Authentic personal relationships are a fundamental human experience, grounding both our sense of individual

self-identity and our capacity for shared political action.  

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four is a grim dystopian warning against the insidious threat posed to this core
aspect of our humanity by an intrusive totalitarian state. 

In the dark futuristic society portrayed in the novel, all human interactions are regulated and surveilled by the all-
powerful ‘Party’.  

The only ‘love’ and ‘loyalty’ permitted in Oceania are those which the demoralised and alienated citizens are
forced to give to the State, personified in the menacingly benevolent figure of ‘Big Brother’.  

The novel follows Orwell’s everyman anti-hero, Winston Smith, as he rebels against his state-enforced isolation
and brainwashing and embarks on a doomed love affair with a fellow Party functionary, Julia.  

In an early chapter, describing Winston’s first, dreamlike tryst with Julia in an idealised pastoral setting that he
privately calls ‘the Golden Country’, Orwell subtly suggests that the Party’s all-pervasive political indoctrination
has tainted even the most intimate moments between people in this dystopian society.  

As the action shifts from the dystopian city to the relatively unspoilt countryside, there is a marked shift in the
novel’s descriptive style and tone.  

The grim realism of the earlier chapters (which relied heavily on similes such as “the hallway smelt of boiled
cabbage and old rag mats’) gives way to a less cautious, more lyrical style which makes more use of heightening
devices such as metaphor and personification.  

The light in the ‘Golden Country’ is described as ‘pools of gold', while the air seems to ‘kiss’ the ‘skin’ of Winston
and Julia as they work their way to the 'heart of the wood'.  

However, it is notable that even in the midst of this sunlit Eden, Winston himself feels 'dirty and etiolated' and
cannot fully enjoy the romantic moment.  

His immersion in nature is always shadowed by his fear of Party surveillance, here embodied by the 'beetle-like
man' who he imagines listening via hidden microphone to the pure song of the thrush in the grove.  

Even after he makes love to Julia, the 'pitying protecting feeling' that is 'awoke[n]' in him is soon overtaken by his
sense that their climax has been a 'blow struck against the party... a political act'.  

Here, Orwell uses the penetration of the violent diction of political struggle ('blow', 'hate', 'rot, weaken,
undermine') into the otherwise blissful imagery of nature and natural affection. This conveys his belief that
modern totalitarian states deliberately set out to  corrode natural affections and politicise even our most intimate
relationships.  

Thus Nineteen Eighty Four warns that even our most essential human experience, that of emotional connection
with others, is vulnerable to erasure by the alienating and controlling forces of modern political control.