Masculinity, Sex, And Subversion In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, his protagonist Winston Smith seems a far cry from the traditional construction of masculinity. However, it is in his relationships and interactions with both men and women that traditional gender roles begin to become apparent in the narrative.

It was three years after the end of the Second World War when George Orwell completed his novel. The influence of the War is glaringly obvious throughout the novel (the use of propaganda to ensure a certain level of hatred for opposition soldiers, for example), and the way it constructs gender is not immune from this influence. The physical degeneration of Winston, who is described as having a “frail figure” (Orwell, 2000 edition, pg. 4), is not only an allegory for the weakness of humanity, but would also have served as a literal reminder of the privations and harm done to the soldier’s body by war. The idea that Winston’s masculinity is couched in his physicality has some merit although he is young, or at least not old, and biologically male (two of the ideals of masculinity propounded by nearly every cultural resource, from recruitment posters to the Homeric poetry taught in public schools), Winston is suffering from damage to his lungs, as well as a varicose ulcer. In other words, he has the potential to become the very image of masculinity, but his environment will not allow him to do so. In this, we see that the masculine and the intellectual parallel one another. Just as Winston cannot attain ideal masculinity because of his physical unfitness, so he cannot achieve intellectual freedom because of his place in society.

Airstrip One is by no means a phallocracy in which men are considered inherently superior to women, but it is difficult to consider it anything less than a patriarchy in which most or all of the officially powerful are men. Aside from the woman who appears on Winston’s television to instruct the office workers in their morning exercise (who is belittled as “shrewish” (pg. 39)), everyone with obvious power over Winston is male. It is undoubtedly significant that Big Brother, who probably is only a tool of propaganda, is male. Would a Big Sister have the same power over the minds of the populace? It is possible, given the inescapable nature of Big Brother’s face and name, that a Big Sister could be used instead, but the very fact that she is not displays something not only about the imagined society but about Orwell’s own. Winston Smith is written as a sympathetic character, with his familiar name and identifiable country, and the terror of Nineteen Eighty-Four lies in its similarities with our own world. The famous poster of Lord Kitchener pointing his finger at the reader and declaring to the reader that “Britons” must “join your country’s army!” (Chappell, 2003, pg. 8) seems to have been Orwell’s inspiration for Big Brother, “black-haired, black-moustachio’d” (Orwell, pg. 18) and on posters everywhere Winston looks. This presents the reader with an idea of masculine authority which Winston neither has nor wants. Big Brother, or Lord Kitchener, can call men to their eventual death with only a look, and twenty years later many men are suffering the aftermath of trauma in the trenches, or in Winston’s case struggling to remember the events they once lived through. The mimesis is clear, and the gulf of power is not fictional. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the lack of a time difference between the Big Brother figure and Winston’s reality seems not to make any difference. Winston never holds himself to the ideals set by Big Brother’s image or the Party’s influence, because he can see that they are impossible for the likes of him he is aware of his perceived inadequacy but unable to change it.

This could be said to place Winston in the role of the damsel in distress. It cannot be denied that, like many dystopian heroes, he is only rescued from the misery of his life by the love or desire of another. Thomas Horan suggests that dystopian fiction presents “sexual desire… as a potential force for political and spiritual regeneration” (2007, pg. 314+), and Julia’s disregard for the Party’s views on sex and pleasure allow Winston to shed his sense of imprisonment for a brief while. Despite their eventual discovery and incarceration in the Ministry of Love, Julia and Winston achieve a fleeting moment of freedom. It is possible to imagine that, if the narrative cut off before their betrayal by the owner of the antique shop, Nineteen Eighty-Four could be read as a fairy tale-like story wherein the protagonist’s life is saved by a white knight. If “nothing saves anybody’s life… it only postpones their death” (Bennett, 2006), then it could be argued that Julia saves Winston’s life by making his last weeks before capture by the Ministry of Truth those in which he was most free. His intellectual death, here meaning his capitulation to Ingsoc ideas, was postponed by Julia’s lingering presence in his mind even as he was being tormented after his incarceration.

The inversion of gender roles between Julia and Winston goes further than this somewhat fanciful interpretation. Consider their behaviour in the rented room above Mr Charrington’s shop. The idea of the man as breadwinner and the woman as homemaker is directly reversed. It is Julia who is the literal breadwinner, bringing “proper white bread, not our bloody stuff” (Orwell, pg. 147) to the haven they believe they have created. As to the haven itself, Winston is the one who finds it, rents it, and suggests it as their regular haunt, thereby becoming the literal homemaker. Of course, this is a simplified interpretation of their actions in the rented room. Julia’s insistence that she is “going to be a woman” (pg. 149) whilst they are together in the room does nothing to undermine the power she holds over Winston. In fact, the make-up and scent seem only to increase his desire for and trust in her, leading him to be “naked in her presence” (pg. 149) for the first time. It seems that assertiveness does not necessarily equal masculinity in Nineteen Eighty-Four. While it is possible to suggest that the apparent inversion of gender roles that were prevalent in the 1940s (with many of the women who had worked in factories during the war returning to their roles in the home) is a part of Orwell’s nightmare, it is difficult to deny Winston’s emasculation alongside Julia’s assertiveness.

One archetype of femininity that Julia challenges is that of the Fallen Woman. Julia’s abundance of past sexual partners is one of the things that Winston finds most attractive about her. Rather than virginity or sexual innocence signalling a character’s moral virtue, as is the case in many turn-of-the century novels such as Dracula, the very opposite is the case here. In Winston’s struggle against the oppressive and repressive Party, the feminine ideal is no longer one of passivity and prudishness. The contrast between Katharine, who is held up as a typical woman of the Party, with chastity “deeply ingrained [and]… the natural feeling” (pg. 71) driven out of her, and Julia, who adores sex for its own sake and feels “the simple undifferentiated desire… that would tear the Party to pieces” (pg. 132) is an important, but not the only representation of female sexuality as it relates to morality. While Julia fits the archetype of the fallen woman as one who “commits a sexual transgression such as adultery or premarital sex” (Jacobs, 1991, preface, pg. x), she cannot be said to experience “a protracted decline” (pg. x) as a result. Her falling into the Party’s hands is swift and there is no hint of it being due to anything but her affair with Winston. Julia’s “scores” (Orwell, pg. 131) of sexual conquests do not seem to count against her, going against the common idea that promiscuity is a sexual transgression. Indeed, the Party only takes notice of Julia when she becomes emotionally invested in her affair with Winston, inverting the traditional vilification of sexual contact and glorification of emotional intimacy. It is an inherent part of Orwell’s dystopia that despite the attempts of the tyrants to control sexual pleasure, it is from love that they take most offence.

But as stated above, Katherine and Julia are not Winston’s only sexual partners. His visit to a prostitute is placed alongside the descri ption of his weekly intercourse with Katharine, and both are treated with such disdain that it becomes clear that the virgin/whore dichotomy in no way satisfies Winston. It may be symbolic of his dissatisfaction with the rigid world in which he lives, drawing parallels between our expectations of female sexuality (or perhaps those of Orwell’s world of 1940s Britain) and the prescri ptive way it is treated by the Party. Despite the claim that “consorting with prostitutes was forbidden” (pg. 68) and “might mean five years in a forced labour camp” (pg. 68), it is also stated that “tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution” (pg. 68) a contradiction that echoes the confusion implicit in the image of the fallen woman. This image calls up connotations of a Victorian England in which it has sometimes been claimed that up to “one hundred thousand prostitutes” (Hoare, 2012, pg. 77), but which simultaneously relegated female sexual excitement to the status of an illness, equating it with hysteria. This concurrent denigration and acceptance of sexuality serves to make the world of Airstrip One even more recognisable as an image of our own, as well as highlighting Winston as, arguably, an incidental feminist.

The definition given of the Newspeak word “goodsex” (Orwell, pg. 319) is “normal intercourse between man and wife… without physical pleasure on the part of the woman” (pg. 319). The sexism of the Party, and presumably Ingsoc as a whole, is apparent from that single sentence. The idea of the woman as not more than a vessel for creating children and a body to work for the Party is not equally applied to men, who are presumably allowed to experience sexual pleasure without being accused of “sexcrime” (pg. 319). In Winston’s rejection of the authority of Big Brother, and his desire for Julia’s promiscuity almost as a separate being from her, he incidentally rejects the ingrained notion of patriarchy. It is arguable that his deference to Julia’s greater experience in the art of having affairs comes not only from his own lack of experience, but from a subconscious desire to invert the dominant man/submissive woman ideal that is so much a part of the Party’s control.

Constructions of masculinity and femininity are manipulated masterfully in Nineteen Eighty-Four, often being used as symbols for larger issues in the text. The restrictive notions of the ideal masculine and feminine are subtly likened to the oppressive ideals of Ingsoc, and their subversion is more often an act of rebellion than weakness.

Bibliography

Bennett, Alan, (2006) The History Boys. DVD.

Chappell, Mike, (2003) The British Army in World War I (1): The Western Front 1914-16, Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing

Hoare, Philip (2012) England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia, London, England: HarperCollins UK

Horan, Thomas, (2007) "Revolutions from the waist downwards: desire as rebellion in Yevgeny Zamyatin`s We, George Orwell`s 1984, and Aldous Huxley`s Brave New World." Extrapolation 48.2. [journal] pg. 314+. Available through York St John University Library Website. [Accessed 16 May 2013.]

Jacobs, Lea, (1991) The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942, California, United States: University of California Press

Orwell, George, (1949, my edition 2000) Nineteen Eighty-Four, St Ives, England: Penguin Classics