7. Dirtying the Sex Instinct: Nineteen Eighty-Four Part I, Chapter 6 

Audio version / edition: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), introd. Julian Symons and ed. Peter Davison (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992)

This comparatively short chapter foregrounds how writing—as a process, as an object—structures Winston’s experience. The latter point is evident from the way writing appears on this chapter’s pages: here we see stretches of narrative space marked by interruptions in the form of extracts from Winston’s diary. The placement of these extracts on the page suggests that Orwell wants us to think about the material character of the diary, just as a similar strategy with Goldstein’s book (in Part II, Chapter 9) implies much the same. Orwell’s approach to the layout of the page indicates the diary’s significance for Winston as an outlet for complex feelings and for us, we readers, who have privileged access to Winston’s thoughts and emotions. The act of writing itself functions as a kind of utopian utterance here. In the real world of Airstrip One, there’s nowhere for the sentiments Winston expresses to go; in the compartmentalized reality of the diary, Winston can say and think whatever he likes, albeit on the understanding that doing so is the most scandalous crime he can commit under Ingsoc law. The diary is utopian because it enables Winston to occupy imaginatively a ‘nowhere’ space in which anything goes, and from which he can address an unknown future. It’s also utopian because it’s a space of impossibility, a receptacle for ideas that, in being articulated, point to their own undoing. To write in the diary means writing in something that will eventually be torn to pieces, or tossed into a memory hole. As a record of experience, it’s peculiarly susceptible to being destroyed. And yet, write in it Winston must. The act of writing down his emotions is an act that enables him to think them through, and perhaps, to a degree, to understand and come to terms with them.  

We learn in this chapter that certain complex feelings prompt Winston into barely controlled pangs of hypothetical violence. Here, the memory of a prospective sexual encounter, as logged in his diary, stops Winston in his tracks. Finding it temporarily ‘too difficult to go on’ (p. 66) with recording the memory, he presses his fingers against his eyes and is struck by ‘an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice’ (pp. 66-7). Like other moments of overpowering sensation in the novel, such as Winston’s desire to possess the diary (p. 8) or the ‘weariness’ (p. 274) that overwhelms him in the Ministry of Love, this gives us an insight into Winston’s fragility, his brittleness. The memory draws out from Winston urges ‘to bang his head against the wall’, ‘to kick over the table and hurl the inkpot through the window’, ‘to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory’ (p. 67) that torments him. The ‘urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice’ (p. 72) doesn’t go away by the time he finishes writing about his experience with the sex worker, whose agedness disgusts him (and, we suspect, disgusts Orwell too), just as he’s disgusted by his wife Katharine’s supposedly ‘stupid, vulgar, empty mind’ (p. 69). There’s a lot in Winston’s mind and body that’s damaged. But there’s also a lot in him that’s damaging, and that sees others through the prism of his own disgust-driven impairments: Katharine, the sex worker, Julia. 

Winston’s barely controlled viciousness is a sign of wider psycho-social problems. We learn in this chapter that his efforts to stop himself from bursting into displays of uninhibited rage are not restricted to him alone, but are indicative of Oceanic society more generally: 

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back: a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five or forty, tallish and thin, carrying a briefcase. They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man’s face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see. (p. 67) 

This passage implies that a ‘habitual’ discontent is simmering inside most members of the Outer Party. It doesn’t matter if the proles show signs of restlessness—they, as the novel demonstrates, can be safely ignored, because it seems that they lack the structural means and revolutionary consciousness with which to construct a meaningful opposition to Ingsoc’s overlordship. Those who belong to the Outer Party, by contrast, must always guard against the potential sedition of their own bodies, against the ‘symptoms of unorthodoxy’ (p. 26) and changes of habits and ‘nervous mannerism[s]’ that might symbolize ‘an inner struggle’ (p. 219) against the ruling order. They’re right to fear ‘the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy’ (p. 12), but they’ve just as much to dread from the involuntary forfeiture of their unthinking comportment: ‘A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide’ (p. 65). 

Approaching sex workers isn’t outlawed in Airstrip One. In fact, as the narrative indicates, it’s an activity ‘tacitly’ encouraged by the Party, who view it as ‘an outlet for instincts’ that cannot ‘be altogether suppressed’ (p. 68). Winston’s memory, then, is a memory of something officially outlawed—and punishable, officially, by time to be served in a labour camp—but unofficially supported by the very figures supposedly in ideological opposition to it. The deeper and more significant crime, at least as the Party imagines things, is intimacy, and pleasure in intimacy more specifically. A ‘furtive and joyless’ (p. 68) intimacy, of the sort that seems to exist between Mr and Mrs Parsons, is permissible. But the sort of intimacy that Winston and Julia eventually enjoy is absolutely to be hunted down and annihilated. This is to be done at one level through physical and ideological violence: by stopping people from forming emotional ties by preventing them from congregating, and from enjoying the closeness of the nuclear family; and by redefining the category of ‘the familial’ as a kind of treasonous criminality, something not only to be resisted by the individual but also cracked down on by the State. All of this sits in service of the essential goal of removing all pleasure from sexual intercourse, thereby reframing procreation within marriage as something ‘to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema’; as the narrative voice insists: ‘The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it’ (p. 69). In Oceania, to enjoy sex is to enjoy an activity and a space of intimacy away from the sanctioned existence of drudgery, pain, and unhappiness. 

Winston’s relationship with his wife, Katharine, is in all of these ways ‘good’ in the sense imagined by Ingsoc: joyless, perfunctory, repetitive, unsympathetic. Winston has barely thought of her in the decade or so since they parted after fifteen months of being together. She comes into his field of vision as a wholly unsatisfactory person and memory. Her ‘bold, aquiline face’ might have been ‘called noble’ except for the fact that ‘there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it’, and this has given Winston an impression that she ‘had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and [that] there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her’ (p. 69). A kind of puppet who winced and stiffened when Winston touched her, Katharine nevertheless expected them to go through with the weekly ‘performance’ (p. 70) of sexual intercourse in order to get pregnant, thereby doing their duty to the Party. When no child appeared, their relationship fell apart. Yet the remembrance of this failure doesn’t upset Winston so much as it provides him with a ‘horrible’ (p. 70) memory of submission, of Katharine doing her part so that he can do his, in a parody of the closeness Winston yearns for—‘a real love affair’ (p. 71).  

It’s worth pausing here to reflect on how Orwell’s depiction of Winston’s relationship, or non-relationship, with Katharine reflects a wider shortcoming of the novel: its inability or unwillingness to imagine the lives of women from their interior point of view. Orwell never wrote a first-person novel from this perspective. His only attempt at a first-person novel, Coming Up for Air (1939), is narrated by a man, and his only attempt at telling a story from a woman’s point of view (albeit in third-person terms), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), lays the broad emphasis on what happens to its protagonist, rather than on what she thinks and feels about what happens to her. Katharine isn’t an absence in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but she’s clearly ‘unfilled’ (and unfulfilled, too) as a narrative presence. There are varying gains to be had in wishing Orwell had written a different kind of novel, I think, but what he did write tells us important things about the perspectival priorities of his worldview. We know a lot about what Winston thinks of Katharine, but basically nothing of what she thinks about Winston, or about the world at large. And the same is true, I’d argue, of the other prominent women in the novel: the prostitute, Mrs Parsons, Winston’s mother, the woman who vomits near him in the Ministry of Love, and Julia. These women are memorable, no doubt about that, but they’re memorable primarily in the terms in which they bear on Winston’s telling. And this, ultimately, is bound up with Orwell’s decision to centre Nineteen Eighty-Four in the vocabularies of a man’s consciousness. 

So we learn very little about Katharine in this story. But then again, we learn very little about most people in Nineteen Eighty-Four, except for Winston Smith. Parsons, Ampleforth, Syme, Mr Charrington, O’Brien—the psychologies of all of these figures are closed to us, except for what we learn about them from the Winston-Smith-centric vantage-point of the narrative’s representational posture. What makes Winston’s psychology so interesting is that it’s conveyed to us in multiple ways: through the third-person narrative voice, which sticks close to his point of view (and often conveys his thoughts, dreams, and desires); and through his diary, which presents his words ‘themselves’ as if free from external interference. Winston views the diary as a kind of confessional instrument (p. 71) through which he can plead guilty to his wrongdoings and, if not exactly atone for them, at least get them out of his crowded head and on to the spacious page. Those who go against Ingsoc are always caught, and always confess (p. 107), but Winston is already a man of confessions long before the Thought Police arrive at his door. It’s stated and then reiterated that the story of his encounter with the prostitute has ‘got to be written down’ (p. 71), as if only the purging of words from his brain can make him feel better. It turns out that the act of writing in his diary does nothing of the kind. He feels as bad after writing in it as he does before he starts, which raises the possibility that the story has ‘got to be written down’ in the diary because his confession is inevitable. It has got to be written down because nothing else can happen here. Fated to be captured, and killed, Winston can do nothing but meet (or narrate) his doom. 

There’s something horribly fatalistic about Winston’s encounter with the prostitute. The way Winston represents his encounter with her, it’s as if he’s unable to stop himself from using her body in the most deplorably functional of ways: ‘When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same’ (p. 72). The conjunction (‘but’) at the start of the second sentence does a lot of work in this regard, simultaneously indicating Winston’s hesitation to go through with the act of copulation and evoking his disgust at her aged body. The memory disturbs him, just as the functionalism of the act should disturb us, too. Writing it down in his diary is meant to work as ‘therapy’ (p. 72), a cure that doesn’t have the desired effects. This is sex recalled as trauma, and not only trauma produced by the memory of physical contact with an older person, but also with the sight of an older person:  

What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all. (p. 72) 

Winston is disturbed as much by the memory of functional, mechanical intimacy as he’s disgusted by the sight of a mature, aging body. But he’s also disturbed by the depths of the woman’s mouth, and by the cracked thickness of the paint smeared over her face. Although at first he remembers this with interest—‘It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips’ (p. 66)—he eventually comes to be repulsed by it. 

I’ve mentioned in a previous discussion that Winston is disgusted by mouths. On the evidence of this chapter he also seems to be disgusted by the fulfilment of his own sexual desire under circumstances he later regrets. This doesn’t mean we should feel sorry for him. What it does mean, I think, is that we should try to understand why Orwell focuses on what could be called Winston’s misdirected loathing. Having dirtied the sex instinct, the Party forces its citizens to channel their sexual energies into hatred of the racial other—namely, of Emmanuel Goldstein. But this dirtying of the sex instinct also prompts Winston, and others like him, to externalize their hate in the guise of shame. Winston writes in his diary not only because he wants to work through and overcome the traumas he has come to associate with certain kinds of memory, but also because he’s ashamed of himself. This is why, presumably, he remembers feeling ‘defeat and resentment’ (p. 70) at the sight of the prostitute’s body. Such emotions are symptomatic of Oceania’s systematized maltreatment of his citizens. It’s also symptomatic of the misogyny that Orwell’s work only incompletely manages to self-diagnose. There’s a lot of hatred in Orwell’s writing, and often a hatred aimed at women that one suspects is really a form of self-directed hatred externalized in the form of psychological hostility. If you read Orwell’s earlier novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and focus on the psychology of its protagonist, Gordon Comstock, you’ll see what I mean. Orwell’s men are often the worst. 

A final thought, and then it’s time to stop. Winston’s memories of his wife are intermingled with the memories of the sex worker in a revealing way. In setting out that ‘a real love affair’ is a practical impossibility (and note how this does in fact eventually turn out to be true, given that his affair with Julia ends so calamitously), we learn that ‘natural feeling’ has been evacuated from the ‘women of the Party’ by ‘careful early conditioning, by games and cold water’ (p. 71), and so forth. This description evokes Winston’s earlier impression of Julia as carrying an ‘atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness’ (p. 12). Winston’s default mode, it seems, is hate. So although he’s often held up as a rebel, as a spanner in the works, and a fault in the machine, he is in so many ways a perfectly formed subject of the Party insofar as his natural urges tend towards the hate-ridden and spiteful. He yearns for intimacy, but there is the suggestion in this chapter that what he really wants to do is break down the ‘wall of virtue’ (p. 71) within which Party women seem safely ensconced. This is a sinister desire, even if it’s a mode of thoughtcrime, which ought to make us think very carefully about the nature of the sexual ‘blow struck against the Party’ (p. 133) Winston achieves with Julia in the countryside. In being motivated by a quasi-militaristic desire to break down the walls of a State-approved sexual purity—to conquer women’s bodies, that is—what, exactly, does Winston hope to accomplish, and what, in turn, ought we to make of him?