Decency and Julia
Anita Singh at The Telegraph on Orwell’s misogyny:
George Orwell was a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” man who wrote women out of his story, according to a biographer of his wife.
Anna Funder said that Orwell was a brilliant writer but a complicated man whose personal life was at odds with the “decency” of his writing.
…
“Decency is such a core Orwellian value. He writes about it. It’s the quality of the ‘proles’ in 1984 that is going to save us. He wanted to be decent, to be seen as decent, by which he meant a man of integrity, the same inside and out,” said Funder.
If that’s what he meant by decency then I think it’s inadequate at best. I always assumed it meant not being a shit – not being sadistic or selfish or ruthless. Not harming other people, in short. I think that matters more than integrity and being the same inside and out.
Wifedom is not the only book this year to reassess Orwell through a feminist lens. Sandra Newman has written Julia, which retells 1984 through the eyes of its main female character.
Newman was invited by the Orwell estate to take on the project. She had “absolutely idolised” the author when younger, having read his political works. “Then you read his fiction, particularly 1984, and that hatred of women is really extreme,” said Newman.
Decency isn’t enough.
Uhhh…citations needed.
I’ve read 1984. The only female character in the book is Julia, and Winston doesn’t hate her. Neither (on my reading) does Orwell.
I’m tempted to start quoting from the book, but maybe this isn’t the place. I’ll just go with
Well this was a talk at an event, not an article. She’s written a book: I’m pretty sure she provided citations there. (I haven’t read it yet.)
I will say Orwell’s view of women gave me the crawls decades ago, and that I tried to re-read 1984 more recently than that (I don’t remember exactly when) and gave up because the misogyny was getting on my nerves too much. It’s not just a matter of characters, of course, and Julia isn’t the only woman in the book. I’ve just been looking through it in case I’d marked anything (apparently not) and there are other women. Winston goes to a film and a woman there says things. He encounters a woman in a corridor. Etc.
PS I’ve always been a massive fan of his non-fiction. Got the 4-volume collection when it came out 100 years ago.
Yes, I’ve loved his non-fiction, too. The thing is, casual misogyny is so much a thing, and it’s almost expected. (I’m not giving him a pass; I think he was part of establishing certain expectations in modern literature, for which I blame him). I quit reading late 20th century male novelists because it was too blatant in too many places; I started again, but I’m pretty choosy.
On a related note, my husband and I went to a film the other night. It turned out to be a sci/fi action picture, lots of blow ’em up (not our kind of picture). I wonder if I’m the only one in the theatre that night who noticed there was only one white woman in the picture. She was middle-aged, she turned out to be an evil bad guy, and they blew her up.
It seems somewhat odd to critique Nineteen Eighty-four‘s world for being ugly and unpleasant and vile. Oceania is isn’t just anti-woman; it’s anti-man and anti-Man. It’s a boot stamping on a human face forever.
I don’t think that is the critique though. There’s Oceania and then there’s Orwell’s mind.
Right, my point is that it’s bizarre to draw conclusions about the ugliness of the author’s mind from the ugliness of the intentionally ugly fictional world.
But that’s still not it.
But I can’t explain what is it unless/until I find an example, and I find myself not keen to dig for it.
I read Coming Up For Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. They definitely weren’t feminist texts. The misogyny didn’t seem surprising for the time. (Which isn’t praise.) How Orwell behaved in his private life was much worse according to Singh I hear.
That Orwell conceives of women primarily as objects, rather than as subjects in their own right, also emerges in details about Julia’s behavior. Cosmetics, perfume, and traditional feminine attire are forbidden to Party members. Julia manages to find some makeup and perfume, however, and applies these one day in the secret room. Winston hardly recognizes her, such is the “improvement” in her appearance: She has become prettier and far more feminine… Since Julia has no knowledge of the past or of how women used to look, the assumption seems to be that something in women’s nature makes them want to decorate themselves in this way and that Julia is merely expressing her “femininity,” which the Party, naturally, tries to suppress.
From “The Orwell Mystique” by Daphne Patai, pg. 247.
As a teenager, I’d been told George Orwell was a socialist and a supporter of the British Labour Party.
So I was surprised to repeatedly read American political conservatives like William F. Buckley, Norman Podhoretz and Michael Medved praising Orwell and constantly quoting him.
The same people would *never* quote, say, Fenner Brockway or J. B. Priestley (two other contemporary English socialists who supported the British Labour party).
So if George Orwell was a socialist who supported UK Labour, then he did a pretty lousy job of conveying it through his writings. Heck, James Lovelock said reading George Orwell caused Lovelock to abandon his early socialism.
I find that my American friends have great difficulty in understanding that Communism and Socialism are two different economic systems with some similarities. It’s one of the reasons Americans can’t have nice things like Universal Health Care, 4 weeks annual leave plus 2 weeks sick leave, and anything better than slavery conditions for “servers”.
The American Right praises Orwell because all most of them know is the CIA funded cartoon version of “Animal Farm”, a travesty that ignored Orwell’s criticism of the landholder class and a couple out of context quotes from “1984”.
Orwell would not be recognised by today’s political class – a true believer who was unafraid to criticise his own side when warranted.
The American Right praises Orwell because all most of them know is the CIA funded cartoon version of “Animal Farm”, a travesty that ignored Orwell’s criticism of the landholder class and a couple out of context quotes from “1984”.
I’m not sure about that. Norman Podhoretz was able to quote lengthy passages from Orwell agreeing with Podhoertz’s negative views about pacifists, homosexuals and progressive intellectuals in his book “The Bloody Crossroads.” Podhoretz didn’t take these Orwell quotes from the CIA cartoon of “Animal Farm”.
Look at these George Orwell lines from “My Country Right or Left” (1940):
To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes.
Ugh! Monarchist, anti-intellectual and endorsing a childish kind of English patriotism. Nigel Farage and Laurence Fox would approve every word there!
Compare those Orwell lines with these Rebecca West ones from her essay “The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal” (1935):
For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.
The test of real and valuable nationalism is to avail oneself of the tradition of one’s country; and it happens that internationalism is one of the most ancient and firmly established elements in our tradition. If there is any belief which is new and untried and unnatural, it is the astonishing notion that it is safe to allow the nationalistic spirit free play without constant insistence on international safeguards.
Much better written, and a better argument for a thoughtful English patriotism (that draws on tradition) that also respects other countries. There’s more to being a good person than getting an emotional reaction to the Union Jack
I can’t see Farage or Fox agreeing with this West essay.
Thanks for the Daphne Patai quotation, Mostly Cloudy. I’m a fan of hers. She and Katha Pollitt and I used to be the naughty gang on a Women’s Studies listserv, always dissenting from various bits of orthodoxy. That was long before the Trans Wave, but it was a portent.
Me @ 10
It wasn’t surprising for the time, but it was depressing, because Orwell seemed like (and billed himself as) the kind of guy who would be skeptical of the orthodoxies and prejudices of his time, so to see him so oblivious to the oldest one of all was and is depressing.
The thing about Orwell is that he was bloody-minded, for good and for ill. He was crosswise with the orthodox pro-Stalin left throughout the 1930s, and he wasn’t wrong about that. He wasn’t wrong to support the POUM. He never sucked up to the comrades, and that was never easy.
But. He definitely was not a feminist, and in fact it was a hate-word to him, like pacifist.
I’m sure Orwell would not mind having a cool eye given over to some of his faults, given he did the same to others. It doesn’t diminish what he wrote, both as a masterful essayist and more than decent novelist. FWIW, I liked “Coming Up For Air” as a novel where the protagonist was reflecting on the past and dreading the future circa 1938. (Orwell wrote it after coming back from fighting the war in Spain.)
That said, I can’t help but wonder how much of this is caught up in the current zeitgeist of damning famous old white guys for social justice warrior points. I’m sure Orwell would be worth more than a few.
I kind of like all his early novels, and read them all several times (a long long time ago). They were definitely flawed as literature, but interesting.
You wonder how much of what is caught up in the current zeitgeist of damning famous old white guys for social justice warrior points? What I’m saying certainly isn’t. My social justice warrior cred is way into the negative numbers thanks to my terfitude so it would be pointless to try. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply to Anna Funder either.
That Funder is basing her evaluation of Orwell on a handful of letters is not what I’d consider a full evaluation of Eric Blair’s life. So I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Orwell’s essay about Charles Dickens is still worth reading, if just for the first sentence:
“Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.”
Who said anything about throwing out? Did I say stop reading Orwell? And who says Funder is basing her evaluation of Orwell on a handful of letters? We can all go right on reading Orwell, but we can also swap ideas about him and his work and his attitudes. I’ve always found him depressingly oblivious to women and sometimes misogynist, but that doesn’t mean I threw him out with the bath water.
Also, Funder makes no claim to have done a “full evaluation of Eric Blair’s life.” She was doing something quite different: something narrower and more specific. There’s nothing wrong with that. It interests me because, as I’ve mentioned probably too many times by now, I’ve always found Orwell dense at best about women, and misogynist at worst. See also: Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, John Updike, Philip Roth…the list is long.
I listened to Anna Funder being interviewed on RNZ Saturday a few weeks back. Really interesting interview. I’d recommend tracking it down on whatever podcast app you use. She gave a very nuanced view of him and made clear that she still loves and admires his work. Here’s the web page…
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018901393/anna-funder-how-george-orwell-wrote-his-wife-out-of-his-story
I say. I mean to say, I say.
I find this argument about as compelling as the case for interpreting The Babadook as being about QUILTBAG issues. The conclusion (women are objects not subjects) simply does not follow from the premises, such as they are. It’s a conclusion utterly irrelevant to the premise(s), an ignoratio elenchi. I can’t even agree with the summary of the scene as presented.
There is something in humans that makes us, all of us, both male and female, want to attract potential mates. We do that through whatever means are at hand. To pretend otherwise is to be like the Party and attempt to deny the romantic and carnal impulses. The summary implies that because Julia’s knowledge of the past is nearly non-existent, she ought to have no idea what to do with the makeup. We are then to infer that it’s only her innate femininity that lets her know exactly how to apply it, indicating that Orwell believed the use of makeup to be an instinctual, biologically imparted skill. But! While makeup is forbidden to party members, it is not forbidden to the proles. Winston tells us that he associates makeup with proletariat prostitutes, specifically with fornication, which not only provides a means to know what and how with respect to makeup, it also informs his perception of Julia with makeup. Even assuming that Julia and Winston know nothing of what makeup is supposed to look like tells us nothing. If she does herself up like a clown, we have assumed that Winston has no more frame of reference than she as to what a properly madeup face ought to look. He cannot judge that her attempt is poor by pre-revolutionary standards any more than she can.
Further, a major component of the scene in question is the attempt to experience what it is to be human without the Party’s restrictions. Julia says, “In this room I’m going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.” That it’s makeup she applies is relevant only inasmuch as it’s contraband. If her idea of a “real woman” is distorted and shallow, it’s so because of the dystopia, just like Winston’s distorted psyche. Neither Julia nor Winston knows what it is to be a real woman (or a real man), only that it’s something forbidden. While POV characters in third-person limited narratives are usually more trustworthy than first-person narrators, they’re still not to be fully trusted, and they’re certainly not to be taken as any sort of authorial endorsement or condemnation.
“That said, I can’t help but wonder how much of this is caught up in the current zeitgeist of damning famous old white guys for social justice warrior points. I’m sure Orwell would be worth more than a few.”
The obnoxious book “Monsters” by Claire Dederer would be an example of this.
In the end, she refuses to make any bold moves, and gives up with a shrug. “What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.” “Monsters” is a silly book about a very serious topic. “I was beginning to feel,” Dederer muses, “that I wasn’t going to solve this problem of monstrous men by thinking.” Maybe not, but it would have helped.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230512035455/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-monsters-claire-dederer/
“While makeup is forbidden to party members, it is not forbidden to the proles. Winston tells us that he associates makeup with proletariat prostitutes, specifically with fornication, which not only provides a means to know what and how with respect to makeup, it also informs his perception of Julia with makeup. ”
Yes, but it does seem to strongly reinforce the depiction of Julia throughout the novel as being basically a sex object for Winston Smith. Julia is associated with fornication and prostitution, and Winston tells her (in a line that later became infamous among feminist critics) “‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards.”
The only other women in “1984” that I can remember are Winston’s “frigid” wife, Katherine, the grotesque “prole” washerwoman, and Winston’s saintly drudge of a mother. All caricatures.
FWIW, I don’t think anyone here is for cancelling Orwell and I should have made that clear earlier. I do think there are those who do, and would advise that we toss out 1984 for being sexist, misogynist, etc. I strongly disagree as someone who thinks Orwell’s insights about language and totalitarianism is sadly as timely as ever.
I certainly don’t want George Orwell to be cancelled.
I still think “Animal Farm” and “1984” are excellent books (despite the latter’s unpleasant misogyny).
I do, however, dislike the image of George Orwell as an infallible saint who is the only guide we need to the world of politics. We saw a lot of that in the US-UK media during the Cold War and the second Iraq War.
Mostly Cloudy:
But … That’s the point. That’s actually what the book is about: the death of humanity. Not of the species, but of that which is a worthy subject of poetry.
Much of the novel’s horror comes from the regime’s impact on party member psychology, which we get to see through Winston., and Winston is warped. Of course he objectifies Julia. No one in Oceania has a fully developed capacity for empathy. (Except the proles, perhaps.) The Party drives that basic requirement for humanity right out, along with the capacity for the simplest of interpersonal connections. The Party kills what is Human.
J. A. – Welcome to our world – the world of women. There are so many men whose insights are still as timely as ever but who were also utterly dismissive (at best) of women. I promise you women have a lot of practice in continuing to value their insights while not losing sight of the fact that they saw us as lesser beings.
Oh sure, men are certainly still men when it comes to being dismissive of women. All I can do is try not to be so.
FWIW, Hannah Arendt is still very much worth reading with respect to fascism, even though some are trying now to smear her as being a racist based on selective quotes from her past writings. Was Arendt perfect? No. That doesn’t mean she should be cancelled.
Hannah Arendt was brilliant.
Mostly Cloudy @15
I interpret Orwell’s words very differently here. I think he’s criticizing “the kind of Leftist” whose every feeling is filtered through awareness of what is Politically Correct and what isn’t. They certainly still exist; Andrew Doyle calls them “The New Puritans.”
Yeah, he’s pretty clearly not expressing anti-intellectualism, but rather the sort of sentiment in something like, “It takes a post-graduate degree to believe something that stupid.” You know, like pointing to the Judith Butlers of the world?
I read 1984 exactly once, in primary school, and though I was then unversed in either feminist or literary criticism it struck my young mind that while Winston Smith was the story’s protagonist and point of view, Julia was quite clearly the moral hero and in some ways the actual “main character”. As a boy I had nothing but respect and admiration (okay, and a little bit of infatuation) with her, and I was horrified that Smith was tortured into sacrificing her to save himself. Looking back on the story from downstream of twenty-something years of intellectual and social development, it seems the book was (perhaps indeliberately) just about as feminist-ish a message as a man of Orwell’s time and place could be expected to produce. I would be very surprised if Sandra Newman’s apparently-officially-sanctioned fanfiction recentring Julia as the narrative’s perspective serves as an improvement in showing her raw human spirit and the desolation of having it crushed and blown to the winds by Big Brother’s goons and Winston’s betrayal than the one we get from the original.
As Nullius in Verba implies, it would be a strange dystopia indeed where there was nothing objectionable that happened to any women, or where women reacted in the tabula-rasa robotic way that at least some (if not most) feminist criticism seems to expect of all media everywhere all the time. Sure, people are and should be free to write in whatever manner they choose (and also to criticise freely), but one has to fisk 1984 quite hard and deliberately misread almost every passage within to come to the conclusion that it is somehow insulting or debasing to Julia’s dignity or to women in general.
Lady Mondegreen @34
George Orwell is saying he feels that it’s disrespectful not to stand to attention for a song that says “Supernatural Entity, Protect Our Nation’s Hereditary Monarch”. He said he would prefer being raised like that to being like some unspecified “Left-wing intellectuals”.
I don’t think the “Left-wing intellectuals” are the Judith Butler-type head-in-the-clouds,post-graduate degree intellectuals of the time (someone like the Stalinist D. N. Pritt springs to mind).
Nor are they people we would now call “Politically correct” or “woke”.
It seems more like Orwell isn’t quite convinced that his mix of Blimpish patriotism and an unspecified “revolution” will convince people, and hence is lashing out at people on the political Left who might find this idea unconvincing.
Try to imagine a group of British anti-fascists singing “God Save Edward VIII” and you’ll see some of the problems with Orwell’s ideas in the essay “My Country Right or Left.”.
Also, the anti-intellectual statements of “My Country Right or Left” are part of a standard trope in British politics – to demonise “Intellectuals” as weird, cowardly, arrogant, and unpatriotic.
Margaret Thatcher made regular use of this trope: She once told the UK edition of Reader’s Digest that “socialism did not come from the people. It is a doctrine of intellectuals who had the arrogance to believe they could better plan everyone’s life.”
Nigel Farage uses this trope as well. He once said “Labour is hijacked by North London intellectuals who won’t even sing our national anthem.”
https://nitter.poast.org/Nigel_Farage/status/829085439181090816#m
So that is why I said I found Orwell’s ideas in that essay similar to Farage and Laurence Fox. It’s also why I said I considered Rebecca West a superior writer to Orwell, even though West also had quite the soft spot for the British Royal Family.
To tie in with the George Orwell – Margaret Thatcher connection:
On the 2nd January 1984, the Rupert Murdoch-owned British tabloid The Sun ran an editorial titled:
‘1984: What we must do to keep Big Brother at bay.’
As 1984 opens, we have been spared the Orwell nightmare. We
have liberty under Margaret Thatcher. We have hope of a better
tomorrow.
Yet all these things are not automatic.
We have to deserve them. We have to earn them.
We must be vigilant every day in 1984 and beyond to preserve them from any assault.
Decency isn’t enough.
(The editorial is quoted in the Scott Lucas book “The Betrayal of Dissent : Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the new American century.”)
Mostly Cloudy, I haven’t read the essay. Maybe there’s context I’m missing. But addressing this paragraph:
He is not saying
There’s nothing there about respect or disrespect. He’s talking about his feelings, which he admits are childish.
Mostly Cloudy:
Actually, the left-wing intellectuals to whom he referred were not unspecified. He specified those left-wing intellectuals “who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions”, which is a subset of left-wing intellectuals, which is itself a subset of intellectuals. Whatever thought was in his head, the words that he put down do not express rank anti-intellectualism. It’s reasonable to read this excerpt as implicitly including himself in the set of intellectuals, and it’s even plausible that he counted himself among left-wing intellectuals. Just not among those left-wing intellectuals—the ones who don’t understand ordinary emotions.
Mostly Cloudy,
I must confess I am not quite sure what the point of all this posthumous guilt-by-association is — indeed, I am not even sure Nigel Farage had even been born when Eric Blair’s tubercled lungs finally gave out on him (and a quick search confirms this to be the case). Of course British politicians of all stripes have taken Orwell’s words and appropriated them for political purposes — he became, sadly only after his death, recognised as one of the greatest writers in the Anglosphere. If Rebecca West had obtained similar levels of recognition and thus a place in the common heart of British voters, it is almost certain that the Farages of such a world would have found something in her body of work to appropriate as well.
If we are to be judged by how our words might one day be used by the spiritual descendents of our current political enemies, then none of us should write anything at all, because that is a game none can hope to win. Unless you are fanatically certain that history does indeed have a singular arc and that you will somehow always land on the correct side of it forevermore, that is.
So what is the point of this? Please, with all respect, spell out the implications you are making.
Der Durchwanderer @41
“If we are to be judged by how our words might one day be used by the spiritual descendents of our current political enemies, then none of us should write anything at all, because that is a game none can hope to win. Unless you are fanatically certain that history does indeed have a singular arc and that you will somehow always land on the correct side of it forevermore, that is.”
You have a point there. We know that Martin Luther King, for instance, would not have approved of the politics of Rand Paul, and would be dismayed to hear Paul appropriating his words:
https://time.com/3774154/rand-paul-mlk/
I suppose my main issue with George Orwell is that he helped make anti-intellectualism respectable in British society.
Orwell’s status as *the* archetypal literary defender of democratic society against totalitarianism meant that the numerous attacks on intellectuals in Orwell’s work gained a special status.
And since anti-intellectualism in British society has been mainly, since the Thatcher era, associated with the political right, there’s a similarity between Orwell’s comments on intellectuals as “disloyal”, deracinated, and treacherous, and those of later figures like Thatcher and Farage.
This might also explain why “The Sun” was able to recruit Orwell into an editorial describing people opposed to Thatcher’s government as people its readers needed to be “vigilant” against.
And conservatives like William F. Buckley, Norman Podhoretz and Michael Medved also shared the anti-intellectual views of their British counterparts. Hence why they too were able to use lengthy quotes from George Orwell’s work in their attacks on the political left.
Those are the implications I am making- Orwell’s strong dislike of intellectuals make him a uniquely attractive writer for the modern-day political right.
And this might answer the question I raised earlier, that puzzled my teenage self. *Why* is this revolutionary socialist writer always being quoted, so often by defenders of tradition and capitalism?
Is it because of his undeniable literary merit? Maybe.
Is it because his plain style of writing makes it easy for other writers to understand and quote his work? Maybe.
Or is it because Orwell’s dislike of intellectuals (who, by definition, aren’t happy with the status quo) makes him uniquely attractive to these defenders of tradition and capitalism?
If you want to read someone who’s written about this aspect of George Orwell’s work much better than I could, read the chapter on George Orwell in Stefan Collini’s excellent book “Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain.”
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