British Literature after 1900 2021/22 © Piotr Matczak

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949)

GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950)

• real name: Eric Arthur Blair

• an English novelist, essayist, journalist, critic
• his work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice,
opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic
socialism
• born on June 25th, 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, in British India
• his mother brought him and his sister to England about a year after
his birth and settled in Henley-on-Thames
• his father stayed in India and rarely visited, so Orwell
and his father never formed a strong bond
• sent to a boarding school, which he hated and where he got his first taste of England’s class system
• on a partial scholarship, he noticed that the school treated the richer students better than the poorer
ones
• won scholarships to Wellington College and Eton College to continue his studies
• joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, because his family couldn’t pay for his university education
• resigned in 1928, moved to Paris and decided to become a writer
• in Paris and later in London he lived hand to mouth, in fairly severe poverty
• 1933 – while being a teacher in a small private school in Middlesex, he came down with his first bout of
pneumonia due to tuberculosis; this year he gave up teaching and spent almost a year writing Burmese
Days
• 1936 – married Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who he met in a bookshop where he worked
• moved to Spain to write newspaper articles about the Spanish Civil War; there he found a truly socialist
state; he joined the struggle against the Fascist party but had to flee when the group with which he
was associated was falsely accused of secretly helping the Fascists
• returned to England in 1939, and in 1941 took a position with the BBC as the person in charge
of broadcasting to India and Southeast Asia; he disliked the job, because of being in charge
of disseminating propaganda to these British colonies
• lost his wife in 1944, and remarried in 1949 to Sonia Brownell
• well-known for his literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism
• main works: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia
• the second on the list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945 by The Times
• his works has had a great impact on popular and political culture (e.g. the term Orwellian – totalitarian
or authoritarian social practices)
• his neologisms: cold war, Big Brother, thought police, Room 101, doublethink, thoughtcrime
• diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1947 – his health continued to decline and he died in 1950
British Literature after 1900 2021/22 © Piotr Matczak

SYNOPSIS

Winston Smith is a low-ranking

member of the ruling Party in London, in
the nation of Oceania. Everywhere
Winston goes, even his own home, the
Party watches him through
telescreens; everywhere he looks he
sees the face of the Party’s seemingly
omniscient leader, a figure known only
as Big Brother. The Party controls
everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the
implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by
eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the
worst of all crimes.

As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits
free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a
diary in which to write his criminal thoughts. He has also become fixated on a powerful Party member named
O’Brien, whom Winston believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood – the mysterious, legendary group
that works to overthrow the Party.

Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He
notices a coworker, a beautiful dark-haired girl, staring at him, and worries that she is an informant who will turn
him in for his thoughtcrime. He is troubled by the Party’s control of history: the Party claims that Oceania has
always been allied with Eastasia in a war against Eurasia, but Winston seems to recall a time when this was not
true. The Party also claims that Emmanuel Goldstein, the alleged leader of the Brotherhood, is the most
dangerous man alive, but this does not seem plausible to Winston. Winston spends his evenings wandering
through the poorest neighborhoods in London, where the proletarians, or proles, live squalid lives, relatively
free of Party monitoring.

One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired girl that reads I love you. She tells him her name, Julia,
and they begin a covert affair, always on the lookout for signs of Party monitoring. Eventually they rent a room
above the secondhand store in the prole district where Winston bought the diary. This relationship lasts for some
time. Winston is sure that they will be caught and punished sooner or later (the fatalistic Winston knows
that he has been doomed since he wrote his first diary entry), while Julia is more pragmatic and optimistic. As
Winston’s affair with Julia progresses, his hatred for the Party grows more and more intense. At last, he receives
the message that he has been waiting for: O’Brien wants to see him.

Winston and Julia travel to O’Brien’s luxurious apartment. As a member of the powerful Inner Party (Winston
belongs to the Outer Party), O’Brien leads a life of luxury that Winston can only imagine. O’Brien confirms to
Winston and Julia that, like them, he hates the Party, and says that he works against it as a member of the
British Literature after 1900 2021/22 © Piotr Matczak

Brotherhood. He indoctrinates Winston and Julia into the Brotherhood, and gives Winston a copy of
Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, the manifesto of the Brotherhood. Winston reads the book – an amalgam of
several forms of class-based twentieth-century social theory – to Julia in the room above the store. Suddenly,
soldiers barge in and seize them. Mr. Charrington, the proprietor of the store, is revealed as having been a
member of the Thought Police all along.

Torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the Ministry of Love, Winston finds that O’Brien, too, is a Party
spy who simply pretended to be a member of the Brotherhood in order to trap Winston into committing an
open act of rebellion against the Party. O’Brien spends months torturing and brainwashing Winston, who
struggles to resist. At last, O’Brien sends him to the dreaded Room 101, the final destination for anyone who
opposes the Party. Here, O’Brien tells Winston that he will be forced to confront his worst fear. Throughout the
novel, Winston has had recurring nightmares about rats; O’Brien now straps a cage full of rats onto Winston’s
head and prepares to allow the rats to eat his face. Winston snaps, pleading with O’Brien to do it to Julia, not
to him.

Giving up Julia is what O’Brien wanted from Winston all along. His spirit broken, Winston is released
to the outside world. He meets Julia but no longer feels anything for her. He has accepted the Party entirely
and has learned to love Big Brother.

UTOPIA

• an imagined form of ideal or superior human society or a written work of fiction or philosophical
speculation describing such a society
• distinguished from mythological Golden Ages or religious paradises in that they are the products
of human arrangement for human benefit
• word coined by Sir Thomas More in his Latin work Utopia (1516), as a pun of two Greek words, eutopos
(good place) outopos (no place)
• famous utopian works: New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, News
from Nowhere by William Morris
• utopian fiction has often been used as the basis of satire on contemporary life, it is also closely related
to some kinds of science fiction
• inverted or undesirable equivalent of utopia = dystopia (bad place)
• first utopian novel – The Republic by Plato (about the ideal city of Kallipolis)
• library is the future of utopia, citizens must work, but not all the time (time for contemplation),
agriculture provides most important occupation, wives and husbands are subjects to each other
(mutual respect), hierarchy
• welfare state – the state taking care of citizens (education, health care); fair and just laws
• we are going to be governed by philosophers, sages (poets are not useful – they can forfeit reality)
British Literature after 1900 2021/22 © Piotr Matczak

DYSTOPIA

• a modern term invented as the opposite of utopia, and applied to any alarmingly unpleasant
imaginary world, usually of the projected future
• examples: Orwell’s 1984, Wells’s The Time Machine, Hoban’s Riddley Walker
• work – almost slavery, far away from utopian idea of work; people’s lives are so drab that some
of them even like their hobs (Winston Smith looks upon it as a challenge and a diversion in his life);
there are many government jobs involved in propaganda and evaporation of people who do not obey
the system
• education – lower-class people receive little education, do manual labor and live in general poverty;
school system is based on propaganda and history books are adjusted to fit the current government
plan (the state of war used to involve Eurasia, and then it is converted to Eastasia)
• mutual respect – every human relationship is suppressed and rid of love and affection; sex is viewed
as a dirty act, and is only used to create more Party members
• welfare state – people have to be obedient; no healthcare, people tortured physically and mentally;
not even loyalty, but obedience; there is no mention of citizenship
• good, fair laws – there is no rule of law; evaporation, thoughtcrime, the Spies and the Youth League,
telescreens, brainwashing
• philosophers – Big Brother (symbol of the state) at the top, but he doesn’t actually show up –
he is not the sage (although he is painted like that), but he represents the party

TOTALITARIAN STATE

• aim of the book: warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government (Orwell
witnessed totalitarianism in Spain and Russia)
• Western nations were still unsure how to approach the rise of communism (in 1949, the Cold War
had not yet escalated, and many American intellectuals supported communism)
• Orwell was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed – particularly
by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens
• the perfect totalitarian society – the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government
with absolute power
• a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even
having a disloyal thought is against the law
• Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power – only to discover that its ability
to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even the most paranoid conceptions of its reach
• the Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme
on its own in the novel: psychological manipulation, physical control, control of information
and history, technology, language as mind control
British Literature after 1900 2021/22 © Piotr Matczak

PANOPTICISM

• Panopticon – a device conceptualized by a social theorist Jeremy

Bentham in the 18th century; it was to be used in the construction
of prisons where all prisoners of the institution would be observed
by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell
whether they are being watched (one-way mirrors)
• panopticism – philosophy described by a French philosopher
Michael Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975):
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance
is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should
tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for
creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the
inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To
achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an
inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has
no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible
and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower
from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any
one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the
inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not
only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that
intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag
openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the
presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the
peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything
without ever being seen.
• panopticism – a term introduced by Foucault to indicate a kind of internal surveillance; the watcher
ceases to be external to be watched; the gaze of the watcher is internalized to such an extent that each
prisoner becomes their own guard
• in 1984: the society is structured like a panoptic prison: the central tower is Big Brother, and people
are constantly observed via telescreens; they are controlled by propaganda and technology
• young children join The Spies and later the Youth League – they are trained and encouraged to report
any behavior that goes against the Party
• the continual fear of being watched by the government or reported by the neighbor’s child (or your own)
is often enough to keep the proletariat and the outer party in accordance with Party regulations
British Literature after 1900 2021/22 © Piotr Matczak

LANGUAGE AND HISTORICAL DISCOURSE

• the state uses newspeak to promote its ideology; dictionaries are revised to reflect reality, and words
used to express the unwanted thoughts are deleted (newspeak = propaganda)
• propaganda – aims to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought; the giant telescreen
in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures
and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes
• control of mind by language – eradication of unwanted words; constant propaganda; signs stating BIG
BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU
• history – rewrite the facts to suit propaganda (exchanging historical figures, the alteration of Eastasia
and Eurasia) – to show the party is flawless, the one who controls the past, controls the present –
the state controls everything
• there is no totalitarian system without an enemy (Eastasia and Eurasia) – the war is led not to be
won, but to last

THE INDIVIDUAL VS. TOTALITARIAN POWER

• the Party aims to control independence and identity

• the basic traits of establishing one’s identity are unavailable to Winston and other citizens of Oceania
(age, marital status, relatives – Smith does not know whether his mother is alive or not)
• no childhood memories are reliable, because there are no photos or documents to help sort real
memories from imagined ones
• every member of the Outer Party is identical: the same clothing, brand of cigarettes, gin
• forming a sense of individual identity is not only psychologically challenging, but logistically difficult
• attempts to build a sense of identity: purchasing a diary – creating memories and history; purchasing
a paperweight; sexual relationship with Julia; spending time together in an apartment
• Ministry of Love – complete disassembly and destruction of all aspects of Winston’s individuality
• ultimately, Winston becomes part of the Party’s faceless collective