pp. 290–291)
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Williams argues that Orwell was socially impotent because he would not compromise his personal independence by working for liberty within a group framework. Since Orwell was politically isolated from all seg- ments of society, he lacked perspective and therefore accuracy: “His conclusions have no general validity” (Williams 1958/1983, p. 294). This, too, is untrue. From the time of his return from Burma, Orwell saw himself as part of a modest-yet-vibrant community of English socialists, working for achiev- able, positive change in an emerging post-imperial Britain. Crick points out that Orwell was an active part of this group until his death and that Nineteen Eighty-Four does not show any loss of faith in democratic social- ism: “[T]he book does not represent a repudiation of his democratic socialism as so many American reviewers assumed; for he continued to write for the Tribune and American left wing journals right up to his final illness, during the time of the composition of Nineteen Eighty-Four” (2007, p. 146). Orwell, nevertheless, explicitly rejected the idea that progressive reforms could only result from participating in group efforts. The prom- ise of socialism itself, as he wrote in 1945 in an unpublished letter to the editor of Tribune, had always depended on individual perseverance against overwhelming odds: “It is only because over the past hundred years small groups and lonely individuals have been willing to face unpop- ularity that the Socialist movement exists at all” (1945/2000c, p. 391). Orwell thus shows confidence in the efficacy of individual effort rather than isolationism. Occasionally, Orwell did separate himself from certain people, not because of a tendency toward self-exile but on account of his loyalty to the left. In a letter to the Duchess of Atholl declining an invitation to partici- pate in a speaking engagement, he makes his place and allegiances within English society and politics clear:
I cannot speak for the League of European Freedom [....] Certainly what is said on your platforms is more truthful than the lying propaganda to be found in most of the press, but I cannot associate myself with an essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy in Europe but has nothing to say about British Imperialism [....] I belong to the Left and must work within it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country. (Orwell 1945/1968a, p. 30)
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tense but in a manner which suggests that the Party is an organization of the distant past, since the annotator assumes that the reader will be unfamiliar with Newspeak: “Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structures and etymology, see Appendix” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 5). Although Winston and Julia understand their likely fate, desire allows them to feel human, hopeful, and even redeemed under the bleakest pos- sible conditions. As Laurence Lerner (1992/2007) points out, just how many other clandestine Oceanian couples are out there experiencing a sexual and ethical awakening of this kind is impossible to say: “As the story proceeds, the uniqueness of Winston and Julia seems to grow more and more marked, yet why should they be unique if they are so ordinary?” (p. 79) Positing that there may be others like Winston and Julia even within the Inner Party, Lerner concludes that “Ingsoc is not as stable as O’Brien asserts” (1992/2007, p. 79), a conclusion with which Craig L. Carr (2010) concurs:
We might try to sustain a Hobbesian account of power in the face of O’Brien’s remarks, however, if we suppose the inner party can never be completely secure in its power. Always there might be some deviant around, someone like Winston, willing to question the authority of Big Brother and inclined to incite others to stand against Him. (p. 113)
The most compelling testimony to the all-encompassing strength of the Party comes from O’Brien, when he re-educates Winston in the Ministry of Love: “There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is forever” (Orwell 1949/1977, p. 265). Yet Claeys emphasizes O’Brien’s unreliability: “Intoxicated with power, he too can- not see clearly, or at least clearly beyond power—and for a few moments— we grasp his own inner weakness” (2017, p. 414). According to Williams’s own assessment, O’Brien is just another “hated”—and by implication dishonest—“politician.” Just as by the year 1984 the Soviets were far weaker than they claimed to be, O’Brien’s boastful rhetoric might be nothing more than empty, self-serving hyperbole. That the Party expends so much effort hunting, torturing, and murdering even loyal Oceanians such as Parsons may indicate hidden desperation and instability within the ruling elite. In the face of governmental terror, potential revolutionaries (like the scores of men whom Julia once seduced) are still being born, growing up,
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discovering their sexuality, and—at least for a time—forming personal bonds beyond the reach of the Party. Despite O’Brien’s self-assured claims about the self-restraint of the Inner Party, Casement (1988) notes that this subversive process of sociopolitical awakening through sexual desire is possible, and even likely, within the Inner-Party membership:
Winston and Julia make love illicitly, and she not only intimates that she has done so with other Outer Party members, but avers that Inner Party mem- bers too would have her if they could [....] Although in theory Party mem- bers’ sensuality is to be held in check, enforcement of this principle is sometimes lax or ineffective. (p. 48)
These radicals may eventually be caught and crushed, but more will follow; and their dreams remain realizable potentially on an individual level and ultimately on a societal one. This pattern of resilience also emerges in The Handmaid’s Tale, which revisits the socioeconomic impli- cations of misogyny central to Burdekin’s Swastika Night.
RefeRences
Atwood, M. (1987). Margaret Atwood/Interviewer: G. Hancock. In G. Hancock (Ed.), Canadian Writers at Work (pp. 256–287). Toronto: Oxford University Press. Bail, P. (2003). Sexuality as Rebellion in George Orwell’s 1984. In J. Fisher & E. S. Silber (Eds.), Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender (pp. 215–217). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Baruch, E. H. (1983). The Golden Country: Sex and Love in 1984. In I. Howe (Ed.), 1984 Revisited (pp. 47–56). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Booker, M. K. (1994). The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Carr, C. L. (2010). Orwell, Politics, and Power. New York, NY: Continuum. Casement, W. (1988). Another Perspective on Orwellian Pessimism. The International Fiction Review, 15(1), 48–50. Casement, W. (1989). Nineteen Eighty-Four and Philosophical Realism. The Midwest Quarterly, 30(2), 215–228. Claeys, G. (2017). Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crick, B. (2007). Nineteen Eighty-Four: Context and Controversy. In J. Rodden (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (pp. 146–159). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, R. (1984). The Big Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Essays in Criticism, 34 (1), 56–69.
T. HORAN
Desire and Empathy in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Course: advanced english (ENGADV)
University: University of Sydney
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