18. Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four
Edition used is George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), introd. Julian Symons (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011). Hereafter referred to as NEF. [Content warning: sexual violence]
Recent reassessments of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have stressed the novel’s formal and generic diversity. Take John Bowen, for example, who in his editorial introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics version of the novel writes as follows:
There has been a bewildering number of interpretations of the book, often dogmatic in character and shaped by the pressing historical circumstances in which they were written and by the political beliefs of its readers. It has been seen as a relatively realistic portrayal of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, as an extrapolation from what London was in 1948, and as a picture of what Orwell feared it might become in the future. It has been described as a “satire”, as a dystopia, science fiction, a thought experiment, a techno-historical fantasy, and a political treatise. It has elements of all of these genres, but what it most often resembles is, quite simply, a Gothic novel.[1]
In The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019), Dorian Lynskey strikes a similar tone:
A novel that has been claimed by socialists, conservatives, anarchists, liberals, Catholics, and libertarians of every description cannot be, as Milan Kundera alleged, merely “political thought disguised as a novel.” It is certainly not a precise allegory like Animal Farm, where every element slots into the real world with a neat click. Orwell’s famously translucent prose conceals a world of complexity. Nineteen Eighty-Four is usually described as a dystopia. It is also, to varying and debatable degrees, a satire, a prophecy, a warning, a political thesis, a work of science fiction, a spy thriller, a psychological horror, a gothic nightmare, a postmodern text, and a love story.[2]
These lists of the different generic emphases within Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four attest to the novel’s formal variety. This is a novel that isn’t just one thing (although the agreement over its gothic qualities is an interesting development). Despite being called, often enough, a dystopia, it continues to be seen as many other kinds of book. And among all these different possibilities, the idea that Nineteen Eighty-Four contains elements of a love story is hardly controversial. Yet precisely what kinds of love Orwell’s story is concerned with is a less easily solved, more multi-sided problem.
Is Nineteen Eighty-Four a love story? The question seems obvious to answer, at first glance. A lot of people would say ‘yes’ in response to it. And they’d be right. This is a love story, at one level—the love story of Winston’s Romeo to Julia’s Juliet, their story ending in as much pain and suffering as Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers. Maybe this is why Winston wakes up ‘with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips’ after dreaming about Julia coming towards him across a field and annihilating ‘a whole culture, a whole system of thought,’ with a single, stunning movement of flinging her clothes ‘disdainfully aside’ (NEF, p. 33). Much later in the story, when Julia surreptitiously hands Winston a note, he opens it to discover that it contains a simple message in ‘large unformed handwriting: I love you’ (NEF, p. 113). Their relationship is in many ways less about the love of one person for another and more about ‘the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire […] that would tear the Party to pieces’ (NEF, p. 132). But by the time both Winston and Julia have been captured and imprisoned in the Party’s dungeons, love has reasserted its claim on Winston, at least. In the run-up to his betrayal of Julia, he knows that he has ‘not stopped loving her’, that his feelings for her have ‘remained the same’ (NEF, p. 287). Yet like the best love stories, the love itself can’t survive its telling. Winston does betray Julia, and Julia betrays Winston. In the end, Winston only has room in his heart for Big Brother.
There’s a great deal of evidence in Nineteen Eighty-Four to suggest that Julia’s and Winston’s relationship really is a loving one, at least at times. One such occasion is the first encounter they have together in the countryside. When they first embrace, Julia clasps her arms about Winston, ‘calling him darling, precious one, loved one’ (NEF, p. 126). The pastoral setting—a forested area near an ‘old, close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there’ (NEF, p. 129)—further accentuates the love-laden implications of the scene. Later on in the novel, Orwell describes Winston’s and Julia’s sexual activity in very particular terms as ‘making love’ (NEF, p. 134), an emphasis that in turn acquires nostalgic significance in the micro-utopian setting of the room above Mr Charrington’s shop: ‘[Winston] wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in a bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely’, the novel continues, ‘there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?’ (NEF, p. 150). The act of making love reconnects Winston and Julia with a long-vanished past, an ancient time of nigh-on unbelievable innocence and virtue.
Cutting significantly against this, however, is the way Orwell presents Winston’s view of Julia not only when he first witnesses her, but also when he begins his relationship with her. Winston is said to dislike ‘nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones’ (NEF, p. 12), so it’s no surprise that his initial impressions of Julia are unfavourable. He dislikes her because of her youth, her apparent total conformity, her boldness and shows of confidence. Yet the intensity of his disgust, and the dreams of misogynistic violence it evokes, can often take readers by surprise. During the Two Minutes Hate, Winston sees Julia and has ‘vivid’ and, in the novel’s phrasing, ‘beautiful hallucinations’ of flogging ‘her to death with a rubber truncheon’; of tying her ‘naked to a stake and shoot[ing] her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian’; of ravishing her and cutting ‘her throat at the moment of climax’ (NEF, p. 17). The hate-filled context suggests that Orwell meant to blame the Two Minutes Hate itself for drawing out these atrociously violent fantasies in Winston’s mind. Yet Orwell’s strategy of using violence against women to establish a scene, to set a certain kind of mood, is itself a fantasy of violence, and deserves to be questioned.[3] A very similar emphasis comes back into Winston’s mind when he and Julia make love in the countryside. In this moment, he imagines her as a sexual object with whom he can ‘do what he like[s]’ (NEF, p. 126). What she thinks of him at this moment, in return, we’re not privileged to know.
It isn’t obviously the case that Julia feels as strongly about Winston as Winston feels about her. If Julia is an agent of the Thought Police, as Winston suspects (NEF, p. 12) and as critics sometimes suggest, then her entanglement with Winston is less a matter of romance and more a matter of control. The fact that she calls Winston ‘dear’ and insists that she won’t leave him, no matter the dangers involved (NEF, p. 173), could from this angle be construed as an act designed to make Winston feel secure in her company before she betrays him. If Julia is innocent of the charge of Thought Police membership, then it may well simply be the case that she likes Winston because he represents a diversion from the usual run of things, the latest in a long run of sexual partners taken on for their entertainment value rather than for their revolutionary implications. And by the novel’s end Orwell treads a delicate line between suggesting, in the scene of Winston’s and Julia’s final encounter, that Julia has really been hurt by Winston, on the one hand, and that Julia only pretends to have been hurt by him, on the other. The case seems finally unanswerable. All we know for sure is that whatever their ‘love’ was, while it lasted, by the novel’s conclusion it has fallen away in favour of some other arrangement. The ‘long scar’ (NEF, p. 304) on Julia’s forehead that Winston notices after his ‘conversion’ may be lasting evidence of a real injury sustained during her own torture (if she is tortured) in Room 101, or it may be a ploy, organized by the Thought Police and O’Brien, designed to make Winston think that she went through exactly the same experience that he did. Nineteen Eighty-Four may be a love story, but the love it depicts is riddled with uncertainties from beginning to end.
One of the first things we learn about the future world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that there’s a building in it called the Ministry of Love. Of the four ministries in Airstrip One—the others being the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, and the Ministry of Plenty—the Ministry of Love is the one that’s ‘really frightening’ (NEF, p. 6). All these structures have an imposing, quasi-Egyptian ‘pyramidal’ (NEF, p. 5) massiveness, but the Ministry of Love is especially ominous: a place ‘impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors and hidden machine-gun nests’; even the streets outside it are ‘roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons’ (NEF, p. 6). Ironies abound. The Ministry of Love has very little to do with love, in the sense that Winston feels, and everything to do with pain—a place of executions in dark cellars (NEF, p. 52), alongside ‘tortures, drugs, delicate instruments’ that register your ‘nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning’ (NEF, p. 174). Winston ends up there. He endures much the same horrors. He’s cured of his rebelliousness by O’Brien inside its featureless interiors, emerging as a remade man.
Winston’s journey from dissident citizen to pliable conformist is a journey described explicitly in terms of love. It’s not enough to obey Big Brother, O’Brien informs Winston. He must love him (NEF, p. 295). And come to love him he does, as the novel’s famous ending paragraph makes clear:
[Winston] gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. (NEF, p. 311)
The novel’s third-person narration presents Winston’s love as an objective fact. Nevertheless, the nature of that love is intriguingly unspecified. Has Winston really come around, through torture, to a position of unqualified, unhesitating devotion (winning the victory over himself in the sense that he truly has annihilated his thoughts of rebellion and resistance)? Or has he found a way to ‘defeat’ himself into loving Big Brother by keeping his rebelliousness intact, yet subordinate to the outward appearance of conformity he presents to the world? Is Winston’s love a pose, in other words, or is it authentic? Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t allow for any straightforward decisions here. The melodramatic tone of the passage makes it hard to judge the ironies involved. But what is undeniably the case is that if this is love, then it’s a very disturbing kind of love—a love born not from tenderness, but from terror. Is love really love if it’s forced into existence? Is love really love if it’s elicited under duress?
Oceania is a world built on a strange relationship with love. At an early point in the novel, we learn one of the many ways in which human emotions have been transformed by the Party’s scheming:
The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. (NEF, p. 32)
Love in the sense meant here—a feeling or attitude of deep, selfless affection and fondness for another person—has been consigned, or is meant to have been consigned, to the dustbin of history. Love understood in these terms is as tantalizingly venerable as the survivors of the pre-revolutionary period (NEF, p. 96), or the figures of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford, all three ‘left over from the heroic early days of the Party’ (NEF, p. 79). It’s not simply that love of this selfless kind has more or less entirely disappeared from the Oceanian future. The point is that the capacity not only to feel but also to understand the value of love of this kind has started to fall away. A ‘real love affair’, we learn, has become ‘an almost unthinkable event’ (NEF, p. 71).
Different forms of love in Oceania are targeted for eradication in different ways. In the case of sexual love, the Party has given itself the goal of removing all pleasure from the sexual act. Winston grasps the point that, from the Party’s perspective, it isn’t love per se that’s the problem, but rather ‘eroticism’ (NEF, p. 68), a force which intensifies feelings of sexual love through physical intimacy. An array of mechanisms is positioned against the erotic: the authorization of marriage through committee, which associates it with a kind of bureaucratic tedium; the reduction of the purpose of marriage from the ideal of loving equality to the function of procreation alone; the increasing alignment of sexual intimacy with disgust; the formation of the Junior Anti-Sex League; and the creation of children through artificial insemination (NEF, pp. 68-9). The impression of physical attraction between couples is enough to make marriage a non-starter, as far as the authorities are concerned. Marriage must be strictly and solely utilitarian. Any hint of affection is treason. Ultimately, the point is to ‘kill the sex instinct’ altogether, or ‘to distort it and dirty it’ (NEF, p. 69). Winston realizes that this makes genuine sexual intimacy an act of ‘rebellion’, desire an instance of ‘thoughtcrime’ (NEF, p. 71). The ‘sexual puritanism of the Party’ (NEF, p. 75) represents an attempt to turn erotic love into machinic process.
The most obvious instance of this distorting and dirtying of sexual intimacy into a kind of mechanism is Winston’s relationship with his wife, Katharine. Or, rather, it would be more accurate to say that Winston perceives his relationship with his wife, in retrospect, as having turned, after a time, into a kind of mechanistic performance, like dolls on a stage. In reading about their sexual encounters, we learn that Winston remembers his time with Katharine as follows:
To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating, but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not impossible. She used even to remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two names for it. One was “making a baby”, and the other was “our duty to the Party”: yes, she had actually used that phrase. Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they parted. (NEF, p. 70)
Whatever this passage remembers, it is not sexual intimacy of a loving kind. This is sexual intimacy under threat, an act performed because it must be performed. This is not the first time in an Orwell novel that a woman character does not get to outline her side of the story, though we are given some insight into Katharine’s state of mind. She has sex with Winston because she’s a Party obedient, and Winston hates her for it. His cruel nickname for her, the ‘human sound-track’ (NEF, p. 69), aligns her with the stream of sound that pours out from the telescreens. The Party has succeeded in turning marriage, and the love it’s meant to encompass, into a form of transactional resentment.
In the case of a parent’s love for a child, and vice versa, the Party has other tricks up its sleeve. Most obviously it pits generations against each other through organizations like the Spies, which turns children into informants able and willing to hand over their parents to the authorities at the merest hint of non-conformity. Members of the Spies and other groups, such as the Youth League, are turned into ideally compliant subjects of the state through ‘careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, […] by lectures, parades, songs, slogans and martial music’, thereby driving out of them the sense of ‘natural feeling’ (NEF, p. 71) upon which love of a traditional sort depends in order to thrive. And their compliance leads, horrifyingly, to a related form of obedience from which love has been expunged, or maybe turned into a new and dreadful shape: the obedience of the parent denounced by their child, who draws out from the parent a form of transformed pride in this familial transgression. When Parsons is dobbed in by his daughter, and finds himself in the Ministry of Love, he can’t help but admire her state-spiritedness: ‘I don’t bear her any grudge for it’, he announces to Winston. ‘In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway’ (NEF, p. 245). It all makes for a stark contrast with the old man Winston remembers from the air raids of his youth, who suffered ‘under some grief that was genuine and unbearable’ (NEF, p. 35). Winston sees in that suffering the pain of a grandfather lamenting the violent death of his beloved granddaughter. There is love in this sense, and there is the Party’s love, which in all cases tends back to itself. One cannot officially love in Oceania without loving the Party in all cases, and under all circumstances.
This twisted and transformed love culminates in Winston’s love for O’Brien, a figure to whom Winston is ‘deeply drawn’ (NEF, p. 13) from the very first time he sees him. In this moment they share what Winston interprets as a kind of mystical visual exchange, one that, in Winston’s analysis at any rate, reads very much like an account of, or a desire for, love at first sight:
Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of re-settling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. “I am with you,” O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. “I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!” (NEF, p. 19)
This can be read as a kind of attraction. John Bowen, for example, reads it in exactly these terms, noting how Nineteen Eighty-Four can be read as ‘at heart a love story […] between two, or possibly three, men’: Winston, O’Brien, and Big Brother.[4] The moment ‘is paranoid’, Bowen continues, ‘but also like the beginning of a romance, as the two men’s eyes meet across a crowded room.’[5]
Winston’s and O’Brien’s relationship is a loving one, though the impression of love tends to be Winston’s rather than O’Brien’s. It is Winston, rather than his torturer, who tends to feel as if he might be loved by the other man. Nevertheless, we know, because the narrator tells us, that even when he’s in the thick of torturing Winston, O’Brien tends to speak to him in a ‘gentle and patient’ voice, having ‘the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish’ (NEF, p. 257). O’Brien assures Winston, in the Ministry of Love, that he’s worth taking trouble over to cure, but he also takes trouble to cure him in the most abhorrently tormenting ways. These torments are administered with ‘kindly’ interruptions, when O’Brien suddenly becomes more caring, less aloof. And then there is the moment, amid unimaginable pain, when Winston loses consciousness, only to wake up in O’Brien’s arms, clinging to him ‘like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders’ (NEF, pp. 262-3). We know in this moment that Winston has become totally reliant on O’Brien, no matter what they talk about or debate. Even after all that O’Brien does to Winston in violently re-educating him back into ‘sanity’, Winston maintains a ‘peculiar reverence’ (NEF, p. 286) for his tormentor.
The imagined sight of Winston clinging to O’Brien like a baby reads like a travestied version of a pietà—the sight of Mary holding on to the dead body of Jesus. There is none of this absolute love in O’Brien’s cradling of Winston. Instead, there is the love of the tyrant for a subject (Big Brother requiring Winston’s love to exist in his purest form), and the love of the administrator, O’Brien, for his next bureaucratic conquest. Both make a mockery of the selfless love of Winston’s mother. Remembering her is traumatic for Winston because he believes he murdered her; in remembering his betrayal of her, and of his sister, he can never regain that time, even in memory, when he, his mother, and his sister ‘had all been happy together’ (NEF, p. 309). ‘His mother’s memory [tears] at his heart because she had died loving him’, he realizes, in a time when he had been ‘too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow […] she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable’ (NEF, p. 32). The only way for him to be happy now, without this genuine form of love, is to be educated in a new kind of love—a love that sacrifices Julia to its cause, along with his own sense of self; a love that thrives in violence, that alienates the different, and traumatizes the soul. Orwell may not have been able to imagine this love in terms that avoid violence. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a novel caught in its own, and in Orwell’s own, structures of prejudice. But in charting the perverted course of a love twisted into new shapes for political goals, it retains a disturbing relevance and power.
[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), ed. John Bowen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. viii.
[2] Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (London: Picador, 2019), p. xviii.
[3] For similar thoughts about Shakespeare, see Emma Smith, ‘Tragedy, Misogyny, and King Lear’, emagazine: The Magazine for Advanced Level English, 92 (April 2021), pp. 4-7.
[4] Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Bowen, p. xv.
[5] Ibid., p. xvi.