Reading Orwell's 1984
55: Part 2 of 6
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We are reading George Orwell’s 1984 in six parts. Last week, we met Winston Smith, a lone man who has recently awakened to the tiny horrors he faces daily and how tightly his world is controlled. Part two of our discussions begin with a deeper look inside his world and the lives of people around him.
Chapters’ Summary
Pages 63-104 (end of Part One) or listening from 2:12:58 to 3:41:14
This section starts to draw parallels between Party members and those within the lower class, called the proles or proletariat. Sexual desire cannot altogether be suppressed so the Party has found methods of, like everything else, skewing the institution altogether. We see sex from different facets of Winstons’s life and London in general.
Sex work
We are in Winston’s apartment where he’s forcing himself to write about a memory of visiting a sex worker.
Winston liked the color of her makeup and the perfume of the room. Party members didn’t wear makeup or perfume. He has a halting way of recalling the event. His mind wanders and he reveals details about how sex and connection is controlled. He has to press himself to keep going. He turns up a lamp and realizes the sex worker is much older than he thought and has no teeth. He’d come this far and didn’t want to take on such risk (5 years in a labor camp if caught) for nothing. He had sex with her and referred to it as if it were an addiction relapse but regretted these occasional “filthy scuffles” .
The Party did not police the profession much at all, only focusing on those caught in the act. This is the first inkling we get that some sectors are ruled with a hands-off approach. They succeeded in relegating sex work to a despised class of women and made the whole transaction secretive, dirty, and joyless.
Sex within marriage
Winston forces himself through the entire memory and in the midst of it, remembers his wife. He is married to a fair-haired and graceful woman named Katharine. They lived together for 15 months before separating and he hasn’t seen her in about a decade. He thought she was an empty headed Party follower, but the dealbreaker was the unbearable chore of weekly sex. He felt her simultaneous desire and rejection of him during the act. Winston would have tolerated her if they had agreed on celibacy, but she insisted on satisfying their “duty to the Party“.
Marriage was functional and while the Party were not opposed to love, physical desire for someone else was thoughtcrime. They foreclosed on the possibility of emotional connection between people by turning sex to something disgusting but necessary, even within marriage.
Sex of the youth and the future of sex
Sex education consisted of rigorous and prolonged brainwashing among youth to despise sex. They congregate in groups to reinforce these doctrines while stripping sex even of its transactional nature and making it entirely medical with artificial insemination (or artsem in Newspeak). Winston despises the women of the Party much like he does the woman in the Fiction department, who is also in the junior anti-sex league. They are chaste bigots who he is sexually and psychologically frustrated by.
Winston is still overcome with a need to expel emotion and physically act out that was not cured by his confessional.
The proletariat is the most powerful mass imaginable but are too ravaged by need and ignorance to rise up. They have been rendered powerless and don’t know it. Winston opines they don’t need conspiring, just force, but they have no strong ideas so they quarrel among themselves and do not look to the real evil. Most have no telescreens and were not indoctrinated into the Party’s “sexual Puritanism”. The party even permitted divorce among them, in contrast to Winston. Anyone more capable than the average is weeded out and undercover thought police sewed discontent to keep people distracted.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
- Winston Smith
Winston is copying a passage from a children’s book which creates a caricature of capitalists from the early part of the century. In it, capitalists owned everything and treated people cruelly. Descriptions of London as a dank place in the time of capitalist calls to mind doublethink where we believe it was different before even if the environment is the same. Winston does not know what is actually true and what is made up.
Winston reiterates that the knowledge in one’s bones are proof that things must have been different at a previous time. He talks about evidence of that former time and sites three men he saw at the Chestnut Tree Cafe who looked battered and deflated. Jones, Aronson, and Rutherford were arrested in 1965, disappeared for a year, then re-emerged with confessions of a variety of crimes and were pardoned. They sat in the cafe that day drinking, but were soon arrested again, confessed to old and new crimes, and executed.
Five years later, Winston received a 10 year old article at work tucked among his instructions. The article date conflicted with the trios’ documented confessions. He eventually destroyed the article but does not trust his memory since the piece of evidence no longer exists. This brings Winston to the question of why the Party continually changes information. He doesn’t know, but he’s been thoroughly programmed to distrust even what he remembers or what he knows. A manipulated mind could be wrong and the Party could be right, he thinks.
He suddenly thinks of inner Party member O’Brien and realizes O’Brien is his sole audience member for the diary.
The desire for solitude is suspicious but Winston goes wandering into the proles’ areas of London one day anyway. Winston eavesdrops on the proles’ conversations as he passes which is the first insight we get into their thoughts. They are fairly ordinary people in ordinary conversations debating lottery probabilities. We learn the Ministry of Plenty operates the lottery and it is entirely faked. It’s another elaborate distraction.
He ends up in the commercial area where he bought his diary, ink, and pen. Nearby, and against his better judgment, Winston follows an old man into a pub to ask him about history. The man is a rare sight since most of the older generation were killed in the 50s and 60s purges during the revolution. Winston thought the man would likely have formed his own ideas before everything changed.
Inside the bar, the old man is going back and forth with the bar man since there are no longer pints, only liters and half liters. It’s an indication of a “before time”. A half liter is too little and liter too much (and also more expensive), so there always seems this chasm between wanting and excess where people, by virtue of resource, have to choose wanting.
Winston sits with the man and rattles off the history he’s been taught, especially about capitalists. The man recalls scenes from his life which frustrates Winston because the old man doesn’t directly answer his questions. He is hoping the man will disprove what he’s been taught, but the man does not. Winston drifts out of the bar dissatisfied.
He goes into the antique shop where he bought his diary and the shopkeeper, Mr. Charington remembers him. Winston buys a piece of pink coral embedded in glass, which is a relic of the past like everything in the shop. Antiques, though, have been either destroyed or fallen out of fashion.
Mr. Charington shows him up to a room to show him more antiques but Winston wants to rent the room since it has a bed and fireplace. They talk about churches when Winston notices a photo of a statue on the wall and Mr. Charington recalls a tune and game mentioning it from when he was a boy. Winston takes it as another past relic and is determined to know more.
🎼Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens
🎶You owe me three farthings say the bells of St. Martins
While humming the tune on the way out, the woman from the Fiction department walks down the street and looks Winston in the face. He’s sure she was following him. He is filled with fear and physically powerless to stop her. Winston realizes one fights themselves more than any outside enemy. He imagines the fate that’s worse than a swift death: being tortured into confessing.
My thoughts
We get a picture of what life is like as a proles, including their dress, conversations, and physical danger. They live what we would categorize as normal lives, albeit ignorant ones. There’s this divide, where people like Winston are perpetually afraid of being who we are and on the outskirts of the Party, are in some ways freer with a different type of misery and unrealized potential. It’s maddening.
The Party’s simultaneous indoctrination of celibacy among youth and sanitizing sexual behavior in marriage, while seemingly contradictory could serve an ultimate purpose. If sex and marriage are purely functional, then I suspect people would eventually opt for artificial insemination rather than endure the humiliation of sex itself. Further still, it’s conceivable that eugenics would play a part in creating children. They would be raised in institutions without the empathy of family and be easier to control. Both the language and the people would be perfect, according to someone like Syme.
Am I alone in possession of a memory?
I keep coming back to this quote because Winston doesn’t trust his memories. Mind control is very powerful and we underestimate how thoroughly it can cloud our reasoning.
The piece of evidence from the 10-year-old news story was suspicious. It seemed either a purposeful temptation by the Thought Police or someone who chose Winston to hold the evidence. Either way, that scene haunts me too because Winston doesn’t even know who sent it. What did that person want Winston to do with the information? Were they eventually vaporized? It may have been possible at that point to turn things around and I wonder what would have happened if Winston had kept it.
Winston nurtures this painful nostalgia and while we often see the past with rose-colored glasses, in this case, it’s actually true. He is desperate for quick answers but is impatient. The man does reveal a top hat as purely ceremonial but Winston is not listening. It calls to mind how little younger people really pay attention to what the older generation say. They’re in a hurry to know instead of understand.
Mr. Covington’s room seems a hopeful sanctuary but like Winston, I’m not sure he’s safe. I think he is caring less and less about the danger since he knows he’s already sealed his death warrant, but seeing the woman from the Fiction department was a turn I didn’t expect. I can’t shake the feeling he is being specifically targeted.
Discussion prompts:
Do you think it’s possible for the proles to rise up? What would be the catalyst?
Why do you think Orwell keeps mentioning what physical symptoms will give people away?
How would the Party balance religion among proles and their doctrines?
Are proles really free?
What’s next?
Part 3 of 6, pages 105-159 or 3:41:17 to 5:37:33 on the audiobook
I really liked how he was so fascinated by the coral in the glass ball. From what I remember, he was drawn to it because it "had no purpose." Their society didn't have things to showcase personalities/interests and it made think of how that's commonplace today. We expect people to have things in their rooms to show "I like this thing because it looks cool" I also like how in the movie adaption I saw, it was the only piece of real color in the world outside of the belts the women wore.