Further notes on Orwell and Big Brother’s puritanism

At the end of my post last week about Orwell’s failure to see how totalitarian regimes can—contra his criticism of Huxley’s Brave New World—have “a strict morality” that is not sexually repressive, I noted that the Soviet Union exploited just such conditions in order to obtain kompromat—compromising material that could be used for blackmail, either of its own people or foreign agents.

I hadn’t finished reading DJ Taylor’s Who is Big Brother? when I wrote that post, but as I did later that evening Taylor raised an interesting possibility about Nineteen Eighty-Four’s central love affair, one that hinges on the ambiguity of Julia, Winston Smith’s lover. Not just ambiguity, but inscrutability. “What goes on in her head?” Taylor asks. “Orwell never says.”

This is not because, as some recent feminist critics have argued, Orwell is too sexist to write women well, but because she is mysterious by design. There is a dimension to Julia that she keeps from Winston, that he is too smitten and desperate and unworldly to detect.

Consider: When Julia throws herself at Winston, he, “desperate for companionship . . . takes this at face value.” She is considerably younger than him, is both bold as the instigator of their affair and furtive in its execution, has unexplained access to small luxury items, and confesses to a history of sexual indiscretions with Party elites. Taylor continues:

Julia, it seems clear, is up to something. But what exactly? Some of the most revealing passages about her turn up in the chapter that begins with the disappearance of Syme. Half of her is oddly naive and uninformed: she has only the faintest idea of who [Emmanuel] Goldstein is and the doctrines he is supposed to represent. But the other half is ominously sophisticated, tuned in to ideas and deceptions that are beyond Winston’s power to comprehend. When on one occasion he mentions the war in Eurasia, she insists that the conflict is simply imaginary and the bombs which fall on Oceania are probably fired by its own rulers ‘just to keep people frightened’.

Further, when Winston tells her about his irrational desire to confess his thoughtcrime to O’Brien and recruit him as an ally and defender, Julia tells him to do it. It is O’Brien who eventually arrests them—in a love nest owned by an undercover member of the Thought Police—and who tortures Winston in Room 101.

Considered from outside Winston’s naive point-of-view, Julia’s personality and behavior—her forwardness, her attitudes toward the Party, her mysterious access to goods usually reserved for the elite, and especially her seduction of an unattractive older man—make her look less like another love-starved prole driven into a doomed relationship by sheer need and more like bait. Julia, Taylor concludes, “is a honey-trap, gamely enticing Winston into O’Brien’s lair so that he can be exposed, tormented, and ultimately re-educated. From start to finish, you infer, their whole affair is a put-up job.”

This makes a lot of sense. Even Winston and Julia’s final meeting, post-Ministry of Love, can be read this way. But Taylor notes that the reader can’t be sure, which is probably part of Orwell’s point. Julia remains ambiguous to the end.

Interpreting Julia as a tool of the Thought Police does not resolve the problem of Big Brother’s repressive sexual puritanism, the aspect of his regime that fundamentally jars with the rest—which was the point of last week’s post—but it does add a note of realism to how Big Brother might exploit and suppress a potential enemy. It also makes Winston’s story that much more pitiful.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell turned out to be excellent, by the way. You can look for more about it when I finish my spring reading post. I am aware of the recent parallax novel Julia, which retells Nineteen Eighty-Four from Julia’s perspective, but I have no interest in reading it. I do, however, need to reread Nineteen Eighty-Four.