Bailey McMillan
ENG 484B
Prof. Johnsen
Final Paper
Sexual Politics and Gender Relations in Nineteen Eighty-Four
Gender plays an important role in George Orwell’s classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. More specifically, gender plays into the success of the Party, which attempts to neutralize the relevance of gender. Although the Party tries to make gender irrelevant in its dystopian society, many scholars and feminists have attacked Orwell’s treatment of sexual politics and gender relations, with their arguments mainly focusing on the portrayal of Julia. However, John Newsinger, in his article entitled “Nineteen Eighty-Four since the Collapse of Communism,” rejects the idea that Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects misogynistic themes and motives.
As previously mentioned, the Party aims to deemphasize the difference between genders and deconstruct gender roles. From a young age, girls are taught that sex is wrong and shameful, dirty and unnecessary. As Winston explains, the aim of the Party “was to remove all pleasure from sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.”[1] All marriages had to be approved by the Party, and “the only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.”[2] Newsinger continues by explaining the importance of the Anti-Sex League to the Party’s “apparatus of control over Oceania’s population and has… as its undeclared purpose the elimination of all pleasure from the sexual act.”[3] In this society, gender is seen as a non-issue, and there are even experimental plants where babies are produced without the use of the mother’s womb, eliminating the necessity of
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sex. When Winston is interrogated by O’Brien, he explains that the Party is going to eradicate the sex instinct. “Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card,” O’Brien proclaims, “We shall abolish the orgasm.”[4]
Many feminist critics believe that this irrelevance of gender is one of the many ways in which the novel undermines women. Orwell has also come under attack for the novel’s portrayal of Julia in particular, and for its masculinism, in general. According to Anne Mellor, Julia “embodies every man’s most potent sexual fantasy: the seeming virgin who is in fact sexually available, a whore. She is sexually liberated, healthy, a creature of instinct and emotion but not intellect, a man-identified woman… the stereotype of the ideal woman in a patriarchal society.”[5] Mellor continues by accusing Orwell of failing “to see that embedded in his own attitudes towards women was an ideology almost as oppressive to the female as the Party is to Smith.”[6] Elaine Hoffman Baruch also views Orwell’s portrayal of women as suspect:
Winston has violent fantasies of raping and killing Julia when he thinks he cannot have her. “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents to the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and noses-out of orthodoxy”… We never do learn what her last name is, although we get much detail about her use of cosmetics and desire to wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” Winston tells Julia. As is to prove it, she falls asleep when he reads excitedly from Emmanuel Goldstein’s revolutionary manual.[7]
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Newsinger states that Daphne Patai’s The Orwell Mystique provides an even more critical critique, in which she states that Orwell is a misogynist, specializing in stereotypes and caricatures of women. Like Baruch, Patai focuses her critique on the portrayal of Julia:
the only major female character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, though also a rebel, evokes yet another female stereotype. She is a rebel only from “the waist downwards,” as Winston comments; she is motivated by love of pleasure – sexual pleasure – and is totally uninterested in the political dynamics of the society that oppresses her. Orwell invites the reader to view Julia in a largely negative way and to contrast her lack of seriousness with Winston’s heroic attempt to understand his society. And, indeed, most critics have faithfully echoed this view of Julia, so that in comments on the novel she is routinely described as egocentric and unintelligent… Julia has only a first name; she is an insignificant female, and Orwell in this respect follows his society’s convention of considering a woman’s last name a disposable…”[8]
While many of the critics focus their attention on the portrayal of Julia, it is important to keep in mind that there are other women in the novel who are subject to the patriarchal society. For example, the relationship between Mrs. Parsons and her son and daughter can be interpreted as patriarchal. The young daughter follows the lead of the son, and both are raised with the mindset to maintain the status quo of the Party. As Winston observes, the two are bound to start spying on their mother. “Another year, two years, and they would be watching her day and night for symptoms of unorthodoxy.”[9] Winston continues by stating that the worst thing about
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organization like the Spies is that they systematically turn children into “ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.”[10] Winston finds himself thinking about Mrs. Parsons repeatedly. “Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs. Parsons would be vaporized.”[11]
As previously stated, Newsinger rejects the feminist critiques of Orwell’s portrayal of Julia. While many of the critics believe that Julia is viewed as an act of defiance, Newsinger states that it is important to note that “it is Julia who initiates the relationship [with Winston], it is she who confidently and with practiced ease breaks a capital law by declaring her love for him, while he is considering ways to murder her for fear she is a member of the Thought Police.”[12] Newsinger also believes that Julia “is portrayed as a strong, determined character, by far the more experienced and practical rebel.”[13] He also notes that Orwell makes Julia a power declaration for sexual liberation. “‘[Winston’s] heart leapt. 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.’”[14] Winston tells Julia that the more men she has had, the more he loves her. Newsinger argues that “the remark that she is a rebel from the waist down is admiring and affectionate rather than derogatory in the context of the novel and serves to emphasize the importance of the theme of sexual rebellion.”[15] Newsinger also argues that when Julia falls asleep when Winston is reading Goldstein’s book, she is not being stupid or shallow. Rather, “it
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is because she is not interested in politics, because the book does not address her concerns.”[16] However, Newsinger does not reject the idea that Orwell uses sexist stereotypes in the novel, although he does argue that “these [stereotypes] have to be placed in the context of a thematic claim for sexual liberation that is centered on the book’s principal female character.”[17]
Among these feminist critiques of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is important to note that the novel offers female figures who symbolize hope. Similarly, just before Winston and Julia are arrested, Winston watches a working-class woman from his room above Charrington’s shop:
The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distances. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia and Eastasia and well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overrun the world. If there was hope, it lay with the proles! Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The future belonged to the proles… The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at the valiant figure in the yard. In the end, their awakening would come.[18]
Ultimately, this woman serves as a symbol of hope for the long-term future. As he watches the woman, Winston fantasizes about her giving birth to the future generations that will challenge
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the Party’s authority. “He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen.”[19] As Newsinger explains, “the woman in the yard symbolizes the potential power of the proles. Throughout the world… ‘everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of these loins a mighty race of conscious beings must one day come.’”[20] Women are used to symbolize Winston’s reiterated belief that there is still hope – a hope that one day the proles will overthrow Big Brother and the Party.
George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, deals with a variety of controversial topics, specifically involving gender, gender roles, and the treatment of these sexual politics and gender relations. A variety of feminist critics, including Anne Mellor, Elaine Hoffman Baruch, and Daphne Patai, have argued that Orwell’s portrayal of Julia is both stereotypical and patriarchal. However, scholar John Newsinger views Orwell’s portrayal of Julia as that of a declaration for sexual liberation. He rejects the idea that Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects misogynistic themes and motives, although he does not deny Orwell’s use of sexist stereotypes. Newsinger argues that Orwell’s “writings reflect a masculinist view of the world… this is sometimes contended as in the case of Julia and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having acknowledges this, however, it must be said that Daphne Patai, in particular, seems quite wrongly to consider him as being altogether defined by his traditional notions of masculinity and of male superiority and regards his writings has one of the main pillars of twentieth-century patriarchy, as a vital ideological prop sustaining male domination.”[21] The different viewpoints of these critics
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demonstrate that it is significant to note how a novel - especially one published over sixty years ago – has raised so much attention and argument over its themes and portrayals of its characters.
Works Cited
Newsinger, John. "‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ since the Collapse of Communism."Foundation(1992): 79-
82. Print.
Orwell, George.Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1950. Print.
[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1950) 65.
[2] Orwell, 65.
[3] John Newsinger, “Nineteen Eighty-Four since the Collapse of Communism (Science Fiction Foundation, 1992) 81.
[4] Orwell, 267.
[5] Newsinger, 80.
[6] Newsinger, 80.
[7] Newsinger, 80.
[8] Newsinger, 81.
[9] Orwell, 24.
[10] Orwell, 24.
[11] Orwell, 61.
[12] Newsinger, 81.
[13] Newsinger, 81.
[14] Newsinger, 82.
[15] Newsinger, 82.
[16] Newsinger, 82.
[17] Newsinger, 82.
[18] Orwell, 220.
[19] Orwell, 220.
[20] Newsinger, 79.
[21] Newsinger, 82.