In his study of The Great Gatsby, Roger Lathbury notes, “Novelists do not, as a general rule, start out writing about ideas. They begin with incident or mood.”¹ Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is an exception to that general rule. The novel starts from the concept of “the last man in Europe” moving from acquiescence to questioning to rebellion against the power of the State and Party. While the novel begins with the mood of natural—“vile wind,” “gritty dust” (743)—as well as man-made oppression, this is used to establish immediately the image of a beaten-down man in a giant, unfeeling system.

Orwell's ideas are never far from the surface of the text. At some point, they are the text, as in his reproduction of Goldstein's analysis of politics, society, and the Party or his presentation of the Appendix on Newspeak. In other passages, the political statement suddenly appears in Winston's personal narrative. For example, in the description of his encounter with a prostitute and thoughts of his wife Katharine, Winston thinks, “The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act” (781). While the particular nature of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the narrative of the Party taking over all aspects of the “personal” may explain this overt presentation of ideas, the outcome is conflation between Winston's “thoughts” and the expression of Orwell's political observations and philosophy.

One must always be careful about equating the ideas of a character with those of an author. The process of creation is not necessarily one of the author putting his/her identity on paper. In this case, however, Winston is a vehicle for restating, through a fictional format, Orwell's nonfictional conclusions about the individual, writing, and the State, and heightening the impact of those conclusions by portraying the State in an extreme, totalitarian form. Inevitably, Nineteen Eighty-Four is often read not as the story of “the last man in Europe” but as Orwell's general warning of the political dangers of the technologically-advanced society or a specific warning of the menace of Soviet Communism (or even misguided Socialism). Inevitably, Nineteen Eighty-Four's other dimensions, such as the generally negative portrayal of women, have been seen by some as an extension of Orwell's often troubled personal relationships.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE/PARTY

We shall get nowhere unless we start by recognising that political behaviour is largely non-rational, that the world is suffering from some kind of mental disease which must be diagnosed before it can be cured. The significant point is that nearly all the calamities that happen to use are quite unnecessary.

(George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, 30 November 1946)

In Orwell's Oceania, the State and the Party are synonymous, as all opposition has been removed and put beyond acceptability as the “enemy.” The opening chapter not only uses Winston's experience to describe this State/Party but to establish his attempt to escape its power and perpetual surveillance, as he begins writing his diary out of sight of the watching telescreen. The first two-thirds of the novel is a juxtaposition and even intersection of Winston with this State/Party system: in his discussions with neighbors and co-workers who have become extensions of State/Party ideology or practice; in his work at the Ministry of Truth; in his participation in Hate Week; and in his attempt to escape the State/Party through his writing, his ventures into the prole section, and his relationship with Julia.

The “turning point” of the book is not the end of Part 2, Winston and Julia's arrest by the Thought Police, but Winston's transition from the quest to “escape” to his decision to rebel against the State/Party. Winston's relationship to the State/Party is embodied in his relationship with O'Brien, whom Winston mistakenly believes is leading the resistance movement but is actually dedicated to the power of the Party and system. In the encounter between O'Brien and Winston in the last part of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the personal has become the political.

The novel would be inconceivable without Winston, a recalcitrant protagonist who, through his exiguous resistance, shows up the tyranny of the State. However, for the tyranny to appear truly horrific, that recalcitrance must itself appear pathetic and shabby—ultimately, just derisory.

(Alok Rai, Orwell and the Politics of Despair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 116)

What is left is the triumph of the Party and the exercise of power. This exercise is not for any end such as economic profit or territorial gain. Instead, as Orwell wrote in a 1944 essay, “The cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes.”²

Power as be-all and end-all draws from and takes Orwell beyond his previous work. The imagery of the Two Minute Hate and the Ministry of Love is descended from Coming Up for Air:

It isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen.³

In Coming Up for Air, however, there is still a broader political objective, the battle against Fascism ostensibly for the sake of Socialism. A decade later, even this objective has disappeared.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND THE POLITICAL: MEMORY

Orwell goes further in this depiction of the individual and State/Party by portraying resistance and conformity as an outgrowth of the struggle for memory. The State/Party is successful, Orwell indicates, because most people remember no way of life other than their acquiescent place in the system. Winston's recovery of memory is part of the motivation for, and process of, writing the diary. It is intertwined with his search for escape in the prole areas, in the countryside, and in the room above Mr. Charrington's shop with Julia.

If O'Brien can destroy memory, he can destroy Winston's resistance. Thus physical torture in the Ministry of Love is only part of the process of recreating Winston's mind and psyche. As O'Brien states bluntly, “We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will” (890). At the end of the novel, the victory of the Party is signified when Winston dismisses a recollection of a happy moment with his mother and sister:

He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were.

(915)

HISTORY AND PROPAGANDA

To succeed in its totalitarianism, the State/Party must also control the collective memory of “history,” ensuring that any truth is replaced by a version which fits current needs. As he begins writing his diary, Winston thinks of the perpetual warfare of Oceania with either Eurasia or Eastasia and notes, “To trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one.” He concludes, “The frightening thing was it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?” (762).

Winston participates in this annihilation of memory through his job at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting back issues of The Times. In one of the most striking passages in the book, Winston replaces Big Brother's praise of Comrade Withers, an Inner Party member who has fallen into disgrace, with a speech commemorating Comrade Ogilvy, a mythical figure who carries out great feats before dying in military action at the age of 23. (The episode is reminiscent of the tale of Comrade Stakhanov, a Soviet worker who was exalted by Joseph Stalin for his prodigious efforts in mining coal.) Winston thinks, “Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar” (770).

Later Winston recalls the time that, through an error, he held evidence of a “true” event which has been eliminated from history. Three purged leaders confess at show trials that, on a certain date, they were in enemy territory giving away military secrets; for a moment, Winston has a newspaper cutting from that same day showing the leaders at a Party function in Oceania. After agitating for a few minutes, he drops the cutting into the chute for the incinerator.

Winston writes in his diary, “I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY” (789). O'Brien again serves as his instructor: “Who controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” (886).

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

There is little in Orwell's background and reading to indicate his familiarity with the psychological theories that were prominent in the 1940s—in particular, the Freudian psychology which was receiving popular as well as scholarly attention. Orwell, however, had expressed a practical interest in the individual's psychological reaction to the tactics of regimes such as the Nazis in Germany or to situations such as the anti-German and anti-collaborator fervor at the end of World War II.

Orwell's evolution as a “modernist” writer, with his attention to the interior thoughts of protagonists such as Gordon Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) and George Bowling (Coming Up for Air), is furthered from the first page of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his portrayal of Winston Smith. Whereas the struggles of Comstock and Bowling are with external forces such as urbanization and capitalism, Winston's battle is not only with the State and Party but also with himself. In simple Freudian terms, his id, the impulse to recover his past, confronts an ego which is trying to explain the present. Up to the time when Winston begins writing his diary, this has been resolved by the superego, the adherence to rules and practices which have made him a good citizen of Oceania.

Winston's impulse gradually presses him, through the diary, through his wanderings into unacceptable areas, through his relationship with Julia, to challenge this personal order. Yet this underlying tension never disappears: Will Winston be transformed or will order be restored?

This Freudian approach in Nineteen Eighty-Four interacts with a behavioral approach to psychology. Pavlovian theories on prompting a response through positive reinforcement were generally known in the 1940s, and there had been many stories of Nazi experiments to condition subjects through the threat and application of punishment. Orwell even drew upon childhood recollections of buying “one of those big rat-cage traps” and the memory from the Spanish Civil War of rats in the trenches. The protracted scene between O'Brien and Winston at the end of the novel plays out these ideas, culminating in Winston's renewed acceptance of the dictates and “truths” of O'Brien, the Party, and the State.

Orwell was never happy with his depiction of the process. He wrote Julian Symons, who criticized the torture passages after Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared, “You are of course right about the vulgarity of the ‘Room 101’ business. I was aware of this while writing it, but I didn't know another way of getting somewhere near the effect I wanted.”⁴

GENDER RELATIONS

In the late 1940s, best-selling books used a “popular” version of Freudian psychology to portray a negative image of women who controlled men. There is no evidence that Orwell read any of these books, nor does he explicitly delineate a theory of gender relations. Yet Orwell's stark depictions of women are just as problematic as conceptions of the “viper” or the “marked woman.” Beatrix Campbell's assessment is incisive: “Orwell's eye never comes to rest on the culture of women, their concerns, their history, their movements. He only holds women to the filter of his own desire—or distaste.”⁵ Deirdre Beddoe adds, “Julia is as brainless as Elizabeth Lackersteen [Burmese Days] or Hilda Bowling [Coming Up for Air]. … [Orwell] is contemptuous of women's intellects; he reduces married women and spinsters to stereotypes and in the portrayal of both he draws on the conventions of seaside postcards.”⁶

Orwell's points are made through contrasts between two-dimensional images. Winston's mother is a saintly martyr, killed both by the repression of the State and by the greed of her son. Her essential goodness, expressed not through intellectual depth but through the simple picture of maternal care for her children, is echoed in Winston's evolving reaction to the washerwoman. The maternal image is evoked physically through her “strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly” (867).

Julia's contrasting image, with her “shapeliness of … hips” (748), “supple waist” (868), and “body gleam[ing] white in the sun” (817), is emphasized by Winston's conclusion that “out of [Winston and Julia's] bodies no child would ever come” (868). Julia's body and sexuality is compared positively not only with the “very straight” frame and the face with “as nearly as possible nothing behind it” (782) of Katharine, Winston's wife, but also with the degraded prostitute whose cardboard mask finally yields to “a cavernous blackness” and the face of “quite an old woman, fifty years old at least” (783). In the end, however, she can never be complete because of the barriers to motherhood.

Denied this essential nature, Julia cannot find completion through her thoughts, whatever Winston's hope of passing “on the secret … mind to mind” (868). She is empty of ideas beyond rebellion through sexual activity and the obtaining of forbidden luxuries. Initially this is enough for Winston, for he seeks “not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces” (817). He might jibe at her lack of intellectual rebellion, but any frustration at her lack of political interest, represented by her falling asleep while Winston reads Goldstein's book, evaporates at the “sun on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own” (866).

Orwell raises further issues with his uncritical, troubling projection of Winston's sexuality. Raymond Williams is charitable when he writes of Winston having “the lonely confusion of the adolescent—so guilty about lovemaking that corruption of the object is a necessary element of its pleasure.”⁷ Orwell offers the excuse of political rebellion for Winston's prurient interest (“The more men you've had, the more I love you”) in Julia's sexual history:

Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds—thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.

(817)

The matter does not stop there, however. Before Julia proves a willing partner, Winston has “wanted to rape [her] and then murder [her] afterwards” (814). He has fantasized:

He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. 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.

(751)

The justification lies not only in the pervasive concept of “hate” in Oceania but in a disturbing generalization about gender:

[Winston] disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

(748)

There is no evidence that Winston ever abandons this view. Instead Julia “proves” herself by distancing herself from her gender: she exclaims how she lives “always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” (820)

The disturbing thought is that it is Orwell, as well as Winston, who continues to feel “the urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice” (783).

CLASS AND SOCIAL POSITION

Much of Orwell's writing was ostensibly concerned with “class,” in particular the relationship between those who held privileged positions because of power, wealth, or aristocratic status, and those who were the poorest in society. In fact, Orwell's critique of class, detached from any systematic consideration of economics, politics, and ideas, is often superficial.⁸

The same pattern of analysis is evident in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book is at its sharpest when it describes Winston's position within the political system. He is not of the elite in the Inner Party, but his work in the Ministry of Truth is valuable enough that he does not sink into the mire of the proles. This position is marked by Winston's dress in the coveralls of the Party member, by his home and work in the protected inner sanctum of Oceania, and by his precise language, which is contrasted with the local dialects of the proles.

The book is awkward, however, in its description of Winston's encounter with proles. Apart from Winston's clichéd observation of the washerwoman, his incoherent conversation with the old man in the pub, and his dealing with Mr. Charrington (who, in the end, is not a prole but an agent of the Party), the description of the proles is more a frightening specter than the detailed observation of Orwell's documentaries.

The issue is not that the living conditions are crowded, filthy, and dangerous—the depiction in Nineteen Eighty-Four could be lifted directly from The Road to Wigan Pier—but that Winston's proles do not have the hope, ability, or aspiration to rise above these conditions. Beatrix Campbell, who links Orwell's treatment of gender to his portrayal of the proles, summarises, “He excludes the working class from history and fails to give them any place in the revolutionary cast, other than the supporting role, the proverbial extras.”⁹

The residents are inured to the bombs that fall among them, devoting any mental effort to the study of how to win the Lottery (which has been rigged by the Party to ensure the jackpot goes only to non-existent persons). Orwell may be making a point about memory through his parody of the old man whose manic recollection, in response to Winston's prompting of Party literature of “the most terrible oppression, injustice, poverty” (795), is limited to top hats and an encounter with a “gent” on Boat Race night. However, as Winston is left with no explanation of how the proles became and remained the proles, Orwell can never move beyond a caricature of class. Winston and Julia's sanctuary above Mr. Charrington's shop is not only a refuge from the Party but from the proles whom Winston professes to revere. (Significantly, this sanctuary is invaded by the filthy rats which are a feature of the prole environment.)

The proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four are the figurative counterpart of the animals in Animal Farm. They are compared to “a horse shaking off flies.”The reader is told: “So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern” (784).

“ENGLAND”

Orwell, despite his famous denunciation of nationalism, was a “nationalist” writer. Indeed he went beyond nationalism for his allegiance was not to Britain but to a mythical “England” of “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes [mailboxes].” In 1940, he called out to readers:

[England] is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.¹⁰

Essays after the war considered the Englishness of cricket, the ideal pub, the perfect cup of tea, and toads in spring. Even the symbolic importance of Nineteen Eighty-Four's antique hemisphere with its coral was anticipated in a 1946 column on the wonder of junk shops.

England [was] perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals [were] ashamed of their own nationality.

(George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius [New York: Viking Penguin, 1982]: 63-4)

Orwell's nostalgic vision was shattered by the decadence and filth of the present, represented in his documentaries and novels of the 1930s. “England” disappeared politically to become part of Oceania's Airstrip One, and it disappeared physically in “these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions … the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willowherb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses” (744).

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston's London is bleak, grimy, and menacing. Modern “landmarks” loom menacingly over the populace, as in Orwell's conversion of Senate House, the main building of the University of London, into the Ministry of Truth. The prole areas are threatened by Oceania's own rockets. Even Winston's fragmented memories of the city are of a noisy, crowded subway station serving as a bomb shelter.

In contrast, Orwell's idyllic England is in the countryside. Just before drafting Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell had written a series of short articles on English culture and locales. His favored images—the perfect pub, village cricket, a toad in the pond—were all set in the Golden Country that he commemorated in Coming Up for Air and would resurrect in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Golden Country is not just the remedy for Winston's psyche, it is the hope for recovery of the “lost” England. However, just as Winston's brief aspirations are crushed, the gentler, kinder, more beautiful England is forever departed. Orwell cannot go home again.

THEMES IN NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR RELATED TO EVENTS IN ORWELL'S LIFE

One must be careful never to equate a protagonist with an author. The parallels between Orwell's life and Winston's thoughts and actions in Nineteen Eighty-Four are striking enough, however, to consider Winston as a vehicle for Orwell's observations and fears, if not as a surrogate for Orwell, in 1948. Orwell's friend, Julian Symons, commented, “It is queer route that Mr. Orwell has taken from Burma to the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four, by way of Catalonia and Wigan Pier.”¹¹ To an extent, Orwell's protagonists had always served this purpose: John Flory (Burmese Days) was an outlet for the author's conflicted views of imperialism as well as Orwell's fears of his physical frailties and his awkward relations with women; Gordon Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) vented Orwell's hatred of literary cliques and the “money god” that hovered over his impoverished life in London; George Bowling (Coming Up for Air) personified Orwell's nostalgic search for the lost England of his childhood and his vilification of left-wing activists and alternative lifestyles.

Winston Smith provides Orwell with multiple approaches to issues in the author's life. Winston's evolving thoughts on the individual and the State/Party, through history, memory, and “propaganda,” present the arguments of Orwell's nonfiction to a wider audience. Winston's troubled relations with his mother, his wife, and his lover are an expression of Orwell's own problems. Winston is even a physical representation of Orwell's anxiety about his constant illness and the decay of his body.

The social environment of Oceania owes much to Orwell's observations of British and French conditions of the 1930s. The origins of the political environment, however, owe more to Orwell's troubled, even hostile, relationship with the “socialism” that he supposedly advocated. Early in his career, Orwell rejected the systematic approach that marked not only Marxism but other critiques of capitalism and rejected those who pursued such approaches:

I had at that time no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then—it sometimes seems to me now, for that matter—that economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters.¹²

The second half of The Road to Wigan Pier documented Orwell's break with those activists (including Victor Gollancz, the publisher of the book) who were either “warm-hearted, unthinking” Socialists from the working class or “intellectual, book-trained” Socialists with their “soggy half-baked insincerity,” complemented by a “prevalence of cranks” including “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”¹³

Homage to Catalonia, the documentary of Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, further established him as a scourge of the Left. Of course, Orwell was no friend of the “Right” and movements such as Fascism (after all, in the Spanish front line he faced fascists and other conservative supporters of General Francisco Franco, but Homage to Catalonia becomes a story of the in-fighting in Spain between the Communists and groups such as Trotskyists and anarchists and a depiction of a cowardly left-wing British press following the Communist line.

Orwell's personal politics were more complex than anti-communism, however. He was active in the Independent Labour Party, which had separated from the “mainstream” Labour Party in the 1930s and was opposing war with Germany. Orwell put the case in Coming Up for Air, closing with an oblique reference to the “after-war” world of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

In 1914 we thought it was going to be a glorious business. Well, it wasn't. It was just a bloody mess. … You think war's all heroism and V. C. [Victoria Cross, the highest British military decoration] charges, but I tell you it isn't like that. You don't have bayonet-charges nowadays, and when you do it isn't like you imagine. You don't feel like a hero. All you know is that you've had no sleep for three days, and stink like a polecat, you're pissing your bags with fright, and your hands are so cold you can't hold your rifle. But that doesn't matter a damn, either. It's the things that happen afterwards.¹⁴

After this short-lived if passionate embrace of pacifism, Orwell used his experiences in World War II to develop his criticism of the totalitarian system of National Socialism. At the same time, Orwell bolstered his hatred of many on the Left. He maintained a pointed skepticism about the Soviet Union, even though that country had become an ally of Britain's in the fight against Germany. He vehemently denounced pacifists, who only a few years earlier had been his colleagues, and naive or cunning Socialists: “The quisling intellectual is a phenomenon of the last two years.”¹⁵ The protracted effort to publish Animal Farm reinforced Orwell's opinion that he was being blocked not only by the London “literary clique” but also by political forces.

The thing that politicians are seemingly unable to understand is that you cannot produce a vigorous literature by terrorising everyone into conformity.

(George Orwell “As I Please,” Tribune, 3 January 1947)

By the end of World War II, Orwell was caught up in contradiction. His politics were conflicted, as Alok Rai notes, by a “wartime phase of accommodation with his ambient society [in which] Orwell is lulled into making a ‘conservative’ commitment which he can later neither live with nor reject.”¹⁶ Orwell's vision of socialism, always shaky because of his inability and disinterest in economic and social theory and analysis, was becoming little more than a fetish.

Not only was he offering little in the way of an alternative to U.S.-led capitalism, his defence of political rights was far from absolute. On the one hand, he was defending individual freedom not only through his writing but also through his involvement in the Freedom Defence Committee and support of activists arrested for speaking out in Hyde Park in London.¹⁷ On the other, he was advocating that “Communists” and “crypto-Communists” be publicly identified, shamed, and removed from positions of influence. His accusations paralleled those of Red-hunters such as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover:

The actual number of Communists and “fellow-travellers” is still only a few score thousands, and has no doubt dwindled over the past year. But while they have somewhat lost ground with the general public, they have now succeeded in capturing the leadership of several important unions, and in addition there is the group of “underground” Communist MPs—that MPs elected as Labour men but secretly members of the CP or reliably sympathetic to it.¹⁸

When Konni Zilliacus, the left-wing Member of Parliament, denied that he was a ‘crypto-Communist,’ Orwell had the unanswerable rebuttal, ‘What else could he say?’¹⁹

Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell's way out of the dilemma over the individual and the State. Any problems with a State, led by non-Communists, and its oppression and denial of the rights of Communists and suspects on the “Left” were removed by reversing the labels. Because the villainous State/Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of the Left, with its slogan of “Ingsoc” (English Socialism) and propaganda denouncing capitalism, Orwell could pursue his familiar themes of revolution betrayed (the central theme of Animal Farm), totalitarian power, and Communist menace. Because Winston Smith, Orwell's surrogate, is the “common man” without power, the reader could be reassured that Winston and Orwell were always on the side of individual freedom.

Yet Orwell had qualms about the resolution. The U.S. press seized upon Nineteen Eighty-Four as a seminal anti-Communist and even anti-Socialist tract. In one of the last letters of his life, Orwell wrote Francis Henson, an official of the United Auto Workers who was concerned about the press reaction, “My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.”²⁰

Some critics and biographers have argued that Nineteen Eighty-Four is the outcome of other aspects of Orwell's life. Anthony West sparked a debate by claiming that the novel was fostered by Orwell's memories of his first boarding school, an experience that the author recalled with horror and dread in an essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” which was written or revised in 1947. Others have attributed the bleakness of the work to Orwell's failing health; Tom Hopkinson, for example, claimed that Orwell told him, “[Nineteen Eighty-Four] wouldn't have been so gloomy. … If I hadn't been so ill.”

These claims have been vigorously challenged, notably by Orwell's biographer Bernard Crick. A significant objection is that Orwell first outlined the novel in 1943, long before his final illness and “Such, Such Were the Joys,” and that the outline changed little after 1947. In the end, there is no need to separate the personal from the political in the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

THEMES OF THE 1940S: THE COLD WAR

By the time Orwell began drafting Nineteen Eighty-Four, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, former allies in World War II, were in conflict throughout the world. The U.S. and Britain were pursuing a Western European economic bloc which included a revived Germany, while the Soviet Union was ensuring that Eastern Europe would be a “buffer zone” under Communist control. The first Cold War crisis had occurred in March 1946 over Iran and its oilfields when the Soviet Union had balked at withdrawing its troops from the north of the country. Greece was split by civil war, with the U.S. mistakenly believing that Moscow was supporting the insurgency of the Greek Communists, and the Administration of President Harry Truman also feared the Soviet Union was pressing for a military presence in Turkey.

By 1948, with Mao Zedong's Communist Party gaining the upper hand in the Chinese Civil War and promising to unite the country as the leader of a new Asia, Orwell could contend that the world was dividing into the three blocs that James Burnham had foreseen.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. …

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

(Harry Truman, “The Truman Doctrine” speech to Congress, March 12, 1947, quoted in Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The U.S. Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-1956 [New York: New York University Press, 1999]: 6-7)

The Marshall Plan and the Soviet response divided Europe not only economically but also into political and military camps. Two months before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ten Western European countries, the U.S., and Canada formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; four months after publication, the victorious Communist Party proclaimed a new People's Republic of China.

The Cold War was a new kind of conflict. As Orwell foresaw in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it could not be resolved by the atomic bomb or by conventional military forces. Instead, the goal for each superpower was to maintain its sphere of influence through propaganda, ideology, and the promotion of a superior way of life. Orwell wrote at length about Soviet control of the media, literature, and the arts; what he did not mention was that Western governments, including the U.S. and Britain, were using more subtle methods to shape the output of the “private” sector.

The only big political questions in the world today are: for Russia—against Russia, for America—against America, for democracy—against democracy.

(George Orwell, “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus,” late 1947/early 1948, in CEJL, Vol. 4: 395)

The Central Intelligence Agency and its British equivalent, MI6, provided millions of dollars in secret funds to journalists, artists, women's and youth groups, trade unions, and intellectual movements. (After his death, Orwell's work benefited from this secret largesse, with MI6 subsidizing the distribution of his books and the CIA helping arrange the film versions of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

THE WELFARE STATE

The election of a Labour Government in 1945 began a new era in British politics. The Government, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, sought extensive State involvement in the running of the economy, including nationalization of banks and key industries, and set the goal of universal provision of education, health care, and unemployment and disability benefits. This program, which some claimed as “socialism,” became popularly known as the “welfare state.” At first glance, Labour's programme should have addressed Orwell's long-standing concerns about the materialism and decay he associated with urban capitalism.

However, Orwell had mixed feelings about the Government's quest. On the one hand, he claimed to be a socialist and had advocated, in The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941, a fixed scale of incomes between the highest and lowest-paid and nationalization of land, mines, banks, railways, and key industries.²¹ On the other, he worried that the information and organization needed to implement the welfare state would lead to State interference in private lives.

Socialism, in the sense of economic collectivism, is conquering the earth at a speed that would hardly have seemed possible 60 years ago, and yet Utopia, at any rate Wilde's Utopia, is no nearer.

(George Orwell, Review of Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism, The Observer, May 9, 1948; reprinted in CEJL, Vol. 4: 426)

Nineteen Eighty-Four refers to the “remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.” Moreover, the depressing environment of London is directly linked to the Socialist project: “Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC” (744). In the end, Orwell's pessimism overcame his optimism, primarily because of his vision of new technologies.

TECHNOLOGY

Technology had become a leading theme of public discussion after the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945; however, writers had been debating the benefits and dangers of new technologies long before this. The challenge came not only from military technologies but also from “social” technologies which could be put to different uses. Television, created just before World War II, but only beginning to reach a wide audience in the late 1940s, could become the surveillance “telescreen” of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newsreel in the cinemas not only informed but conditioned the audience to endorse and applaud the terror and warfare of the State. All the technology of “modernity” could be used to control as well as liberate the populace. Orwell had written in a 1946 column, “The tendency of many modern inventions—in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane—is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.”²²

URBANIZATION

Orwell's opinion of technology was linked to his dark vision of urbanization. The growth of the city, with the shift of the population from rural to urban areas and the “Industrial Revolution,” accelerated from the 19th century. The associated problems, such as overcrowding, filth, and disease, and the image of the city as a dangerous and forbidding place, were recurrent concerns of British writers.

Orwell, despite being a resident of London for much of his adult life, had a particularly harsh view of urban life. His novels of the 1930s featured characters roaming the streets of an uncaring metropolis (Dorothy Hare in A Clergyman's Daughter), railing ineffectively at the filth and garish lighting of an area dominated by money (Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying), or seeking to escape the bleak, unfeeling environment (George Bowling in Coming Up for Air). He was no kinder about London in his wartime “Letter” for the journal Partisan Review, writing in 1944, “There has been no real shift of power and no increase in genuine democracy. The same people still own the property and usurp all the best jobs.”²³ After World War II, this pessimism was reinforced by deprivation. The rationing system continued until 1955, and in the late 1940s, the average Briton was consuming fewer calories than in wartime. There was a protracted struggle to repair the bomb and rocket damage that scarred much of London, and reconstruction was limited by recurrent economic crises. Only in 1951, the year after Orwell's death, would London try to lift itself with the Festival of Britain.

THEMES IN OTHER NOVELS AND POLITICAL TEXTS

Orwell's novel of dystopia, be it in the present or the future, and political terror was unique in late 1940s Britain; however, it clearly drew from several important works published before the war, and it arguably had an ancestor from the 17th century.

The antecedent was Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. As Patrick Reilly has noted, “Both texts pursue the truth about man, seeking the true self, the authentic person, who will at last be found beneath the accretions of culture and the drapings of mythology; both end in a kind of conversion in which once sacrosanct dogmas about human identity are exposed as totally untenable superstitions.”²⁴

Orwell had written an extended essay about Swift in 1946. The essay is notable not for the literary criticism, which is muddled, but for Orwell's efforts to fit Swift into a Cold War environment—Swift, although a “reactionary” writer, is to be commended for his stand against totalitarianism—and for a revealing misinterpretation. Far from appreciating the black comedy of Swift's work, Orwell conducts amateur psychoanalysis: “Swift was presumably impotent, and had an exaggerated horror of dungà. Such [a person is] not likely to enjoy even the small amount of happiness that falls to most human beings.”²⁵ It is far from surprising, given Orwell's failure to recognise the “comic satire” in Gulliver's Travels, that Nineteen Eighty-Four is “depressingly humourless.”²⁶ Yet, just as Gulliver's journey ends with the “revelation” of the ascendancy of the cruel Yahoos, so Winston's ends in Room 101.

As Andy Croft has noted, Orwell owed a great deal to the futurist literature of a previous generation of writers. Since he was a boy, he had been an avid reader of H. G. Wells, citing The Sleeper Awakes (1900) as one of his favorite books.²⁷ Orwell also was familiar with and critical of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Other futurist writers who may have influenced Orwell included his friend Cyril Connolly, who had published a 1938 short story “Year Nine,” in which a young man and woman pursue a love affair in a totalitarian state headed by “Our Leader,”²⁸ and even Rudyard Kipling, who wrote stories of “the A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons [which] controls the planet.”²⁹

The primary model for Oceania may have been We (1920), the work of Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, which Orwell reviewed in January 1946 and which he recommended (unsuccessfully) to Fredric Warburg for re-publication in Britain in 1949.³⁰ Set in the 26th century, the novel depicts a world where people live in glass houses so they can be watched by the “Guardians,” the equivalent of Orwell's Thought Office. Everyone wears identical uniforms, and each person is designated by number. The Single State is led by the Benefactor, who is unanimously re-elected by the population. Like Orwell, Zamyatin also pays close attention to the State's attitudes towards sexual behaviour. In his world, which has no marriage, sex is not discouraged but regulated with each person having a ration book for his/her encounters.

The protagonist in We, a mathematician named D-503 who is in charge of building the first rocket for inter-planetary flight, carried out advance work for Nineteen Eighty-Four. He considers the relationship between power, justice, and “faith”: “Their [the Ancients'] God couldn't come up with any smarter idea than sacrificing yourself, never mind why. But we, when we sacrifice to our God, OneState, we make a calm, rational, carefully considered sacrifice.” He is a generation ahead of Winston in evaluating knowledge and freedom. He writes, “Truth is one, and the true path is one. And that truth is two times two and that true path is four.” He even exalts the service of literature for the ends of the State:

Our poets no longer soar into the Empyrean: they've come down to earth. … Their lyre consists of the morning hum of electrical toothbrushes, the spark's ominous snap in the Machine of the Benefactor, the grandiose echo of the OneState Anthem, the intimate sound of the crystal bright chamber pot at night, the exciting clattering of lowering blinds, the merry voices of the latest cookbook, and the barely audible whisper of the street membranes [for perpetual surveillance].³¹

Some scholars have emphasized a fundamental difference between the future “fantasy” world of We and Orwell's naturalistic Oceania of the present. Given the general approach of the books to the individual, the State, and power, the difference is not so fundamental. More intriguing is that Zamyatin, far from establishing how the struggle of the individual is to use reason to challenge the State, allies the “reason” of D-503 and authority. He is fulfilling the State's command “to integrate completely the colossal equation of the universe … to unbend the wild curve, to straighten it tangentially, asymptotically, to flatten it to an undeviating line. Because the line of OneState is a straight line.” Only when D-503 declares, “Everybody has to go mad, everybody must absolutely go mad, and as soon as possible!” does his personal revolution (ultimately a failure like Winston's) begin.³²

The influences upon Orwell's depiction of political terror have not been as widely studied by scholars. In addition to the nonfictional accounts of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorial regimes before, during, and after World War II, Orwell appears to have drawn from Jack London and Arthur Koestler.

London may appear at first glance an unusual source for Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Orwell was fascinated by the American's depiction of authority in The Iron Heel (1903), reviewing the novel in 1940. In The Iron Heel, London portrays a tyranny of the Oligarchs who, as in Oceania, pursue violence in the name of progress. The Oligarchs' propaganda is explicit (“Not God, not Mammon, but Power”), and London's description of violence anticipates O'Brien's depiction of a “boot stamping on a human face—for ever” (898). The Oligarchs declare they “will grind you revolutionaries down under our heel, and we shall walk on your faces.”³³ Unlike Orwell, however, London still projects power as a means to a broader end, in this case the defense of “civilization” against the proletariat.

Arthur Koestler was another inspiration for Orwell with Darkness at Noon (1940), an acclaimed account of the terror of the Soviet purges of the 1930s. In the show trials, leading Party members would confess to “crimes.” The question of why and how they were led to confession shaped Darkness at Noon but Koestler, like Orwell, focuses his narrative on a single protagonist. Orwell's friendship with Koestler from World War II offered many opportunities to discuss the work.

For a full appreciation of the influences upon Orwell, however, one must go beyond fiction. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is based on the projections of James Burnham, in particular two books reviewed by Orwell in 1946, The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. Orwell, while troubled by Burnham's alleged fascination with power and proponents such as Stalin and the Nazis, adopted his political theory.³⁴Nineteen Eighty-Four reproduced Burnham's division of the world into three superstates which control their populations through permanent, inconclusive war. Burnham's “managerial” society also was inspiration for Orwell's Inner Party bureaucrats controlling the Outer Party of functionaries as well as the mass of proles.

In the end, Burnham's vision of managerial advance would overwhelm technological advance. Orwell, considering “You and the Atom Bomb” in 1945, concluded:

But suppose—and really this is the likeliest development—that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.³⁵

He would repeat the assertion two years later, “Civilizations of this type might remain static for thousands of years.”³⁶

Notes

1. Roger Lathbury, Literary Masterpieces: The Great Gatsby (Farmington Hills MI: The Gale Group, 2000), p. 57.

2. George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” Horizon, October 1944, reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume III, p. 222.

3. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air in The Collected Novels (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), p. 519.

4. George Orwell to Julian Symons, February 1949, reprinted in CEJL, Volume 4, p. 502.

5. Beatrix Campbell, “Orwell—Paterfamilias or Big Brother” in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth: Orwell, Views from the Left (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), p. 131.

6. Deirdre Beddoe, “Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell,” in Norris (ed.), p. 148.

7. Raymond Williams, Orwell (Glasgow: Fontana, 1971), p. 81.

8. See Scott Lucas, George Orwell (Farmington Hills MI: The Gale Group, 2002).

9. Campbell in Norris (ed.), p. 135.

10. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), p. 37.

11. Rai, p. 120.

12. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Penguin,1962), p. 130.

13. The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 139, 152, and 159.

14. Coming Up for Air, p. 520.

15. “London Letter,” Partisan Review, March-April 1942, reprinted in CEJL, Volume 2, p. 182.

16. Rai, p. 132.

17. Hyde Park, one of the chain of major parks in central London, is famed for Speakers' Corner where, in theory, any person may speak out on any topic.

18. George Orwell, “London Letter,” Partisan Review, Summer 1946, reprinted in CEJL, Volume IV, p. 184.

19. George Orwell to Tribune, 17 January 1947, reprinted in CEJL, Volume IV, p. 192.

20. George Orwell to Francis Henson, 16 June 1949, reprinted in CEJL, Volume IV, p. 502.

21. See George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982).

22. George Orwell, “Pleasure Spots,” Tribune, 11 January 1946, reprinted in CEJL, Volume 4, p. 78.

23. George Orwell, “London Letter,” Partisan Review, Winter 1945, reprinted in CEJL, Volume 3, p. 293.

24. Patrick Reilly, The Literature of Guilt (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 92.

25. George Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels,” Polemic, September-October 1946, reprinted in CEJL, Volume 4, pp. 205-23.

26. Reilly, p. 93.

27. See Orwell's use of Wells and other authors in his pamphlet, “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution” (London: Socialist Book Centre, 1946), reprinted in CEJL, Volume 4, p. 160.

28. See Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 355.

29. See William Steinhoff, The Road to 1984 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) for a further discussion of these influences.

30. George Orwell, review of We, Tribune, 4 January 1946, CEJL, Volume 4, p. 72; George Orwell to Fredric Warburg, 30 March 1949, CEJL, p. 487.

31. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Clarence Brown (New York: Penguin, 1993), pp. 45 and 65-8.

32. Ibid., pp. 4 and 152.

33. See Christopher Small, The Road to Miniluv (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 186.

34. Orwell, “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,” CEJL, Volume IV, pp. 160-80.

35. George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Tribune, 19 October 1945, reprinted in CEJL, Volume 4, pp. 7-12.

36. George Orwell, “Toward European Unity,” Partisan Review, July-August 1947, reprinted in CEJL, Volume 4, pp. 370-5.