20719844-On Nineteen Eighty Four PDF

Dissent, Assent, and the Body in Nineteen Eighty-Four
Author(s): Naomi Jacobs

Source: Utopian Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2007), pp. 3-20
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20719844
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Dissent, Assent, and the Body in Nineteen Eighty-Four
Naomi Jacobs
A series of bodies mark the progression from hope to despair in George
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell proffers several versions of an opposi
tional body capable of resisting dystopia: first, Winston's rebellious body that
refuses to submit to the everyday discomforts of life, then Julia's naked body
in lovemaking, and finally the powerful body of the proletarian mother sing
ing at her household drudgery. But in Winston's emaciated body after torture,
Orwell's final vision is of the body as inherently flawed, permeable, incapable
of sustaining any enduring opposition to social control. Together, these bod
ies appear to comprise a persuasive anatomy of the powers and limitations of
the human body and, indeed, of the human being. However, I will argue that
the devastating pessimism of Orwell's great novel is based upon an inconsis
tent and ultimately impoverished model of the body. Orwell underestimates
the body's recuperative powers as well as the extent to which the meaning
of bodily experience is malleable, shaped by social relation. A disjunction
between his rhetoric about the body and his representations of it underpins
these limitations in his great work.
The Body in Utopia and Dystopia
The problem of the body is central to Utopian literature, which attempts to

reconcile the desires of individual bodies with the needs of the body politic;
at the heart of the Utopian endeavor is the projection of new ways to man
age populations of human bodies and to re-form the individual body, with
its inchoate and often antisocial drives. In any vision of an orderly world in
which suffering is minimized and pleasure maximized, the materiality of the
body comes to the fore?both as an obstacle to success in its stubborn disor
derliness, and as the territory upon which any new order must ultimately be
mapped. The body itself must be the locus of Utopian or dystopian transfor
mation, whether that transformation is to be brought about by liberating the
body or by more effectively subduing it.
In the Christian tradition, the fallen body with its unreasoning re
sponsiveness and hungers has been understood as the source of sin; though
the spirit may be willing, the flesh is weak. By contrast, many Utopian thinkers
Utopian Studies 18.1 (2007) : 3-20 ? Society for Utopian Studies 2007
-UTOPIAN STUDIES 18.1 ~
have envisioned the body as innocent or reasonable. Thomas Mores Utopian

citizens limit themselves to the pursuit of reasonable or "natural" pleasures
which do not produce more pain than gain; under their guidelines, drink
ing to excess would qualify as an unnatural pleasure because of the physical
misery that ensues. Here, the body's sensitivity to pleasure and pain func
tions as a kind of measuring or limiting device helping us to know when
we have exceeded the bounds of the natural and the good. Charles Fourier,
too, regards the impulses of human nature?physical as well as psychologi
cal?as virtuous if properly managed and balanced; the highly elaborated and
artificial practices of his Utopian world are to constitute a perfectly balanced
social organism in which each individual s indulgence of natural impulses
contributes directly to social Harmony. In Newsfrom Nowhere, William Mor
ris postulated bodily impulses that could inspire and sustain a revolution.
Beyond the simple hunger that precipitates the socialist rebellion, there was ' a
general instinct" toward the new life (155) which "produced the passion for
freedom and equality" (135); furthermore, a "kind of instinct... a craving
for beauty" gives rise to the "art or work-pleasure" (160) of the new world.
Morris' repeated use of the term "instinct" underlines the body's role as a
source of Utopian energy.
In our own century, the body has continued to be characterized as a
source of liberatory energy. Though the mind may be corrupted or contami
nated by societal constraints, a fantasy has survived that the body can retain its
purity and serve as a reservoir of natural virtue, a motivating force for action
against totalitarian control. Perhaps the most familiar versions of this view
focus on the sexual aspects of bodily experience: for example, the links drawn
between political and sexual liberation by fin-de-siecle anarchists, psycholo
gist Wilhelm Reich's arguments that sexual repression supports fascism, or D.
H. Lawrence's Utopian claims for the powers of eroticism to regenerate not
only the individual, but society (Koh). In dystopian and anti-utopian fiction,
this conflation of erotic and Utopian energy is clearly present in works such as
Zamyatin's We, where D-503 s love for 1-330 leads him to question the social
order, or Ayn Rand's Anthem, where love similarly leads the protagonist to
break with a collectivist society that restricts erotic connection. A slightly dif
ferent version of the liberatory body sees the body in all its drives, not merely
the sexual, as that aspea of the self that is most natural?most animal, in a
positive sense. Our animal nature is regarded as free, because irrational; it may
~4~
Jacobs Dissent, Assent, and the Body
be domesticated or caged but can revert to the purity of wildness at any time
(Norris). If submission to a dystopian regime is generated by the workings of
ideology in the mind, the unthinking body remains the unconquered terri
tory from which opposition can be launched.
However, such concepts of the revolutionary body tend to rely upon
a naturalistic notion of the body as "the pre-social, biological basis on which
the superstructures of the self and society are founded" (Shilling 41). As the
considerable theoretical work on the body in recent decades has argued, to
see the rising of the body as a throwing off of social meanings or strictures is
to neglect the ways in which the body expresses and responds to social mean
ings in the construction of which the body itself has been implicated. The
body may be, as Nicholas Mirzoeff comments, "a key site of that resistance
provoked by any exercise of power" (11), but it is so precisely because it is
also the site of that exercise of power. These issues contribute to the fissures in
Orwell's dystopian logic.
"The mute protest in the bones": Everyday Discomforts

and Political Resistance
Although Orwell is jusdy famous for his evocation of the practical techniques
and psychological effects of totalitarian rule, the body is central to his ex
plorations of the workings of power. He begins his novel by establishing in
striking vividness the bodily discomforts of life under Big Brother. In this
fictive world, the body and its sensitivities are brutally repressed. The physical
discomforts and displeasures are unremitting: bad smells, bad food, coarse
fabric, and ugly surroundings. The human body itself has been degraded, and
a debased physical type dominates: "Nearly everyone was ugly... small, dark,
and ill-favored" (52-53). Winston himself is gray, thin, ill, and prematurely
aged. Although these characteristics of Oceania and its citizens are here attrib
uted to totalitarian rule, they strongly echo Orwell's descriptions in The Road
to Wigan Pier of the lives and bodies of the industrial poor as4 a population of
troglodytes" (96). In his critique there of the mechanized nature of modern
life, he claims that the "physical average has been declining all over England"
(97) due to unhealthy diets and living situations, and the "softness" induced
by the lack of physical work. As it happens, he was wrong about this (Pearce).
But for Orwell as for others, the body serves as a symbol of the social order,
and a degenerate social order must produce an inferior physical type. Thus
~5~
the citizens of Oceania?like those of a British industrial city?display in

their very flesh the corruption of the regime.
The prevailing weakness, sickness, or "softness" of the bodies Orwell
describes may be understood against the background of the ostentatiously
healthy and powerful bodies of fascist and Stalinist propaganda. The cult
of the body under totalitarianism involves de-naturing bodies, hardening,
smoothing, and generalizing them. The resultant "mindless body" (Shilling
30) serves the state as a productive and reproductive entity rather than serv
ing the individual as a source of pleasure and as a means of self-expression
and connection to others. As Mirzoeff notes in his discussion of Nazism,
totalitarianism is "profoundly distrustful of the body as the individual expres
sion and component of the body politic, fearing that it might harbour all
manner of weakness and corruption" (91). Under late capitalism, this distrust
takes the different form of an obsessive concern with and self-policing of the
body, which is re-created as spectacle and object for consumption; the body's
drives are channeled into the self-hypnosis of the health club, the consumer
ist trance of the shopping mall. Capitalist propaganda presents young, hard,
"good" bodies as images of individual freedom and happiness, while in fact
individuals under late capitalism become increasingly less healthy. Similarly,
totalitarian propaganda presents healthy bodies as images of national strength
and productivity, while in fact individuals under totalitarianism endure a de
bilitating lack of access to the food and medicines needed for good bodily
health, and a restricted access to physical pleasures generally.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the political logic of these denials of the
body is laid out explicidy. By denying a satisfying bodily existence to its mem
bers, the Party intensifies the importance and effectiveness of Party-designed
experiences such as the group ecstasy of the Two Minutes' Hate. The only love
allowed, that for Big Brother, is also the only pleasure allowed (Paul Robinson
152) other than the sadistic pleasures of hatred. There is certainly a bodily
component in the latter, but it is brief; these frenzied expressions of loyalty to
the Party provide but a temporary distraction from the endless discomforts
and physical self-restraint to which the citizens then return.
To all outward appearances, the bodies of Party members have been
successfully controlled by Party discipline. Doublethink requires denying the
reality of bodily experiences, rejecting the "evidence of your own eyes and
ears" (69), as Winston says. And orthodoxy, or at least the appearance of or
~6~
thodoxy, requires repressing any unsanctioned emotion or impulse. According

to Goldsteins book, "A Party member is required to have not only the right
opinions, but the right instincts" (174). Yet the body cannot be so completely
controlled. When Winston refers to "the mute protest in your own bones" as
a source of knowledge that things were once better than they are now (63), he
is experiencing what Alison Jaggar calls "oudaw emotions"?those feelings at
odds with what we expect to feel or believe we ought to feel. Such emotions
can "provide the first indications that something is wrong" with accepted un
derstandings of the world and contribute to the development of oppositional
subcultures (Jaggar 161). It is at the prompting of such outlaw emotions that
Winston writes "Down with Big Brother" in his diary, his hand moving with
out the direction or even the assent of his mind, as if his dimly-felt rebellious
impulse could be brought to consciousness only through an independent act
of the body. Through its engagement with the physical realities of this world,
Winstons body knows things his conscious mind has suppressed. Such "tacit
knowledge . . . does not result from the transferring of data from one mind
or book to another or from tracing the logic of a syllogism. Rather, it arises
from, and through what Polanyi calls 'indwelling,' or the active engagement
of the body with the factors comprising our subsidiary awareness" (Sorri 19).
At a very basic level, then, Winston's first aas of resistance to the regime are
motivated and manifested by his irrepressible body.1 He is quite aware that
these outbreakings of bodily energy are dangerous. "Your worst enemy . . .
was your own nervous system" (56) he thinks, in reference to individuals who
cannot control their facial expressions and so make their unorthodoxy visible
as "facecrime" to the Thought Police. Even when the face is successfiilly con
trolled, "you could not control the beating of your heart" (67). Instinct, then,
is more powerful than intention, driving the body to act against reason; this
is both the body's virtue and its ultimate vulnerability.
The Erotic Body and Resistance
The instinctive responsiveness of the body leads Winston to begin his first
tentative gestures of resistance in the solitary physical act of writing down his
thoughts and experiences in the forbidden journal. Through his liaison with
Julia, we are told, his body will also lead him toward what he will believe is or
ganized social resistance?joining the Brotherhood. In the novel's representa
tion of the liberatory potential of sexuality, the disrobing of Julias body plays
~7~
~ UTOPIAN STUDIES 18.1 ~
a crucial role. When first seen, Julia emblematizes the nature of bodies under
the rule of Big Brother: dressed, like all other members of the Outer Party,
in drab work clothes that obscure her individual features, she is yet marked
out from the crowd by the crimson sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League, which
displays both her sexuality?the curve of her womanly body?and her sexual
unavailability. In a fashion described so well by Foucault, desire is created by
its proscription; the sash that seems to mark Julias submission to the anti
erotic policies of a Party that aspires to 6 abolish the orgasm" (220) also makes
her an object of desire for Winston, whose sexuality is bound up in his na
scent resistance to the regime. Thus, when he fantasizes Julias clothes coming
off, he thinks that the gesture of disrobing could "annihilate a whole culture"
(29). To imagine the removal of clothing and the revelation of the hidden
body as having such political power is to imagine the body itself as untouched
by the layers of civilization that cloak its "naked truth." In this view, civiliza
tion, no matter how oppressive, can be thrown aside like a garment when the
body aas upon its own "pure" desires.
These portions of the work make large claims for the power of the
body's erotic impulses to heal the psychic and physical wounds of oppres
sion and to enable political resistance. Winston will famously think that "The
sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime"
(59). And after having made love to Julia he claims, "Their embrace had been
a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a
political aa" (105). To Winston, both the simple animal instina?the aa
itself?and the primitive emotions and intimacies to which it gives rise carry
a revolutionary potential, nurturing a place in the heart that the regime can
never touch. Many of Orwell's readers have accepted at face value the text's
characterization of sexuality as a natural, instinctive expression of animal na
ture. For example, Connelly states that "Sex is the most uniquely individual
instina and, like the belief in the soul, a threat to the organization bent on
destroying the self" (139). Similarly, Anne Mellor argues that "Sexual desire
and consummation affirm nature over culture, human instinct over rational
or technological control. . . . Julia's celebration of her own body, of sexual
desire, of the primal animal instinct of human beings, is thus a denial of all
forms of mind control, a powerful political rebellion" (119).2
But Orwell's rhetoric is not in fact borne out by the actual represen
tations of sexuality in the text; the liberatory power of the erotic seems largely
~8~
an abstract notion for Orwell.3 Indeed, Winstons initial fantasies about sex
have very little of the instinctive or natural about them. Upon first seeing
Julia, believing that she is a proponent of the Party's puritanism and that he
could never have her, he imagines beating and killing her in much more detail
than he imagines making love to her. Even when they finally meet in private
and embrace, he feels no physical desire, only "incredulity and pride" (100).
For all Winston's fantasies of disrobing, Julia's body is vaguely generalized as
"white, youthful" (92). Although Winston believes that "the animal instinct,
the simple undifferentiated desire ... was the force that would tear the Party
to pieces" (105), their lovemaking is never described in any detail.4 In fact,
what follows is largely a clich?d romance of star-crossed lovers, who set up a
monogamous love-nest complete with domestic trappings and quickly lose
their sexual urgency. The revolutionary rhetoric in praise of promiscuity is
replaced by a nostalgic rhetoric extolling the virtues of private life, a stance
hardly conducive to the common social action necessary if the regime is to
be overthrown.
And indeed there is no direct link established between the affair and
Winston's taking steps to join the Brotherhood. Julia has long indulged her
sexual instincts to no political result. The two have only aimless discussions
of the possibility of active resistance. In fact, Julia thinks the Brotherhood
is a propaganda fiction, and Winston has no real reason to think otherwise.
Had the "summons" never come from O'Brien, it seems likely that Winston
and Julia's expression of their "animal instincts" would have brought about
no result more dramatic than any of Julia's other exploits: a private rebellion
with no ramifications beyond pleasure. Conversely, given Winston's unjusti
fied trust in O'Brien and attraction to him, he might very well have accepted
such a summons even had he never known Julia. Thus the claims for the
revolutionary power of the body remain rhetorical ones, never embodied in
action or description in a way that would grant them fictive force.
The Proletarian Body
The final manifestation of a liberatory body is that of the proles, emblema

tized by the woman Winston sees hanging laundry outside the window of the
room in which he and Julia meet. Her body is monumental, with "powerful
marelike buttocks" (180) and the contours of a "block of granite" (181). This
imagery links the woman both to the animal nature of human beings and to
~9~
an enduring species identity, a bedrock which remains stable although po

litical regimes come and go. "The woman down there had no mind," thinks
Winston, "she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. ... At
the end of [a life of toil] she was still singing" (181). That what the woman
sings is a sentimental song manufactured by the propaganda machine seems
not to dim his optimism that "Out of these mighty loins a race of conscious
beings must one day come" (182). There is an almost Lawrentian mysticism
of blood here, a celebration of animal nature as an immortal impulse to breed
and to sing, a vital enjoyment of life no matter how difficult. When Winston
imagines a revolution carried out by the proles, his optimism is once again
founded in an unsustainable idealization of the body, for he believes that
the proles' embodiment of human decencies is rooted in a blind, instinctual
physicality. "If there is hope ... it lies in the proles," Winston had written
in his diary. "They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse
shaking off flies" (60). His own class, he imagines, will keep alive the mind as
the proles will "keep alive the body." They are "people who had never learned
to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power
that would one day overturn the world" (181) and who pass on "from body
to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill" (182).
There is justice in Raymond Williams' characterization of this passage as
"stale revolutionary romanticism," an "insulting" fantasy of "the rising of the
animals" (79). And indeed, elsewhere in the text the proles' capacity to rebel is
said to be limited by that very animal vitality, which leaves them satisfied with
simple physical pleasures. As with the rhetoric of a revolutionary sexuality, the
rhetoric of a revolutionary proletarian body is not borne out in the events or
the images of the text.
These confusions are of a piece with Orwell's own confused and con
flicted views about the working class. According to Connelly, Orwell "saw
the majority of the lower class as an enervated species unable to participate
in social reform or revolt" (97) and believed that "The squalid meanness of
their environments dulls their senses, rendering them less able to think and
behave rationally" (109). And furthermore, in this context he sees the needs
of the body as impeding rather than enabling political resistance: "When
one's belly is empty, one's only problem is an empty belly." Broader political
questions become important only when "drudgery and exploitation" have
ceased ("As I Please," qtd. Connelly 15). That is, the very poverty in which
~io~
the working classes live makes it impossible for them to concern themselves
in social change that could end that poverty. At the same time, he held a con
tradictory faith in the common sense values of the working class, who to him
embodied basic human decency and provided his "chief hope for the future"
(Reilly53).
Orwell's notably inconsistent attitudes toward the working classes
and working-class bodies are perhaps most vividly present in The Road to
Wigan Pier.5 On the one hand, he admires the miners as small but "splendid
men" with the "most noble bodies . . . stupendous force and speed" (Road
23-24), "arms and belly muscles of steel" (35). Watching them work makes
him question his own sense of superiority as an educated intellectual. Yet he
describes unemployed workers as having "the same sort of dumb amazement
as an animal in a trap" (85-86); and he repeatedly characterizes the workers
as instinctual, unthinking?differendy put, as driven by bodily impulses. For
instance, he claims that "no genuine working man grasps the deeper impli
cations of Socialism" and says that the working class reject education by a
"healthy instinct" (176, 116). In the second part of Wigan Pier, he explores
with painful honesty the ways in which his middle-class upbringing led him
to regard the working classes as "almost sub-human" (126) and instilled in
him "the idea that there was something subdy repulsive about a working-class
body" (128).6 Yet he perpetuates an only superficially more benign version of
these attitudes when idealizing the working class as somehow more "warm,
decent, deeply human" than his own class (117).
As he had done with the desiring bodies of Winston and Julia, Or
well aligns the body of the prole woman, and by extension all the bodies of
her class, with Nature. He makes them represent an irrational, rebellious life
force with the potential to counteract the socially constructed mirage of to
talitarianism. The body and its desires provide the impetus for opposition to
the regime: indeed, the body's very lack of rationality becomes a virtue, for
no reasonable person would be so foolish as to attempt to oppose the absolute
power of the Party. But the final vision of Winston's body will undo that hope
offered by these libidinal bodies. The Torture Body displays less liberatory
aspects of the Natural: pure, instinctive fear, and the instinctive avoidance of
pain are represented as ultimately more powerful than the positive drives of
the life force. If the body's desire for a fuller sensual life leads to rebellion, the
book concludes, its desire for life at any cost leads inevitably to capitulation.
~u~
And Orwell's dramatization of this view is far more convincing that his earlier
evocations of the oppositional body.
The Torture Body

In the extended torture that follows his arrest, Winston learns first-hand that
the power of the body to oppose the mind's will to resistance is stronger than
the body's power to oppose the mind's will to submit. Discussing the political
uses of torture, Renato Martinez has written that "the exhibition of pain is a
language" (86). In addition to its functions of punishment and extortion of
information, torture serves to communicate to the general public the power
of the regime, its absolute right to treat the bodies of its enemies as it sees fit.
But in Nineteen Eighty-Four, this communication is wholly private; the dis
play is made only to the tortured himself, for the goal of this government is
to win over souls, those "few cubic centimeters within [the] skull" that Win
ston had initially believed were his own (26). To the public is exhibited only
the benevolent face of Big Brother, the penitent faces of the reformed reb
els?never the destroyed body itself. Publicly, this regime exhibits its power
to reform and to forgive, rather than its power to destroy. Privately, the regime
exhibits the effects of torture only to the subject of that torture.
It is a crucial turning point when Winston is forced to contemplate
his broken, naked body in a full-length mirror.7 In sculpture and painting,
the body in decay or sunken in age has traditionally served as an emblem of
human f?llenness?the fallibility of flesh (Warner). Winston's self-examina
tion serves a similar function, leading him to contrast his own fallenness and
weakness against the immortal collective body of the Party. Julia's loving body
had been reduced to a phrase, an occasional naked breast or soft, yielding
waist; the prole woman's to her wide hips and tuneful voice. But Orwell de
scribes in dreadfiil detail Winston's body after torture. The gray, dirty flesh,
the "battered" cheekbones, the inflamed ulcer, the skeletal ribs and emaciated
legs and "scraggy" neck; all are chronicled at length and with a clinical exac
titude that grants great persuasive force to the dystopian view of the body as
a treacherous entity that "swells up until it fills the universe" so that "In the
face of pain there are no heroes" (86, 197). If, as Paul Robinson has argued,
the only true eroticism in this novel is the sado-masochistic eroticism of Win
ston's relationship to O'Brien, then this scene of disrobing is the culmination
of that extended seduction; and it provides the definitive body-image for the
~12~
books argument about human potential. The human being is reduced to a

"bag of filth," and the spirit to nothing more than an illusion (224).
That Winston's body is a primary agent in and evidence of his fall
enness leads Reilly to conclude that "Winston weeps uncontrollably at the
sight of his ruined body because, broken intellectually and morally, he has
only the body left . .." (277). However, at this point Winston is not entirely
broken, for he continues to hold onto his love for Julia. Once he is given relief
from pain and his body strengthens, his very flesh sustains a connection with
her, "as though she had got into the texture of his skin," and he still hates
the Party (230). Tellingly, it will be not a bodily experience of pain, but the
imagination of pain to come, that leads him to the final betrayal in which "an
instinct which cannot be disobeyed" impels him to "interpose... the body of
another human being, between himself and the rats" by calling for Julia to be
given the punishment in his stead (234, 235). Paradoxically, these desperate
measures to protect his body leave him in a state of profound alienation from
his body. In the final chapter, although the Victory Gin makes him "retch
slightly" he drains it down, and when he sees Julia again, "his flesh fr[eezes]
in horror" at the thought of making love to her (237,239). No longer can his
body feel either the impulse to everyday rebellions against the discomforts of
his world or the sexual impulse that drove a larger resistance. Certainly nei
ther Winston nor Julia could now summon the life force that flowed through
the massive body of the prole woman. Now the only involuntary motions of
his body are "convulsive movements" of his feet mimicking what he sees on
the telescreen rather than expressing his freedom from state control, as once
was the case (244). The body whose pain swelled up to fill his universe has
been subsumed into the immortal body of the Party, and Winston thus can
await the "long-hoped-for bullet" in a state of bliss (245).
That Winston and Julia fail to resist torture would not, in and of itself,
undo the novel's initial claims for the liberatory potential of the body. For the
narrative logic of dystopia persuades by offering up, in the midst of despair,
luminous glimpses of Utopian states ?moments such as those experienced
by Winston and Julia in the Golden Country or the upper room. In classic
dystopia, oppression always destroys beauty and freedom within the bounds
of the tale; yet the textual evocation of that destruction provokes in readers a
determination to prevent this nightmare future and to cherish what must not
be lost. Orwell, however, leaves no hope that the revolutionary potential of
~13~
the pleasure-body can withstand the miseries of the pain-body He does so by

constructing an abject human being whose psychic states are primarily driven
by the pleasures and pains of the body, and giving disproportionate emphasis
to the iconic representation of the body destroyed by pain.
The rhetoric of representation in Nineteen Eighty-Four destroys all
possibility of resistance to totalitarian oppression. In the everyday resistances
of Winston s protesting body, in the brief utopia of eroticism when bodies
are disrobed and touch each other tenderly, and in the vitality of the prole
woman's sturdy physicality resistance seems possible. But in the protracted
descriptions of a man being broken and then re-formed by pain, we are told
that resistance is doomed. In this is the great failing of Orwell's great novel.
For we know?as, of course, did Orwell himself?that minds do not always
break under torture, that some people suffer appalling pain and fear and yet
refuse to betray their loved ones and their comrades in arms.
Furthermore, even for those who break under pain?as most of us
must admit we would do?this is not the end of the story. The meaning of
bodily suffering is not a merely private matter, and its impact is not irrevers
ible. I do not by any means wish to minimize the devastating effects of torture;
as survivors have said, "the body remembers." But it is also true that many
individuals who have endured torture in retaliation for political resistance
have not ceased to resist. According to one study of torture survivors in Tur
key, most showed "only a moderate level of psychopathology." The researchers
concluded that these former political prisoners had been somewhat protected
from post-traumatic stress symptoms because of their "[p]rior knowledge of
and preparedness for torture, strong commitment to a cause, immunization
against traumatic stress as a result of repeated exposure, and strong social sup
ports. .." (Basoglu et al. 76). Such mitigating forces are entirely absent from
Orwell's estimation that the body's impulses to resistance can be entirely and
permanently destroyed by pain and the fear of pain.
Morris Dickstein suggests that Orwell's "fatalism was intensified by
his own fatal illness ... as his own vitality waned, he allowed his bleak out
look to take over the novel" (104). I am reluctant to reduce the meaning of
Nineteen Eighty-Four to an expression of Orwell's personal failings or to the
fact that he was dying when he wrote the book. Having said that, it seems
clear that the child whose first word is reported to have been "beasdy" ma
tured into a man whose powers of enjoyment were less than robust, and who
increasingly withdrew from society, choosing to spend the end of his life on
a remote island. In addition, the experience of communal political endeavor
that so impressed and inspired Orwell during his time in Spain was largely
absent from his later life. Considering the grim lessons of the rise of Stalinism
and Nazism, his pessimism is certainly understandable. Yet another man in
similar circumstances might not have found that his body "swelled up" to fill
the universe. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's conception of human poten
tial to resist oppression is limited by an ultimately imbalanced notion of the
powers of the body. He seems capable of imagining only an intermittent and
futile power in the body's capacity for connection and endurance?the pow
ers not merely of sexual love but of communal solidarity. But he attributes an
overwhelming, defining power to the body's capacity for pain and the fear of
pain. Orwell's disproportionate estimation of the oppositional body and the
broken torture-body leads his work to an unearned despair.
~15~
~ UTOPIAN STUDIES 18.? ~
Endnotes
1 For more on "everyday resistances," see Andrew Robinsons excel

lent article on "Revolutionary Subjectivities" andTyner's Foucauldian discus
sion of "resistance geographies" in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
2 One notable exception is Paul Robinson, who comments on the
"discrepancy between [the books] strenuously prosexual doctrines and its un
failingly anemic representation of sexual passion" (155). Robinson critiques
various analyses of why the Party represses sexuality in its members, including
what Patai calls Julias "hydraulic theory." Tirohl also offers useful comments
on inconsistencies in the books treatment of sexuality.
3 One is tempted to attribute this abstraction to Orwell's own rather
fraught relations with women (see Meyers).
4 The prudishness of Orwell's descriptions does seem odd in a writer
who admired the frankness of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and whose
literary development, according to Taylor, was much influenced by D. H.
Lawrence (45). Although by the 1930s Orwell wrote, "The kind of life that
[Lawrence] always points to, a life centring round the simple mysteries?sex,
earth, fire, water, blood?is merely a lost cause," his fiction suggests he was
still attracted to those Lawrentian mysteries (Bowker 152). But see also Men
delson s brief comments about Orwell's "refutation" of Lady Chatterleys Lover
in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
5 In a valuable detailing of the many inaccuracies and misrepresenta
tions in Wigan Pier, Pearce states that Orwell veered from an "excessive and
overemotional sympathy to a rather cold, dispassionate appraisal. The book
is marked?and marred?by his ambivalent emotional attitude" (419). For
more on Orwell's complex relation to working class culture, see Breton, Dow,
and Hitchcock.
6 That Orwell says his first approach to a common lodging house
felt like going down into "a sewer full of rats" must come to mind when we
remember Winston's rat phobia (Road 151).
7 As in visual art, the naked body in Utopian works is often general
ized, freighted with meanings well beyond the erotic meaning to which it is
limited in popular culture. As Marcia Pointon has said, "the nude functions
not as a category with clear parameters but as a form of rhetoric. It is the way
the body functions in the grammar of representation, invoking ideologies of
~?6~
the body and its economy, that is significant rather than its erotic power as
estimated by any particular viewer, or its pose, or the extent of its covering"
(14).
~17~
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in Lady Chatterleys Lover? Midwest Quarterly 43.2 (Winter 2002): 189
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2000.
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(April 1997): 143-165.
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~19~
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~20~

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Dissent, Assent, and the Body in Nineteen Eighty-Four

Author(s): Naomi Jacobs

The Body in Utopia and Dystopia

The problem of the body is central to Utopian literature, which attempts to

have envisioned the body as innocent or reasonable. Thomas Mores Utopian

"The mute protest in the bones": Everyday Discomforts

the citizens of Oceania?like those of a British industrial city?display in

thodoxy, requires repressing any unsanctioned emotion or impulse. According

The Erotic Body and Resistance

The Proletarian Body

The final manifestation of a liberatory body is that of the proles, emblema

an enduring species identity, a bedrock which remains stable although po

The Torture Body

books argument about human potential. The human being is reduced to a

the pleasure-body can withstand the miseries of the pain-body He does so by

1 For more on "everyday resistances," see Andrew Robinsons excel

Basoglu, M., M. Paker, O. Paker, E. Ozmen, I. Marks, C. Incesu, D. Sahin,

Bowker, Gordon. Inside George Orwell: A Biography. New York: Palgrave

Dickstein, Morris. "Hope Against Hope: Orwell s Posthumous Novel." Amer

Hitchcock, Peter. "Slumming." Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexual

Jaggar, Alison M. "Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemol

Koh, Jae-Kyung. "D. H. Lawrence's World Vision of Cultural Regeneration

Meyers, Jeffrey. Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: Norton,

Norris, Margo. Beasts of the Moelern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka,

Pittock, Malcolm. "The Hell of Nineteen Eighty-Four." Essays in Criticism 47.2

Stansky, Peter, ed. On Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: W. H. Freeman,

Tyner, James A. "Self and Space, Resistance and Discipline: A Foucauldian

Warner, Marina. "Nuda Veritas." In Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of

Williams, Raymond. George Orwell. New York: Viking, 1971.

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