University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

George Orwell'S Utopian Vision

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George Orwell'S Utopian Vision

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Content This dissertation has been 65-9978
m icrofilm ed exactly as received
JACKSON, Alan Stewart, 1930-
GEORGE ORWELL’S UTOPIAN VISION.
University of Southern California, Ph. D ., 1965
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
GEORGE ORWELL 1S UTOPIAN VISION
by
Alan Stewart Jackson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1965
UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERI'I CALIFORNIA
TH E GRADUATE SC H O O L
U N IV ER SITY PARK
L O S A N G ELES. C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
AlaR.Sfce.w.arJLJjaGkjmn...........
under the direction of his.....Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Date J. un £ ,. . .L 9 . 6. 5 ...............
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
I INTRODUCTION......................................... 1
Chapter
I. THE NEED TO LOVE........................... 7
II. THE HUMANIST VERSUS THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE . 43
III. NATURE AND MODERN MAN . 76
IV. POVERTY AND WORK........................... Ill
CONCLUSION........................................... 139
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................... 149
INTRODUCTION
The two main influences on the development of George
Orwell's thought were the Great Depression and the Spanish
Civil War. The economic crisis that closed the 1920's and
determined the life and work of the mass of men in the west
ern world during the decade before World War Two made many-
thoughtful men acutely aware of society's failure to solve
its economic problems. This crisis also forced many men to
realize that changes had to be made in the social structure
of modern liberal society. Orwell shared in this awareness
and his experiences among the lower classes in Paris, Lon
don, and Wigan gave him an intensely personal view of the
degradation of unemployment and of the deep psychological
need of man to do meaningful work. The second main influ
ence on Orwell, his experience in Spain, caused him to see
this century as primarily a political age and to discover
what was to him the central threat of his time— the totali
tarian state that can emerge from either the Left or the
Right.
Orwell opposed totalitarianism and similar concentra
tions of power because he believed that they destroy, or at
least corrupt, those values, love, friendship, and meaning
ful work, which Orwell most esteemed. His conviction that
1
his was essentially an age of politics underlies his convic
tion that political choice embodied the central ethical ac
tion of his time. Since the abuse of power and the demoral
izing effects of poverty caused the major moral evil in the
lives of his contemporaries, and since the single man in his
private capacity cannot cope with these evils, political ac
tion becomes the most effective form of ethical action for
responsible men. Politics, then, for Orwell, is the moral
imagination realizing itself in effective action.
Yet, he was keenly aware of the failure of politics in
his time. This awareness gave rise to the prominent ele
ments of satire and criticism in his writing. What he op
poses is always clear. But the inadequacy of much published
criticism on Orwell is that it repeats what he opposes and
fails to call attention to the positive values underlying
his criticisms. I am convinced that Orwell used his satire
and social criticism to express certain deeply held beliefs.
In a sense, Orwell wanted to create a world where he could
allow his aesthetic sense full play; shortly before his
death, he expressed the desire to write novels like Joseph
Conrad's, novels that would explore the subtle interplay of
human relationships. But during most of his life, his aes
thetic sense was largely subordinated to his moral vision.
This vision demanded that he first try to help solve the
political and economic crises of his time. In the face of
these problems, Orwell was sustained by his vision of what
3
constitutes the average man's "good life," the daily life
men live far from the centers of political power. During
much of his own life, he sought to realize this good life,
and his vision of it gave him the standards with which to
judge his own times. Although my study requires that I,
too, set forth in considerable detail what it was that
Orwell opposed in his own society at his moment in history,
my aim will always be to show how his satire and criticism
yield by inference and implication their harmony with his
many positive assertions of his own values.
Thus, we shall see that Orwell considers the isolation
of man from man to be the key condition that explains the
personal and social failure that marked both his fictional
characters and the typical middle-class Englishmen of his
time. The isolating walls of self-created fear, prejudice,
and dead traditions in religion and in imperialism all fall
under his satiric view. He is not content, however, merely
to satirize; he insists on man's need to love and to express
his love. The commitments that follow from this, commit
ments to marriage, to the family, and to children, no matter
how limiting in some ways these commitments may be, ulti
mately redeem man from the more oppressive limitations of
human isolation. In addition to marriage, friendship is
another way man makes actual his belief in the solidarity ofI
mankind— a value and concept whose implications the radical
left and various religious groups so often treated in a
dangerously abstract fashion. For Orwell, friendship, how
ever, is not an abstraction whose existence can be ordered
or planned. It springs from the mutual speaking of heart to
heart when man encounters man; this "shock of recognition"
is a central event in man's emotional life. All social and
political institutions exist for and are justified only to
the extent that they enhance these kinds of relationships.
Again we see his positive moral vision in his attack on
religion and the religious attitude. For Orwell, and, as he
judges, for most thoughtful men of his generation, religious
belief necessarily entails hypocrisy. He finds it difficult,
if not impossible, to compromise with the religious position.
For him it is not true; therefore, it can only lead man
astray. We have one life, Orwell says, here and now, in
which to realize our fullest human moral dimensions. If we
take refuge in some future time or in some other world to
escape the moral decisions involved in life on earth, we
are, through intention or ignorance, agents of evil.
Orwell's passion for the truth of particular statements is
indissolubly linked to his firm rejection of the truth of
the transcendental order propounded by religion. Those
truths about man and his nature that have been expressed in
religious traditions must be absorbed by a new humanism, one
that is essentially atheistic and based on a secular ethic.
In Orwell's thought on nature and modern man, we see
critical judgments and positive affirmations. To the extent
that modern man is cut off from a close relationship to na
ture, he is maimed by this narrowing of his response to
life. Yet, for Orwell, nature is not a realm of alternative
experience to society; nature is not a place where one by a
mystical experience of the soul can achieve some kind of
transcendent unity with the cosmos. Orwell, like another
great English moralist, Dr. Johnson, is a man of the city.
Nature for Orwell is a balance-wheel; keeping in touch with
nature helps keep man's own psychological life, his whole
range of desires, in balance and, therefore, closer to san
ity. It is the oppressive grotesque features of the modern
industrial city, its ugliness and artificiality, that help
unbalance the response of human beings to life. But nature
replenishes man's ability to live more fully with other men
and with himself.
And, finally, in Orwell's ideas about poverty and work,
we may discern the same pattern outlined above. The failure
of politics, to Orwell, as we have said, a failure of the
moral imagination of the middle-classes of his time and
place, engulfed large masses of men in the degrading and
debilitating experiences of poverty and unemployment. Again
man is denied access to a full life. Psychologically man
needs work, and it must be more than a source of income.
Man must have work that is meaningful to him and in which he
can take pride.
My purpose in the following chapters is to canvass !
6
Orwell's work in order to bring out the extent and depth of
his affirmation of his positive values. The position Orwell
has established in the long line of English moralists de
rives from the unique combination of these five assertions:
man must love; religion is not true and, hence, is in con
flict with an ethical life and limits man’s response to
life; man needs nature to replenish and keep in balance his
vital energies; man must be free from poverty; and, finally,
man must take pride in meaningful work. This is Orwell's
Utopian vision, the vision he insists must either be at
tained here and now or not at all.
CHAPTER I
THE NEED TO LOVE
Although George Orwell is associated in the popular
mind with the anti-Utopia of the future that he created in
1984, in a perceptive review of "Such, Such Were the Joys,"
Henry Popkin calls Orwell an "Edwardian-Others also find
the source of Orwell's values in the Edwardian or Victorian
past- This view helps explain the tension in his thought.
In a sense, he was an Edwardian facing a post-Edwardian
world. Like G. E. Moore, he believed in the ability of
intellect to solve man1s problems and he placed great im
portance on relationships between people. Like E. M.
Forster, he wanted people "to connect." But these men,
Moore and Forster, were of another generation. In the early
days of the Bloomsbury Group such men could hope for the
fulfillment of their ideals, but political events in
Orwell's world and time were dividing man from man. Sepa
rating Orwell from Moore and Forster is the watershed of
World War I. The war made evident to Forster the inadequacy
of his liberal humanitarianism to resolve the struggles of a
" ' ‘"Orwell the Edwardian, " Kenyon Review, XVI (Winter
1956), 139-144.
7
society breaking away from its traditions. As if stunned by
the years of momentous change in Europe, he remained silent
from 1910 to 1924. Then he ended his major creative phase
with A Passage to India, a novel that mainly depicts the
problems of an earlier world. After the war, like Bertrand
Russell, Forster felt, but for much different reasons, that
he was a man out of his time, "like 'Milton after the Res-
2
toration.Although Orwell might have been "born out of
his time," he was not a Miniver Cheevy. He changed his
Scottish name, but kept the Scot’s urge to reform, to re
shape the world according to his image.
Everywhere in the modern world Orwell saw barriers cut
ting off man from man. These barriers were creating twenti
eth century versions of what Melville called the isolato.
Such barriers are not unique to this century, but certain
developments have intensified their growth. Nineteenth
century English economics were based on the laissez faire
theory, which ultimately saw society in atomistic terms that
divided man from man. Orwell understood that, ironically,
modern totalitarian states, reacting to this atomistic view,
created what one could loosely call an organic economic sys-1
tern (i.e. the efforts of the state and individual are viewed
as connected; man's relationship to other men is recognized):
But in doing this the totalitarian state destroyed man's ;
i
I
2 I
Bertrand Russell, "Obituary," Unpopular Essays (New
York, 1950) , p. 175.__________ J
fundamental sense of self-identity and replaced it with an
identity connected to the destiny of the state.
Thus, Orwell saw totalitarianism not only as a new
assault, but also as a further assault on modern man's sense
of identity. It was another force separating man from man.
A problem throughout Orwell's writing is how to retain a
sense of personal identity and worth in a world moving to
ward greater impersonality. He knew that modern man could
not recapture the sense of man's importance that underlies
Hamlet; but, at the same time, he wanted to avoid the oppo
site view of man that sees him without any dignity. What
then is Orwell1s answer? In a sense his answer is a plati
tude— but then many platitudes are true: Man needs love and
friendship to escape his sense of psychological isolation.
Two succinct critical statements are relevant here.
They both accurately express Orwell's views on man's rela
tionship to man in society. Irving Howe says that Orwell
3
saw social horror as "inhuman relations among men." And
George Woodcock says that instead of basing his 'socialism on
an elaborate framework, Orwell based it on a "generalized
conception in which the greatest tenet is human brother-
4
hood." Such statements show Orwell's awareness of the in
adequacy of a purely personal or private view about human
relationships, as found in the Bloomsbury Group. Instead,
^Politics and the Novel (New York, 1957), p. 241.
^The Writer and Politics (London, 1948) , p. 115.__
" ~ * 10
man's personal and social relationships ultimately depend on
[the kind of existing political institutions in society.
Thus Orwell opposes a retreat to a private world of art and
friendship, as exemplified in the Bloomsbury Group? instead,
man must make the social horror of inhuman relations give
way to humane ones.
Although Orwell's goal is a sense of community among
men, the point of departure in his works is the isolated
man, 1'§tranChristopher Hollis thinks that this generic Orwellian char
acter appears in "Shooting An Elephant" where Orwell de-
5
scribes killing an elephant to keep face with the Burmese.
The solitary man standing in front of the crowd, alone and
isolated, acting against his will, symbolizes the rest of
the isolated characters in his works, as well as Orwell's
response to imperialism. Most of these isolated characters,
however, are unlike T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. They
try to escape their isolated world; they do not want to be
"ragged claws" on "the floors of silent seas.” They want to
find the love and friendship from which Prufrock retreats.
Modern man's sense of psychological isolation is, thus,:
one of man's crucial problems. Orwell saw two main ways to
break free from this isolation: first, love and friendship;i
and, second, marriage and the family. j
Orwell's childhood was a central influence in shaping [
: i
I
5 1
A Study of George Orwell (Chicago, 1956), p. 1.________ I
his later attitudes toward love and friendship. Although in
|a conventional sense his parents loved him, he felt the ab
sence in his childhood of any deep love or friendship. It
was a time of loneliness— he later described why. He was
the middle child of three with a five year gap on both sides;
his sisters were almost strangers to him. Even though he
barely saw his father, he disliked him.^ He was a "gruff
voiced elderly man forever saying 'Don't'" (p. 51). His
mother was the only mature person he loved, but he did not
trust her. As a child he always felt a gulf between himself
and the adult world. This gulf so impressed him that in his
later life he believed that he and other authors write
partly to get back at the grownups whose indifference
7
wounded them in childhood.
His prep school experiences intensified his loneliness.
He attributed many of the faults of the English upper and
middle classes to their tradition of sending children away
8
to school at an early age— sometimes as young as seven.
Home "might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place
ruled by love rather than by fear" (p. 36). But at the age
of eight, boys go from home to a world of "force and fraud
6
"Such, Such Were the Joys . . ." Such, Such Were the
Joys (New York, 1953), p. 51. The title essay was first
published posthumously in 1952. j
I
7"Why I Write," Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 6. j
^"Such, Such Were the Joys ..." Such, Such Were the j
Joys, p. 62. ____________________________
and secrecy, like a goldfish into a tank full of pike"
(p. 36) .
After his school experiences, five years in Burma fur
ther increased his sense of loneliness and isolation. As a
result, throughout his life Orwell remained intensely aware
bf man's need for love and friendship. In his life and
works, like Ishmael in Moby Dick, Orwell sought the regener
ative powers of love. As will be shown later, his charac
ters who find this, such as Gordon in Keep the Aspidistra
Flyincr, are saved; those who fail meet one of two fates:
|"death-in-life," like Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter, or
death, like Flory in Burmese Days.
The first extensive portrait of the isolated person is
9
that of Flory, the main character m Burmese Days. His
weakness and refusal to follow the English code in the Bur
mese colonial world make him an outcast. He can neither
successfully defy nor accept the colonial world's narrow
j . i
prejudices based on sticking together, reading Blackwood1s, ’
and drinking whiskey. The English colonials live in an at-
! |
mosphere of petty argument and deadening conventions. Al
though he tries to forge a deep friendship with Dr. Vera-
L
swami, a Burmese, Flory constantly feels lonely and wants to;
I f
I
talk to someone sympathetic to his views. We observe this
in his reaction to a pigeon he sees in the forest.
i
^(New York, 1934), p. 71.
A pang went through Flory. Alone, alone, the bitterness
of being alone! So often like this, in lonely places in
the forest, he would come upon something— bird, flower,
tree— beautiful beyond all words, if there had been a
soul with whom to share it. Beauty is meaningless until
it is shared. If he had one person, just one, to halve
his loneliness! (p. 71)
Shortly after this, he meets and falls in love with Eliza
beth, an English girl in her early twenties visiting her
aunt and looking for a husband. Flory thinks that perhaps
she can see why he hates part of the "stifling, stultifying
world" of Burma where one's emotional resources dry up
(p. 86). She might help save him from the soul-destroying
loneliness of Burma. Some years before, after his home
leave was cancelled, he had realized that his heart was in
Burma, although he both loved and hated it. He also saw
i
only one way to hold his soul together and to avoid becoming
I
a typical Anglo-Indian. That way was ”to find someone who
would share his life in Burma" (p. 90).
I
But his unorthodox views, another aspect of his isola- j
i
tion, make finding such a person difficult. Flory criti- j
cizes the other Englishmen for refusing to learn anything j
!
about the Burmese. Conversely, part of the novel's central
conflict results, from the other Englishmen's resentment of
i
I
Flory's friendliness toward the Burmese. He goes so far as
ho visit Dr. Veraswami's home, in violation of the English
code. To get Elizabeth to share his interest in and sympa
thy towards the Burmese, he takes her to a pwe, as Flory
describes it, "a kind of Burmese play; a cross between a
I ________________ ____________________________________________
14
"historical drama and a revue" (p. 129), and later to a Bur
mese market place. But these attempts to show her native
customs shock and disgust her. To her the Burmese are un
civilized savages to be avoided. After he fails to interest
her in learning the Burmese language, she comes to share the
conventional judgment that "his views were not the views an
Englishman should hold" (p. 150).
Flory1s only friendship— that with Dr. Veraswami— helps
bring about the situation that causes Flory's suicide. Dr.
Veraswami becomes a cause c£lebre among the English when an
edict from a higher authority suggests that a Burmese be
allowed membership in the European Club, which has had an
all English membership. When Veraswami is the logical
choice, many Englishmen resent him and suspect Flory might
nominate him. But the Burmese magistrate, U Po Kyin, also
hopes to join the club. To insure this he disgraces Dr.
Veraswami in the eyes of the English and destroys Flory.
Just when Flory can successfully nominate Veraswami and is
almost assured of marrying Elizabeth, Flory's former Burmese
mistress disgraces him. Under U Po Kyin's instigation, she
appears in church looking like a "hag of the bazaar" with
grey powder on her face and long greasy hair (p. 352). In
front of the English colonials she screams at Flory to look
at her body that he has "kissed a thousand times" (p. 353).
After demanding money from him, she starts tearing off her
i
clothes as a final insult.
15
Of course, Flory1s final plea to Elizabeth to marry him
fails. To escape a life of continued loneliness, he commits
suicide. Throughout all of this, Elizabeth remains blind to
the suffering she has caused him, overlooking her own cru
elty in encouraging him when it was to her advantage and in
ignoring him when she hoped to make a better marriage. Her
most hateful quality is her lack of compassion that blinds
her to her part in destroying Flory. Insensitive and con
ventional, she unquestioningly accepts the values of the
station, values that destroy healthy and viable relation
ships between people. Like the Reverend Hare's selfishness,
in A Clergyman1s Daughter, Elizabeth’s cruelty and smallness
of spirit result from her blindness to the meaning of love.
It is significant in terms of Orwell's "Edwardian bent"
that his "conclusion" in Burmese Days is like E. M. Forster's
in A Passage to India. In two of the best books about the
English in the east, both writers dramatize colonialism's
ultimate evil: it divides man from man and creates mis
trust, corrupting both colonizer and colonized.
Whereas Flory's failure to break out of his isolation
causes his destruction, in A Clergyman1s Daughter, the in
ability of Dorothy, the main character, to share normal love
with others determines her fate, "death-in-life." Dorothy's
mother and father were unhappy in their marriage, but since
he was a clergyman they hid their unhappiness from the
' ~ ' 16
outside world and so intensified it.^® Dreadful scenes be
tween her parents left "a deep, secret wound in her mind"
(p. 51). This left Dorothy hating the "hind of thing" men
want to do. She finds the thought of a man kissing her re
pulsive (p. 89). Such fears deny her a normal life. She is
left physically isolated, as well as psychologically iso
lated. Although at times she wants to break out of her iso
lation, she retreats from chances to have love affairs, and
knows she will never marry, "nothing would ever overcome her
horror of all that1 1 (p. 90) . Instead she chooses a "death
in life" existence, a life of repression and sterility,
similar to that of James Joyce's Maria in "Clay.”
Even when Dorothy temporarily escapes her father's
domination in London, she feels psychologically isolated,
losing this feeling only when she suffers amnesia and picks
hops. Recovering her memory, however, she rejects for good
the more intimate human relationships, especially physical
love. Warburton, incongruously both the village lecher and
her close friend, proposes marriage. At first she is
tempted, especially since she fears poverty; but this fear
vanishes when she feels his body against her. So great is
the disgust caused by his touch that she is unable to liber
ate herself from her old way of life. But, for Orwell, this
old way of life is a denial of life because it cuts her off
from any close relationship with other people. Warburton
10 (New York, 1936) P- 2 2 . __________________ _______
' " ~ ' ““ .' . 17
sees how her withdrawal is causing her to dry up emotion
ally.
Women who don’t marry wither up— they wither up like as
pidistras in back-parlour windows; and the devilish thing
is that they don't even know that they're withering.
(p. 301)
The isolated character in Keep the Aspidistra Flying,
unlike Flory and Dorothy, breaks through his isolation.
During most of this novel Gordon Comstock is at war with
society. As a boy he rebels against his family's "shabby
genteel” tradition. Even in the third-rate school he at
tends, he lives with much richer boys. At this school he
11
gains "a crawling reverence for money.” Then deciding he
cannot be rich, he declares war on money (p. 43). This
declaration and his later failure as a poet cause him to
quit his job writing jingles in an advertising agency. How
ever, his escape from the money world does not free him from
despair. Instead he finds that cutting himself off from
mankind intensifies his sense of futility. During his self-
imposed loneliness, his friendships deteriorate; he feels
sensitive about his lack of money; and he is bored. Perhaps
worst of all, nothing in poverty compensates for the misery
it brings. Yet, he finds a way out of his isolation. He
re-establishes his connection with humanity by marrying
Rosemary. She has been perceptive enough to see that his
retreat from the money world is actually a retreat from life;
11 (New York, 1954) , p. 42.
18
itself— from his defeated ambitions and from his whole fam
ily tradition.
Whereas in Burmese Days and A Clergyman1s Daughter
Orwell was mainly interested in the destructive effects of
psychological isolation, in Homage to Catalonia, as in Keep
the Aspidistra Flying, he is interested above all in the
12
redemptive powers of love and friendship. Homage to Cata
lonia is an emphatic affirmation of these things. Since it
is about a foreigner's experiences in the fighting in and
around Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, at first
glance it seems an unlikely place for such an affirmation.
But countless incidents prove otherwise. Soon after arriv
ing in Barcelona, Orwell met an Italian. Although unable to
talk to him because of language differences, Orwell liked
him immediately. He hardly understood his deep response,
but he felt that the Italian was capable of deep loyalties.
He "had the face of a man who could commit murder and throw
away his life for a friend" (p. 3). As the Italian was
leaving, he stopped and gripped Orwell’s hand. Orwell felt
"his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging
the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter
intimacy" (p. 4). He became for Orwell a symbol of the
friendliness and warmth and largeness of the human spirit he
found everywhere he went in Spain. Years later, in 1943, in
"Looking Back on the Spanish War," Orwell wrote that he
"^New York, 1952. __________ _______
19
could not think of the Spanish war without remembering the
. . 13
Italxan militiaman.
The ease with which he made friends in Spain and the
way the Spanish overwhelmed him with hospitality and gener
osity amazed Orwell. At times their generosity was almost
embarrassing; they would force a pack of cigarettes on him
when he asked for only one. Beyond this generosity, he saw
"in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit" (p. 12).
One experience particularly illustrates this. Orwell's
party, the POUM, was outlawed after the internal battles
among the Loyalists in Barcelona. However, while trying to
get a friend released from jail, Orwell had to reveal his
party membership to an officer of an opposing party. The
officer understood the risk Orwell was taking for a friend
and did not arrest him. Instead he shook his hand (pp. 222-
223). Orwell says it is hard to understand the significance
of this act unless you realize the feeling of the time: a
feeling of distrust and hatred, a world where you had to
walk by old friends and never greet them because you both
belonged to an outlawed party. The officer's shaking
Orwell's hand in a police office, of all places, was like
"publicly shaking hands with a German during the Great War”
(p. 223).
Such experiences influenced Orwell so deeply that he
came out of the war not with "disillusionment and cynicism,"
13
Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 149.___________________
20
but with "more belief in the decency of human beings"
(p. 230). In "Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1 1 he tells
about having a bundle of extremely cheap cigars stolen from
him. A Spanish boy was wrongly accused and ignominiously
searched in front of him. Yet a few weeks later, the same
boy defended him in a quarrel that resulted when Orwell had
to force a Spaniard to do sentry duty. The boy's behavior,
like the officer's, could result only from having passed
through "some emotionally widening experience," such as the
Spanish Civil War. Spain in 1936 was for Orwell "a time
when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they
ordinarily are" (p. 138).
After returning to England from Spain, Orwell became
involved in the problems of Europe verging on war. His con
cern about the future of Western Europe is one dominant
14
theme in Coming Up For Air. As we said earlier, Orwell
was in many ways an Edwardian facing a post-Edwardian world.
In the response of George Bowling, the main character in
Coming Up For Air, to the atmosphere preceding World War II,
Orwell's Edwardian inclinations are seen. To escape his
present life Bowling tries to recapture the past— essenti
ally an Edwardian past. Bowling is also another isolated
character, not because he fears emotional involvement with
others or because he cannot succeed in life. In a material
sense, he is relatively successful, but he finds his ideals
14
New York, 1950._____ _____________________________
' “ ' 21
in the past. The present plagues him with a nagging wife,
the responsibilities of rearing children, and a sense of
being trapped by circumstances. What most isolates him,
however, is the hate-filled atmosphere before the Second
World War. At a meeting of the local Left Book Club, the
speaker, a "well-known anti-Fascist,” appalls him. Although
Bowling agrees with the speaker's criticism of Hitler and
the Nazis, he sees that this man also is deliberately "stir
ring up hatred." The hatred he tries to work up in others
is "nothing to the hatred he [the speaker] feels himself"
{p. 17 2). If Fascism were eliminated tomorrow, such a man
would find something else to hate. It is partly to escape
this atmosphere that George visits Lower Binfield, his boy
hood town, for the first time in twenty years. But there
the warmth and the sense of community of his boyhood days
have vanished. Overhead, bombing planes fly; on the
streets, children have air-raid drills. The town has grown
from a sleepy village to a good-sized manufacturing town;
and ironically, one major factory makes bombs. But, as at
tractive as the return to the past is both for Bowling and
Orwell, they find that it is impossible to do so.
After World War II, Orwell was more convinced than ever
that men must love one another or perish; men must build a
society in which love and friendship can flourish. In his
last two major works, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and 1984,
his focus shifts from the individual to the state. As we
22
have seen in Coming Up For Air, Bowling's inability to re
treat to the past or substantially change the present left
him alienated from his hate filled atmosphere. In Orwell's
last two major works, he dramatizes the active role of the
state in denying love and friendship to its subjects and
deepening the sense of isolation to exploit it. In Animal
Farm, written near the end of the war, he describes a soci-
15
ety dominated by fear and mistrust. In the opening chap
ter when the animals gather to hear Major, the prize boar,
speak about their future, there is a warm feeling of com
panionship. Clover, a cart-horse, cares for a brood of
motherless ducklings during the meeting. When four rats
creep out of their holes to listen, the dogs try to catch
them. After the rats barely escape, Major asks the animals
to decide if the rats and other wild animals are comrades.
They vote overwhelmingly that they are. The animals end the
meeting by singing Beasts of England, a song expressing
their dreams and hopes. Yet, soon after they gain control
of the farm, this sense of comradeship vanishes. Under the
leadership of Napoleon, a pig whose career parallels that of
Joseph Stalin's, some pigs seek power and privilege for
themselves at the expense of the revolution's success. This
betrayal brings divisiveness, fear, and mistrust. Yet, in
this society friendships still exist. Two horses, Clover
and Boxer, and a donkey, Benjamin, are friends throughout
~^New York, 1946. __________________
their lives. When Boxer finally falls, exhausted from over
work, his two friends remain loyal. In fact, the cynical
and wise Benjamin becomes excited only when he realizes the
pigs are sending Boxer to the knacker, the very thing Major
predicted Jones would do when Boxer lost his strength (p. 8).
But at least in Animal Farm, the state, controlled by the
pigs, does not completely destroy all friendships; in
Orwell's next work, 1984, the state has almost completely
destroyed love or friendship between people and has per
fected its techniques of manipulating the resulting isola-
16
tion.
In this last major work, Orwell expresses his despair
about a state dedicated to abolishing love and friendship
between people. The principle horror in 1984 results from
the Party members' psychological isolation. They live in a
sealed-in world; they never learn foreign languages; never
see foreigners except as prisoners; and never associate with
foreigners. The Party fears they might discover that for
eigners resemble themselves (p. 197). This sealed-in world
is characterized by the windowless Room 101, where man is
isolated from all other men except the Party's sadistic tor
tures. Oceania is also, arranged to prevent intimate per
sonal relationships. The Thought Police observe people con-;
stantly through telescreens or from helicopters hovering
overhead. Winston Smith sees people every day at work, but ■
~^New York, 1949. ____________________________________
.. .. ■ " 24
knows only a few by name. When he sees Syme, an acquaint
ance who works in the same building, he thinks, "You did not
have friends nowadays, you had comrades" (p. 49).
In Homage to Catalonia Orwell told about the generosity
that he found in Spain. In 1984 the reverse is true.
Shortly after Winston is arrested because of his affair with
Julia and his work against the Party, he is in a prison cell
when a new prisoner arrives. The other prisoners soon real
ize that the new one is starving to death. When one pri
soner, "a man with a chinless, toothy face," offers him a
piece of bread, a voice from the telescreen instantly tells
him to halt. Then an officer and a guard come into the
cell. The guard "took his stand opposite the chinless man,
and then, at a signal from the officer let free a frightful
blow . . . full in the chinless man's mouth" (p. 239). Such
brutality to punish generosity, resulting from humane feel
ings, is an act against the values of civilization. But
civilization, as it has been known, is precisely what the
Party opposes. Understanding the implications of love and
friendship and of their role in liberating man from his
sense of isolation and hence his vulnerability to be manipu
lated by the state, the Party wants to destroy them.
In Orwell's ideal society, personal relationships would
be fostered and nourished. However, he insisted that total-:
itarianism was moving in the opposite direction. Herbert
Read describes Orwell's insight into the totalitarian
' ' ..... ' ...... ~ 25
state's hostility to love.
In the love of objective beauty, and in the love of an
individual of the opposite sex, the most oppressed slave
can escape to a free world. Religion is not so danger
ous because it tends to be ideological and can be under
mined by propaganda. But the sympathy of love, and the
empathy of art— these feelings must be eradicated from
the human breast if man's allegiance to Caesar (Big
Brother) is to be complete.
Read adds "the dramatic quality which makes his satire so
readable is due to his perception of the totalitarian hos
tility to love."'*'^
O'Brien, Winston's sadistic torturer, describes the
Party’s plan to condition each member.
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feel
ing. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again
will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of
living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integ
rity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty,
and then we shall fill you with ourselves. (pp. 259-
260)
O'Brien understands the Party's desire to limit its sub
jects' whole emotional response to life. Significantly, it
first wants to destroy love and friendship. It especially
opposes these because they make people less effective Party
members; a person in love will give less of his emotional
energies to the Party.
Because the Party holds such views, in 1984 love be
tween people becomes an act of treason. The relationship
between Winston and Julia shows how the Party interferes
with its subjects' most intimate acts. The Party fears the
"1984, ' _ ' World Review, June, 1950. p. 59.
26
political implications of the sexual act; it indicates that
deep personal commitments exist between two people. Julia's
note to Winston saying "I love you" (p. 109) actually at
tacks the Party's basic ideology. The privateness and deep
emotional responses of love redirect emotions from the Party
to another person, and the Party opposes loyalties it cannot
control. It fears the emotional commitments of love that
threaten the stability of the drab world they have created.
Julia understands this attempt to channel personal relation
ships and sexual energies into political fanaticism. She
says,
If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get ex
cited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the
Two Minute Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?
(p. 134)
The Anti-Sex League's attempts to destroy the tradi
tional relationship between man and woman is part of the
Party's larger plan to eliminate or control all emotion.
Although Julia understands "the sexual puritanism of the
Party" (p. 7 2) better than Winston does, she never examines
the implications of her sexual freedom beyond saying "I
adore it" (p. 127). In saying this, however, she opposes
all the forces trying to limit her emotional life. She dif
fers from others in her society. Katharine, Winston's wife,
accepts the Party's dictates and finds the sexual act not a
source of pleasure, but a duty. The Party approves of
Katharine's attitude because it eliminates the kind of rela
tion sh ip Winston and Julia form. Winston values his________
27
relationship with Julia so much that he says, "If they could
make me stop loving you— that would be the real betrayal"
(p. 167). Although Julia answers, "They can't do that," and
shortly afterwards, "They can't get inside you" (p. 167),
events prove her wrong. After Winston and Julia are ar
rested and undergo torture and reconditioning, their love
for one another is destroyed. The ultimate horror of life
in 1984 is that the state can destroy love between people.
This is even a worse horror than the physical torture in
Room 101.
Orwell's concern with love and friendship is found not
only in his imaginative works but also in his critical es
says, especially the three late ones dealing with Swift,
18
Gandhi, and Tolstoy in Shootincr an Elephant. He criti
cizes all three for underestimating the need for love be
tween people. All three would be condemned, by D. H.
Lawrence's statement: "There is only one evil, to deny
life."
In "Politics vs. Literature," Orwell says the Houyhnhnm
is Swift's "ideal being" (p. 74). Orwell, however, finds
them unattractive because "the 'Reason' by which they are
governed is really a desire for death. They are exempt from
love, friendship, curiosity . . ." (p. 75). The Houyhnhnms
"lay store by 'Friendship' and 'Benevolence,' but 'these are
not confined to particular Objects, but universal to the
"^London, 1950.___________________________________________
28
whole Race1" (p. 76). Since their love is generalized and
lacks attachments to individual Houyhnhnms, they lack a word
for "’love,1 in the sexual sense," and when one dies the
others feel no sorrow (p. 76). Although Orwell's reading of
Gulliver's Travels is highly questionable here (he assumes
that Gulliver is speaking for Swift and that Swift too advo
cates the Houyhnhnms' extreme reliance on reason), it
clearly shows Orwell's values. He condemns thwarting the
instincts of love and passion between people in the name of
an excessive "Reason."
Likewise, in "Reflections on Gandhi," Orwell criticizes
Gandhi's ideas. Gandhi objects to close friendships "be
cause 'friends react on one another' and through loyalty to
a friend one can be led into wrong-doing" (p. 107). Accord
ing to Orwell, Gandhi thinks an attachment to one person
interferes with one's love for God. Orwell says this might
be true, but adds, "to an ordinary human being, love means
nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than
others" (p. 107). He adds that "the essence of being human
is that one does not seek perfection, that one is_ sometimes
willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty" (p. 108).
Perhaps saints are perfect; however, in "Lear, Tolstoy and
the Fool," Orwell says that "the difference between a saint
and an ordinary human being is a difference of kind and not
of degree" (p. 50). In his essay on Gandhi, Orwell also
says that many who achieve sainthood probably never felt
29
much temptation to be human beings. Their "main motive for
'non-attachment' is a desire to escape from the pain of liv
ing, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual,
is hard work" (p. 108).
Like Gandhi, Tolstoy's "main aim, in his later years
was to narrow the range of human consciousness" (p. 43). In
Tolstoy's old age, Orwell says, he did not see the import
ance of love in human life, despite his intense religious
interests. Tolstoy's energies were unsuccessfully directed
toward becoming a saint. However, as a saint he would not
have improved earthly life; instead he would have ended it
and replaced it with the "Kingdom of Heaven." Man should,
according to Tolstoy, ignore this world in favor of the
next, having as few attachments to earthly activities as
possible (p. 43). Thus celibacy becomes a higher state than
marriage because it involves fewer ties to others (p. 50).
Orwell objects to all this; he believes life is worth living
on earth. Tolstoy believes otherwise.
If only, Tolstoy says in effect, we would stop breeding,
fighting, struggling and enjoying, if we could get rid
not only of our sins but of everything else that binds
us to the surface of the earth— including love, then the
whole painful process would be over and the Kingdom of
Heaven would arrive. (p. 50)
But Orwell believes that average people do not want the
Kingdom of Heaven to arrive. It is not that they are weak
or sinful. They merely want to "continue working, breeding,
and dying" and not give up this world for another (p. 50).
For life to continue, as we know it, man must have loyalties1
; 30
and love; he must be bound to the earth. As has been seen,
Orwell's Utopian vision embodies the idea that society must
provide institutions that enable people to break free from
their isolation. Society must try to provide an answer for
Thoreau's question: "What sort of space is that which sep
arates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?" One
way, Orwell says, to fill the space is to let love and
friendship flourish.
These views on love and friendship lead logically to
the major importance he placed on marriage and the family as
fundamental institutions of society. Wherever he looked
during his life, he saw the failure of political institu
tions: imperialism had outlived its day; its successor
would probably be worse; the English government could not
abolish severe unemployment between the wars; Hitler came to
power, filling the vacuum left by the failure of German
democracy; the Communists betrayed the revolution in Russia.
With political institutions proving inadequate, Orwell saw
marriage and the family as points of order in the larger
chaos. They could endure in a world torn apart by distress
and strife.
He did not romanticize marriage or family life; in fact,
his characters are usually either unmarried or unhappily
married. Moreover, marriage and family life are often a
source of humor. In Burmese Days, while thinking about mar-i
I
riage, Flory pleads to God that he might avoid a woman such ]
as Mrs. Lackersteen, a "damned memsahib, yellow and thin,
scandalmongering over cocktails" (p. 91). In Keep the
Aspidistra Flying, Gordon takes an oath against marriage,
considering it another trap set by the money-god (p. 103).
In Coming Up For Air, George Bowling asks himself about his
marriage, "Why the hell did I do it?" (p. 155). He knows
the key to mankind's true attitude toward marriage. Soon
after he married he thought about killing his wife, and, as
he says, whenever a woman is murdered, the first person sus
pected is her husband (pp. 158-159). Despite these com
ments, however, Orwell praises marriage. In "The Art of
Donald McGill" he says that "marriage is something pro
foundly exciting and important, the biggest event in the
19
average human being's life." Because of these beliefs
Orwell wrote extensively about marriage and the family. Un
like a writer such as Hemingway, who often ignores his char
acter ' s family backgrounds, Orwell usually provides a de
tailed account of them. To him a character's motives and
actions are rooted in his family tradition.
Marriage is a central concern in Burmese Days. Much of
the action concerns Flory's attempts to marry Elizabeth, and
her aunt's and uncle's cynical efforts to get her married.
Flory is the likely man until Verrall, a young, titles
British Lieutenant, appears. In the aunt's eyes, he is a
far better catch; but when he leaves abruptly, she again
19
Dickens, Dali and Others (New York, 1946), p. 132.
chooses Flory as Elizabeth's potential husband.
The one marriage examined in the novel is unsuccessful.
Lackersteen1s marriage has deteriorated to where his main
interests in life are getting drunk, seducing young Burmese
girls, and making passes at his niece. Mrs. Lackersteen1s
life revolves around not letting her husband out of sight
for more than several hours at a time. But despite this,
Flory feels that "only by marrying her [Elizabeth] could his
life be salvaged" (pp. 228-229). Through marriage he can
escape his isolation, his intense loneliness. Just before
his former mistress disgraces him in church, his vision of
his future happiness centers around being married to Eliza
beth. This would deliver him from the "pain of exile and
solitude" (p. 351). Thus, her refusal to marry him shatters
his ability to face the future.
In this work Orwell also criticizes the disruptive in
fluence of the English on the Burmese family. In a sense,
it is the perennial story of troops of occupation. To dis
credit Dr. Veraswami, U Po Kyin, the corrupt Burmese Magis
trate, has a slanderous newspaper article secretly printed
about Mr. Macgregor, the English Deputy Commissioner. In it
he attacks the supposed English reverence for the family.
Mr. Macgregor is of the type of the Fine Old English
Gentleman, such as, in these happy days, we have so many
examples before our eyes. He is 'a family man' as our
dear English cousins say. Very much a family man is Mr.
Macgregor. So much so that he has already three children
in the district of Kyauktada, where he has been a year,
and in his last district of Shwemyo he left six young
progenies behind him. Perhaps^ it is an oversight on______ j
; ' ' - - - - - ------ - 33
Mr. Macgregor's part that he has left these young in
fants quite unprovided for, and that some of their moth
ers are in danger of starvation. (pp. 7-8)
These charges are false, but according to Orwell, the Eng
lish too often disrupted the traditional Burmese family
relationships, as Flory does with his mistress. After he
abandons her, she cannot hope to marry one of her own peo
ple; instead she can probably survive only as a prostitute.
In A Clergyman1s Daughter, the perversion of family
relationships is seen in the Reverend Hare's actions. He is
in the lineage of Samuel Butler's Reverend Pontifex. As a
young clergyman, the Reverend Hare could not hire a curate,
so "he left the dirty work of the parish entirely to his
wife" (p. 23); and after her death, his daughter assumed the
work. Trapped by the barriers of his own ego, he lacks any
loyalty or feeling toward her. She suffers amnesia, and he
thinks she has "run away from home in disgraceful circum
stances" (p. 147). On recovering her memory, she feels con
fident that her father will support her against public dis
approval. But when she writes for aid, he does not even
bother to answer. In a flash-back, Orwell describes the
Reverend's reaction after discovering that Dorothy has run
away. His major worry is about his breakfast. After wait
ing an hour, he is driven to extreme measures.
An hour passed, and she did not return. Whereupon there
occurred a frightful, unprecedented thing— a thing never
to be forgotten this side of the grave; the Rector was
obliged to prepare his own breakfast— yes, actually to
mess about with a vulgar black kettle and rashers of
Danish bacon— with his own sacerdotal hands.
: .“ - - 34
After that, of course, his heart was hardened against
Dorothy for ever. {pp- 202-203)
Actually he makes some fumbling attempts to save her from
starving in the streets, even though she caused him to miss
his morning bath and to prepare his own bacon. And finally
he lets her come home, deciding her value as a servant out
weighs her supposedly disgraceful actions. The Reverend's
perverted sense of human relationships lets him see his
daughter and other people only as counters to manipulate for
his own advantage. His ego has turned inwards and destroyed
his ability to relate himself to others through love. In
stead, he holds the rest of humanity in disgust. So, in his
first two novels Orwell presents the failure of a courtship
and two marriages, and consequently the failure of three
people, Flory, the Reverend Hare, and Dorothy, to emerge
from their isolation. In his next novel, however, he shows
the redemptive powers of marriage.
The main character in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is the
product of a decaying family in which "nothing ever hap
pened" (p. 61). Gordon Comstock's family became wealthy
through Grandfather Comstock's efforts during the late
Victorian period, but since his death the family history had
been one of sterility and decay. After slowly wasting their
inheritances, his sons and daughters had sunk into shabby
gentility. Gordon remembers them from his boyhood as "grey,|
shabby, joyless people" who "had lost all impulse to repro- ;
duce themselves" (p. 39). Grandfather Comstock had had I
35
eleven children; but these eleven had produced only two,
Gordon and his sister, Julia. Orwell criticizes this fail
ure to reproduce. He believes that vital people have
children: one thing showing the lower classes' good sense
is that they still follow the family-system of the past,
20
even while on the dole.
At the end of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon glori
fies the small clerks, the commercial travellers, and others
who live, work, and beget children. He says: "They were
alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They
begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers
never by any chance do" (p. 239). Lionel Trilling, in his
introduction to Homage to Catalonia, says that one implica
tion of the themes in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that
"the prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his ab
stracting himself from the life of the family" (p. xvi).
Gordon rejects this withdrawal when he rediscovers meaning
and commitment in life through marriage and impending
fatherhood. Trilling correctly thinks the end of the novel
is an "epiphany," to use his word, of marriage and parent
hood. And, as the last sentence in the novel indicates, be
cause of Gordon and Rosemary's marriage and the impending
birth of their child, "once again things were happening in
the Comstock family" (p. 248).
Again in The Road to Wigan Pier, a principle concern of
I
i
20 !
The Road to Wigan Pier (New York, 1961) , p. 82.______ i
36
Orwell's is with the family life of the industrial workers
in northern England. At this time, the thirties, their main
problems were unemployment and poverty. Despite this, he
was impressed by their family life. In a rather romantic
description of a working class family he maintains that a
manual worker "has a better chance of being happy than an
'educated1 man" (p. 104). However, there is one important
qualification; it depends on "whether Father is in work"
(p. 105). The further implications of this will be con
sidered later.
Even during times of unemployment, though, Orwell sees
a value in the family: it can be a buffer against the de
bilitating effects of poverty. The sense of loyalty in the
lower class family often saves it from the disintegration
usually found in middle class families when unemployment and
poverty strike (p. 103). Orwell also found in Wigan that
unemployment does not forbid marriage; a married couple on
the dole is better off on twenty-three shillings a week than
a single man on fifteen shillings. At least the couple "can
make a home of sorts" (p. 76). It "annoys the old ladies in
Brighton," or moneyed people, that the lower classes get
married on the dole. But Orwell praises this; being unem
ployed does not mean one is no longer a human being (p. 82). j
Although families might be poor, the "family-system" does
not break up (p. 82). The unemployed working man still ;
leads his family and, according to Orwell, does not disgrace;
37
them like an unemployed or poorly employed member of the
middle-classes, such as Gordon in Keep the Aspidistra Fly-
'ing.
Orwell criticized the government's policy toward unem
ployment and poverty for its adverse effect on family life.
In The Road to Wigan Pier he says the "most cruel and evil
effect" of the Means Test is that it breaks up families
(p. 75). This policy creates the old-age pensioners, who
have "as usual, been driven from their homes by the Means
Test" (p. 22). Inadequate government planning also harms
family life by creating wretched housing for many of the
lower classes. Overcrowding, for example, forces members of
some families to sleep in shifts on the same bed. But de
spite such problems, Orwell had a high regard for their way
of life, partly because of the importance they placed on the
family.
But the memory of working-class interiors— especially as
I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war,
when England was still prosperous— that reminds me that
our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.
(p. 106)
As noted earlier, although Orwell does not romanticize
the family life of the middle class, he does praise it. For
instance, through marriage Gordon Comstock gains his redemp
tion. In Coming Up For Air George Bowling is almost a stockj
| i
character plagued by a shrewish wife. Like Snagsby's wife j
in Dickens' Bleak House, she is haunted by suspicions that •
he is deceiving her in some way. Yet, despite Bowling's j
' . " ' 38
complaints about his nagging wife and his flight to his boy
hood home, he feels deeply loyal to his family. He recog
nizes his ambivalent feelings toward his children; at times
he detests the sight of them or the sound of their conversa
tion, but then he reflects:
At other times, especially when they're asleep, I have
quite a different feeling. Sometimes I've stood over
their cots, on summer evenings when it's light, and
watched them sleeping ... . and it's given me that feel
ing you read about in the Bible when it says your bowels
yearn. (pp* 8-9)
And despite his complaints, he does rush home from his vaca
tion when he thinks his wife is seriously ill. So even
though George Bowling feels alienated from his hate filled
society, he does feel a degree of commitment to his family.
Although Orwell's earlier works stress the importance
of the family, 1984 contains his most extended comment. In
this future society, the Party systematically attacks the
family as it attacks love and friendship. In "The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchial Collectivism," Winston reads
Emmanuel Goldstein's supposed analysis of the Party's phil
osophy. Goldstein points out that the name "Big Brother"
appeals directly to "the sentiment of family loyalty"
(p. 217). However, like the instinct of sex, the Party ex
ploits the instinct of family loyalty for its benefit.
Since no other means of rearing children has been devised,
the family cannot be abolished. Parents are even encouraged
to love their children. But, at the same time, the Party
l
i !
teaches children to spy on their parents and to report any ]
.............. " ....... .............. " " " ' “ " " " 39
possible deviations. So the children serve as an extension
of the Thought Police (pp. 134-135).
This perversion of the normal relationship between
parents and children is seen in the experiences of one of
Winston's neighbors, Tom Parsons. An "active man of para
lyzing stupidity," he works faithfully for the Party. A
"leading figure on the Sports Committee, " he boasts about
attending every night for four years at the Community Center.
He also approves of his children's desire to report suspi
cious people and attend hangings (pp. 23-24). Ironically,
his seven year old daughter, while listening at his keyhole,
hears him denounce Big Brother in his sleep and reports him.
While in jail, Parsons, still loyal out of stupidity, finds
it consoling that at least he "brought her up in the right
spirit" (p. 239).
O'Brien sums up the Party's policy toward the family
when he says it has "cut the links between child and parent"
(p. 270). A man cannot trust his wife or children, much
less a friend. Only the lower classes enjoy their children,
because they are allowed a psychological freedom undreamed
of for Party members. Thus, by destroying the most intimate;
family bonds, the Party furthers its larger aim to isolate
each person and to force him to live in a sealed world.
Orwell also discusses the relationship between man and |
wife in 1984. Although Winston and Julia spend much of
their time together in sexual activity, Winston wishes they I
r ....... ... ~ ~. 40
were "a married couple of ten years' standing" who could
talk of trivialities and buy "odds and ends for the house
hold, " instead of feeling obligated to make love every time
they meet (pp. 140-141). But such a relationship for
Winston and Julia requires a society different from that
under Big Brother. Married couples interested in personal
affairs and caring about trivialities would feel less loy
alty to the Party.
Orwell's belief in the importance of the family is seen
in yet another way. Although Winston's mother never appears
in the novel's action, his childhood relationship to her is
often mentioned. He keeps remembering fragments of his ex
periences with her, until she symbolizes an earlier time
when different emotional relationships between people were
possible. He realizes early in the book that his mother's
death "had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no
longer possible," that tragedy belonged to a time when there
was "privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of
a family stood by one another without needing to know the
reason" (p. 31). He sees that "she had sacrificed herself
to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable,"
(p. 31) an act possible in Winston's society only for the
proles.
The larger idea of motherhood is also considered in |
1984. In a motion picture Winston sees a mother try to pro-i
j
tect her child against bullets from a strafing airplane. j
“ ' ■ ' ' " 41
The audience responds in two ways. Winston, as a Party mem
ber, feels indifferent, but the proles kick "up a fuss"
(p. 10). At this point, Winston lacks compassion toward
this mother because the Party has almost completely de
stroyed his sense of family loyalties. But the proles, out
side the strict control of the Party, still have this sense;
thus they object.
At various times, Winston remembers the mother's effort
to protect her child. These memories show his increasing
compassion as he learns more clearly the value of personal
relationships in his affair with J.ulia and in his rejection
of the Party's values. After meeting Julia, Winston in a
dream recalls a gesture his mother had made. The mother in
the motion picture made the same gesture when protecting her
child— a gesture symbolic of a mother's love for her child
(p. 161). Winston realizes that his mother had probably not
been an unusual woman, but that she had a certain nobility,
"a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she
obeyed were private ones" {p. 165). She had lived when one
could love another person; she had lived when the family
flourished and was the emotional center for most peoples'
lives; she had lived when people "were governed by private
loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were
individual relationships" (p. 166).
The intimate connection between the individual's need
for love and friendship and the institution of marriage that
' "................... ~ “ ' "....42
|
emerges from this need is seen by implication in the cul
tural ideals of Orwell's anti-Utopia. Cultural heroes of
this anti-Utopia denounce love and marriage. This is seen
in the imaginary figure, Comrade Ogilvy, that Winston cre
ates. As part of his duty of re-writing history for the
Party, Winston creates imaginary substitutes for men the
Party has purged; to do this he first makes the purged per
son an unperson (p. 46). Then he can substitute a variety
of things for the activities of the unperson: speeches
about past victories and battles, or predictions of events
that never happened. In one instance, Winston creates the
figure Comrade Ogilvy to represent the cultural ideals of
the Party. Ogilvy had belonged to the Junior Anti-Sex
League, had died a hero in battle, and significantly he "had
taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of
a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day
devotion to duty" (p. 48). Thus the cultural hero of
Orwell's anti-Utopia, by denying the importance of love,
friendship, and marriage, embodies the very attitudes that
Orwell believed destroy man's love for man.
CHAPTER II
THE HUMANIST VERSUS THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE
While at Eton, Orwell observed that "at least six
masters on the staff . . . make a very good living out of
the Crucifixion," yet they have to pretend that they wished
it had never happened.^ Later in The Road to Wigan Pier,
while describing his police work in Burma as part of "the
dirty work of Empire," he tells about one of his subordi
nates bullying a suspect. An American missionary— "like
most Non-conformist missionaries . . . a complete ass but
quite a good fellow"— happened to be watching. He said he
would not want Orwell's job. It made Orwell ashamed.
So that was the kind of job I hadJ Even an ass of an
American missionary, a teetotal cock-virgin from the
Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity
meJ (p. 126)
This was degrading— to have a religious person pity him.
For Orwell, hypocrisy and religion went hand in hand.
This belief was rooted in his temperament, his youthful
emotional rebellion, and later in his world view as an
adult. At an early age he was "aware of the impossibility
^Tom Hopkinson, "George Orwell— Dark Side Out," The
Cornhill Magazine (London), No. 996, Summer 1953, p. 453.
44
of any subjective conformity" to many prevailing rules and
2
standards of his society. He distinguished "the difference
between the moral obligation and the psychological fact"
(p. 51). Religion taught that he should love God. Although
until he was fourteen he unquestionably believed in God and
the religious accounts of Him, he did not love Him. Then he
rebelled in other ways. Part of this youthful rebellion can
be seen in Orwell's reaction to various characters in the
Bible. He hated not only God, but Jesus and the Hebrew
patriarchs as well. On the other hand, he felt sympathy for
characters such as Cain, Jezebel, Judas, and Pontius Pilate
(p. 51).
Thus he early found the whole religious experience full
of psychological impossibilities. How does one fear and
love God at the same time? He encountered the identical
question with "private affections." What he should feel was
clear enough, but he could not always command his feelings.
For instance, he knew he should love his father, but, in
fact, he disliked him (p. 51). As a result of his doubts,
by the age of seventeen Orwell had broken with religion.
Christopher Hollis remembers Orwell as "the Election
atheist," and quotes another of Orwell's classmates, Cyril
Connolly, who says that as early as fifteen Orwell was "im- .
mersed in the Way of All Flesh and the atheistic arguments
2 '
"Such, Such Were the Joys ..." Such, Such Were the j
Joys, p. 51. _ _ ____________________________j
; ................. “ "... ~ ' " 45
3
of Androcles and the Lion." Since Orwell and his class
mates criticized the Officer's Training Corps, compulsory
games, and the Royal Family, Christianity could hardly hope
to escape attack.
Recalling his state of mind at Eton, Orwell described
himself as both "a snob and a revolutionary'1 and what could
loosely be called a Socialist. He was against all authority
and had read and re-read Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy— -then
4
"dangerously 'advanced' writers." That one of his school
masters advised him not to go to the University supports the
validity of Orwell's self-analysis. It is impossible to say
precisely why the master gave his advice, but perhaps he
feared that Orwell would not fit into what is now called the;
Establishment. An incident at Eton supports this conjecture.
On one occasion some upper form boys paddled him for arriv
ing late at chapel. Orwell already considered the boys
dull and conventional, and such treatment only re-enforced
his already hostile view toward them and religion. All this
was part of the Establishment; therefore, the solution was
to abolish it.
The Establishment then, as now, was under attack. It
seems only appropriate that Orwell would join this attack,
seeing that in many ways he became a patron saint of the
Establishment's foes— writers such as Kingsley Amis and John
3
A Study of George Orwell (Chicago, 1956), p. 16.
: i
4
The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 121._________________________;
46
Osborne— after World War XI. In Orwell's youth, as today,
the Anglican Church was intimately linked to the Establish
ment. Reared in this tradition, he found it stagnant at
best, another institution conducted by the old men— the old
men who had run World War I so disastrously. Thus the ex
perience of his boyhood gave birth to his lifelong hostility
toward religion. His later years in Burma and Paris were to
give him intellectual reasons as well for rejecting reli
gion.
Like Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Orwell was horri
fied by the breach between the real and the ideal. Every
where he saw the corruption of ideals when he considered
things as they should be. He found this corruption in the
very structure of religious institutions. In Down and Out
in Paris and London, Orwell describes a young clergyman giv
ing meal tickets to a group of tramps. The clergyman feels
genuinely embarrassed, knowing the futility of this aid in
the long run. Sensing his decency and humanity, the tramps
5
compliment him, saying that he will never become a bishop.
On the other hand, they all agree that a clergyman who has a
tramp arrested for begging has the qualities of a future
bishop (p. 277).
In Burmese Days supposedly religious people constantly
violate the ideals of their faith. Two minor characters,
Mr. Francis and Mr. Samuel, are victims of Christian
5 (New York, 1933) , . p. 253.__________ __________________
hypocrisy. Pathetic Eurasians caught between the English
and Burmese cultures, they can join neither. They are "sons
of an American Baptist missionary and Roman Catholic mis
sionary respectively" (p. 19). Mr. Francis remembers a
little about his father from his childhood. A choleric man,
his father often beat his children and two wives, and when
ever the Bishop came to visit, the children had to hide to
conceal their identity. Unfortunately, he never became a
bishop. Four converts in twenty-eight years and an over
fondness for "Chinese rice-spirit" hurt his career. Rumors
about his drinking even spoiled the sales of his book, The
Scourge of Alcohol, although it had the support of the Ran
goon Baptist Press (p. 153).
The behavior of Mr. Francis' father is not unusual for
the characters described in Burmese Days. Other mission
aries have illegitimate children, preach fraudulent funeral
services, and fall into the same corruption as the rest of
the colonials. The internal spiritual conflicts found in a
work such as Somerset Maugham's "Rain" are missing. Chris
tianity in Burmese Days is a drab set of empty rituals.
Many ignore them; others follow them mechanically. Ellis,
an evil tempered Englishman, looks cynically upon the occa
sional church services. He calls them "snivel-parade"
(p. 349) and "Bloody knee-drill" (p. 350). He objects to
the "pack of Madrassi servants" and "those two yellow-
bellies, Francis and Samuel," who call themselves Christians
48
;(p. 30). It is disgraceful that the natives have been
taught that "they're as good as we are" (p. 30). The
thought of a religion nurturing love and equality between
men disgusts Ellis. Although by implication Orwell's treat
ment of Ellis contains an affirmation of some Christian
values, it contains the more essential charge that Christi
anity cannot free men from the prejudices of class and race,
both integral parts of imperialism.
Other religions are also unable to engender any serious
commitment from most of their members. The completely un
scrupulous Buddhist, U Po Kyin, hopes to spend his closing
years doing good works. He feels no ethical compulsion for
doing so, but superstitiously he wants protection against
being reincarnated as a rat or frog. So he sends mangoes to
a monastery for his own benefit— "In his eyes his pile of
merit was a hind of bank-deposit, everlastingly growing"
(p. 16). But, ironically, before he can devote his time to
good works, he dies.
After saying Orwell disliked religion, one must make
some qualifications. There are similarities in Orwell's
thought to traditional Christian thought; both, for example,
have an intense ethical concern. Some critics, such as
Christopher Hollis, argue that the values Orwell defended
were logically an outgrowth of Christian thought. It is
true that Orwell was not a fanatical anti-religionist; how
ever, he believed that man could solve his problems only
through secular actions. Orwell, like Bertrand Russell, be
lieved that we live in a political age. And man in a polit
ical age must solve his problems through political, economic,
and social institutions. He must not rely on a set of tran
scendental beliefs, but on reason. (Considering the as
saults on rationality in this century by leaders such as
Hitler, one is tempted to believe that faith in "reason" is
the Twentieth Century equivalent to Kierkegaard's "leap into
the darkness.") Religion for Orwell either prevents solu
tions or is irrelevant. T. S. Eliot's pessimism, for exam
ple, according to Orwell, "is partly the Christian pessi
mism, which implies a certain indifference to human misery
Orwell believed that man must wrestle with his problems in
the present and find his solutions there. He condemned his
contemporaries' fruitless efforts to find solutions either
in the past or in religion. It is easy, Orwell says, to
prefer D. H. Lawrence's Etruscans— his idealized Etruscans—
to ourselves. But this is "a species of defeatism" (p. 173).
The world is moving in a different direction. It is fruit
less to evade the problems of a mechanized world.
But perhaps the main fault of religion is the "intel
lectual absurdities" the Church demands of its members.
In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox reli
gious believer without being intellectually crippled in
the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice
books by orthodox believers show the same cramped,
^"Inside the Whale," Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 173.
50
blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or
others who are mentally u n f r e e . 7
Religious orthodoxy is thus to Orwell a kind of mental bond
age that distorts man's vision. Man should focus on his
problems in the here and now with complete mental freedom
and, like Ishmael in Moby Dick, take "the earthly dividends.”
The intellectual distortions caused by religion create
tenets that too often are a denial or perversion of life
here on earth. In "Reflections on Gandhi" he is sympathetic
toward Gandhi, but disagrees with him. Gandhi's beliefs
"make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that
the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped
from.
His teaching "cannot be squared with the belief that
Man is the measure of things, and that our job is to make
life worth living on the earth, which is the only earth we
have" (p. 106). The conflict between Orwell and Gandhi is
that of the humanistic view of life versus the religious.
In this sense, seeing the humanistic view as essentially
atheistic, Orwell believes that these two views are mutually
exclusive (p. 108). "One must choose between God and Man"
and Orwell believes all "progressives," from the "mildest
Liberal" to the Anarchist, have chosen Man (p. 108).
1 7
George Orwell, "T. S. Eliot" (review), in Denys Val
Baker, ed., Little Reviews Anthology (London, 1943), p. 217. j
8
"Reflections on Gandhi," Shooting An Elephant (London,
1950), p. 106. j
Orwell agrees with Gandhi that saints should avoid
alcohol, tobacco, and meat. But Orwell argues that man
should avoid sainthood (p. 108). Gandhi's conception of
sainthood is a denial of life. It is a desire to avoid the
pain of living and of loving individual people which, sexual
or non-sexual, is "hard work" (p. 108). Gandhi believed
that sexual intercourse should be for the sole purpose of
begetting children and that one should try to eliminate
sexual desire completely. Also— and this is a crucial point
to Orwell— "for the seeker after goodness there must be no
close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever" (p. 107).
Loyalty to friends leads one to wrong-doing; if one is to
love God or all of humanity, "one cannot give one’s prefer
ence to any individual person" (p. 107). This is where the
humanistic and religious attitude are irreconcilable. To
most people "love means nothing if it does not mean loving
some people more than others" (p. 107). Gandhi on three
occasions, Orwell says, was willing to let his wife or one
of his children die instead of letting them have the "animal
food prescribed by the doctor” {p. 107). Fortunately, none
of them died. In fact, he even gave them the choice of eat
ing the animal food if they did not mind sinning to stay
alive. Orwell says Gandhi believed the limit to what we
will do to stay alive should be "well on this side of
chicken broth" (p. 108). This is all extremely noble, but
to Orwell also inhuman. To him the "essence of being human
~.""..' ~ " ” 52
is that one does not seek perfection." One does not push
asceticism to absurd limits; one is prepared to be broken by
life, if this is the cost of "fastening one's love upon
other human individuals" (p. 108). In John Osborne's Look
Back in Anger, Jimmy Porter summarizes precisely Orwell's
beliefs.
They all want to escape from the pain of being alive.
And, most of all, from love. . . . It's no good trying
to fool yourself about love. You can't fall into it like
a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes
muscle and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of
messing up your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up
the whole idea of life, and become a saint. Because
you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this
world or the next.®
In "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" Orwell accused Tolstoy
in his later years of wanting
to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's inter
ests, one's points of attachment to the physical world
and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and not as
many as possible.
In A Clergyman1s Daughter this is the main fault of reli
gion. It prevents people from living a full life; its puri
tanical code causes crippling inhibitions; and, as in Bur
mese Days, it divides man from man. The local Catholic
priest ignores Dorothy when they pass on the street; her
father detests other religious groups. Such religious be
liefs destroy any sense of community beyond themselves. In-j
stead, they put up walls and increase man's isolation.
9
Masters of Modern Drama, ed. H. M. Block and R. G.
Shedd (New York, 1962), p. 1100.
^ Shooting an Elephant, p. 43 .
J . 53
Many of the main characters in A Clergyman1s Daughter
'are representative of different religious beliefs, such as
Anglican or Non-Conformist. And, in one way or another,
Orwell shows how these beliefs limit their response to life.
The main character, Dorothy Hare, is a devout person; but
her puritanical religious beliefs help cripple her response
to life and provide little consolation for her daily frus
trations. She has to grovel for money and avoid tradesmen
to whom her father owes money. She also has to worry about
his church. The futility of much of her life is seen in her
efforts to get valuable items for a rummage sale to raise
money for the church. She prays that Mrs. Mayfill, a rich
parishioner, will donate a china tea set. But the prayer is
only partially answered; she donates two handleless chamber
pots .
Dorothy's religious beliefs increase her sense of psy
chological isolation from others. As part of her belief she.
follows a grotesque, puritanical discipline. She pricks
herself with a pin whenever she has supposedly evil thoughts
and does penance whenever she has wasted time. This disci
pline and her daily work— running a house and parish— cause
subconscious conflicts that she can solve only by losing her!
memory. During her experiences in London, she is so horri- j
fied by her descent into Hell that like Young Goodman Brown
|
!she loses her faith. The entire act of worship becomes j
meaningless to her (p. 266). But she finds nothing to j
| 54
replace her loss (p. 294). In desperation she decides that
jpretending to believe is the next best thing to believing
'(p. 314). Anything is better than the deadly emptiness she
feels at the heart of things. But she changes in some ■ways.
No longer will she indulge in self-torture. She will not
use her pin again or debase herself in the name of religion.
Thus she has partially freed herself from her religious be
liefs that served to deepen her sense of isolation from
human love and friendship. However, as we saw in an earlier
chapter, she is unable to liberate herself completely from
her isolation.
Dorothy's friend, Warburton, is Orwell's spokesman. In
some ways a l'homroe moyen sensuel, he has traits absent in
many of the religious characters in the novel; beneath his
rakish and cynical surface he is sensitive and compassionate
toward his fellow man. The kind of skeptic who loves to
talk about religious belief, he constantly teases Dorothy
about her beliefs, asking her, for example, if she literally
believes in Hell. He foresees Dorothy's dreary future if
she keeps on living with her father. After his death she
I '
will be left alone, a penniless discard, facing a bleak fu- ;
ture of teaching in second-rate schools or working as a ;
i
governess. Like other unmarried daughters of clergymen, she;
will become a victim of her religion. j
: i
; j
Warburton predicts for Dorothy the kind of existence
illustrated by Miss Minns, a minor character in Comincr Up
................... ""... ‘............." ' 55
For Air. She, too, is a special "hy-product"— victim might
better describe her— of the middle-classes, a clergyman's
daughter. Her father probably "sat on her pretty heavily
■while he lived" (p. 163). Even after his death, it is
"still a tremendous adventure to her not to go to church"
(p. 164). Because of her upbringing and her inability to
respond fully to life, she is doomed, like Dorothy, to be an
effete virgin, living a "death-in-life" existence.
Returning once again to A Clergyman's Daughter, we see
in the character of Victor Stone, the church schoolmaster,
how Orwell satirizes people more interested in the rituals
and ceremonies of religion than in its ethical implications.
As a boy, Victor had hoped to enter the Church, but his
failure to master Hebrew and Greek barred him from the
priesthood. Orwell, who studied classics at Eton, probably
felt that knowing the classics would help a priest less than
having a good heart. However, Victor's failure leaves him
with a sense of frustration, and he gives vent to it through
religion. His religious life centers around grievances; he
is only happy quarreling. A truculent Anglo-Catholic,
"knowledgeable about Church History," (p. 70) one of his
main complaints is "the dull correctness of the Rector's
services" (p. 71). Victor loves incense and processions; he
wants to outdo the Catholics. The Reverend Hare, on the
other hand, thinks all of this is Roman fever. Victor is
thrown into a paroxysm because on Easter the Rector wears
, ........... " 56
"a Gothic cope with a modern Italian lace alb"; to Victor
"it's like wearing a top hat with brown boots" (p. 75). He
thinks the argument that a priest's spirit is more important
than his clothes is what a "Primitive Methodist" would say.
Another of Victor's hatreds is "Science and Free
Thought," exemplified by "modernists and atheists," such as
Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley. In the essay "Politics
vs. Literature," Orwell discussed "silly-clever Conserva
tives" who ridicule anything modern or progressive. In this
group he placed men such as Father Ronald Knox, who tried to
expose the errors of Bertrand Russell.Victor also at
tacks such men as Russell to expose them for the "fools and
liars" they are. But his letter to Russell— a man Orwell
greatly admired— had not been answered. According to Victor,
Russell had not dared (p. 74). But for all his defending of
the faith and "for all his churchiness he had not an atom of
real piety in his constitution" (p. 75). To him religious
controversy was a game. The word prayer embarrassed him.
He would talk all day about a point of ritual, yet "the men
tion of private devotions struck him as slightly indecent"
(p- 75).
A minor character, Mrs. Pither, represents a religious
sentiment far removed from Victor's. In contrast to him,
she feels "ready for a 'little prayer' at any hour of the j
night or day" (pp. 59-60). She represents the strain of
^ Shooting an Elephant, p. 61. j
57
hedonism Orwell saw in many Christians among the lower
classes. Her husband earns little money as a jobbing gard-
ner, and they live on the verge of poverty. Her dreary life
has two pleasures: drinking tea and talking about her only
two topics of conversation, the misery of this life and the
joy of the next. For the pleasures of Heaven, she willingly
stands the misery of this life. But her vision of Heaven
unconsciously reveals her frustrations on earth. It is in
Heaven that the poor are revenged. In her Christian charity
she gleefully contemplates the fate of the rich after death.
She has followed the best way, "poor in this life and rich
in the next" (p. 59). She joyfully thinks about some of the
rich whose "motor cars" and "beautiful houses won't save
from the worm that dieth not and the fire that1s not
quenched” (p. 59).
Orwell did not feel that the hedonism of Christianity
was restricted to the lower classes. Warburton argues with
Dorothy that all philosophies are hedonistic and "verminous
Christian saints are the biggest hedonists of all." They
are out "for an eternity of bliss, whereas we poor sinners
don't hope for more than a few years of it." Warburton con
cludes that all people are out "for a bit of fun," but
Christians take it in a perverted form (p. 304). Later in
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Orwell repeated his charge
that ultimately the Christian attitude is "self-interested
58
12
and hedonistic." It tries to escape the struggle of life
and to find peace in Heaven, whereas "the humanist attitude
is that the struggle must continue and that death is the
price of life" (p. 51).
Orwell criticizes yet another religious group in
A Clergyman1s Daughter, the Non-Conformists. While describ
ing Dorothy's teaching experiences, Orwell criticizes the
Non-Conformists 1 bigotry and provinciality. In Down and Out
in Paris and London he had referred to this kind of bigotry:
a policeman forced a sidewalk artist to cross out his copy
of Botticelli's Venus because it was in front of a church.
The Non-Conformist parents who attack Dorothy's way of
teaching show a similar bigotry. They think education con
sists of learning simple arithmetic, memorizing a few scat
tered bits of knowledge, and writing a good hand. When
Dorothy has their children read Macbeth they become suspi
cious. After she explains to her students the meaning of a
reference to the womb, their suspicion is confirmed. As
"God fearing folks," they complain to Mrs. Creevy, the owner
of the school. She agrees with them completely, fearing
otherwise she would lose their fees. She lets them chastize
Dorothy without mercy. Lacking any Christian charity, they
sit like "a circle of inquisitors" (p. 246) around Dorothy
who is in "a hard chair which stood like a stool of repent- |
ance" (p. 247). They criticize her in terms of their
j
12
Shooting an Elephant, p; . 5JL-___________________________I
59
distorted ideas of the purpose of education and art. After
self-righteously correcting her "erroneous" views, they
approve of Mrs. Creevy's vicious attack on Dorothy; in fact,
they take "a solemn pleasure in the spectacle of sin re
buked" (p. 250) .
One of Orwell's best satiric portraits is that of the
Reverend Hare. In many ways he is a Reverend Pontifex in
the Twentieth Century, and, as such, personifies the in
creasing apathy found in some religious groups. Pontifex's
hypocrisy and self-righteousness at least had some basis in
his commitment to religion, but the Reverend Hare in many
ways feels indifferent to his calling. He is correct in his
clerical duties, at least those he bothers to perform. How
ever, he finds the Christian ideal of brotherhood hardly
worth bothering about. While administering the sacraments
his attitude is: "Remember that I am only your priest, not
your friend. As a human being I dislike you and despise
you" (p. 11). As a young priest he had a church in the
slums and his parishioners soon saw that he abhorred them.
In his present church, his haughtiness has reduced his con
gregation from six hundred to two hundred, while in the town
his quarrels with the Catholics and the Dissenters have
alienated them. A man supposedly dedicated to furthering I
the ideal of human brotherhood under God, he stands isolated'
j
from his fellow man. The death watch beetles watching over ;
j
his moribund church symbolize both its and the Reverend's
! ~ ‘ ' ” 60
spiritual decadence. He is the kind of Anglican chaplain
13
that Robert Graves criticizes in Good-bye to All That.
The soldiers had little respect for the majority of these
chaplains who stayed behind the lines and were out of touch
with the troops. These priests were part of the "old tradi
tion" that had outlived its usefulness.
It is this "old tradition" that the Reverend likes; he
identifies himself completely with the Establishment. The
changes in the modern world— everything from democracy to
Lenin— that have endangered the Establishment, disgust him.
He would be content to live completely in the past, but this
costs money, something he lacks. But even so, he lives in
the memory of the golden past of his youth. Dorothy knows
that it is hopeless to get him to pay attention to current
problems once he says "When I was up at Oxford" (p. 34).
Because of his childhood spent in wealthy surroundings,
he often has trouble remembering he is a poor country rector.
He remains totally indifferent to the fact that the church
is collapsing physically— to say nothing of its loss of
spiritual vitality. What vitally interests him is his gam
bling. Of course, he does not call it this, because he
gambles on stock. A "lifelong search for a 'good invest
ment'" is the main cause of his money troubles. Orwell com-;
ments that this search haunts modern clergymen the way
"demons in female shape . . . used to haunt the anchorites
13New York, _1?30..________ i
of the Dark Ages" (p. 3 2). Unfortunately the Reverend
Hare's search has helped diminish his inheritance of four
thousand pounds to twelve hundred pounds.
His interest in his investments is actually another
facet of his selfishness. To him his fellow man is someone
to exploit or detest. He exploits his only daughter, let
ting her sacrifice her life to serve him. But his pride
prevents him from imagining her unhappy. Behind the facade
of religion he tramples over people and lets his ego run
uncontrolled. Orwell's comments about Tolstoy could well
apply to the Reverend. Orwell points out how some people
exchange one form of egoism for another. They might re
nounce wealth or privilege or violence, but they do not
14
necessarily renounce the principle of coercion. And so it
is with the Reverend? his daughter and all people are merely
objects to dominate and manipulate.
Not only is the Reverend one of a long line of charac
ters whose response to life has been twisted by religion, he
also belongs to an institution, the church, whose influence
on mankind, according to Orwell, has usually been detri
mental. Thus Orwell's second major criticism of religion
concerns its role in society. This criticism .is closely re
lated to the first (i.e. the tenets of religion too often
result in a denial or perversion of life for the individual
14
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Shooting an Elephant,
P- 54.______________ ________________________________________
62
on earth). Organized religion, Orwell believed, too often
directs man’s attention away from possible solutions "in
history" and looks outside of history for solutions. But
man must solve his problems "in-history." As Philip Rieff
remarks: "One of Orwell's attractions for liberals is his
immersion in the here and now. He wrote to the question of
how to live in the possible world, not how to die in an im-
15
possible one." Orwell believes that man cannot depend on
some supernatural power to intervene in his affairs, nor
should he accept suffering in this world in hopes of enter
ing a better one after death. Too often religious reaction
aries use such a belief to defend unjust societies. Claim
ing that this world cannot be improved, they offer compensa
tion in the next one. In this way, religious reactionaries
help political reactionaries prevent change. Instead of
proposing changes in social institutions, "the pious ones,
from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the
16
'change of heart.'" But the religious reactionary does
nothing to encourage this change if it endangers a hier
archical society. Vague statements about a "change of
heart" are more reassuring to such people than a change in
the social system.
i
15 1
"George Orwell and the Post-Liberal Imagination,"
Kenyon Review, XVI (Winter 1954),49. |
"Looking Back on the Spanish War, " Such, Such Were
the Joys , p . 15 0 . j
63
The close relationship between political reactionaries
and some religious groups disturbed Orwell. In The Road to
Wigan Pier, while describing the growth of Fascist feeling
in England, he tells about Moseley and "his pimpled follow
ers, " and the "howl of glee that went up from both Catholic
and Anglican pulpits . . . over the Fascist rising in Spain"
(p- 177).
Soon after this, his experiences in the Spanish Civil
War confirmed his belief that religion is a reactionary
force. He considered the war "a military mutiny bached up
17
by the aristocracy and the Church." These groups did not
want to establish Fascism; they wanted to restore feudalism
(p. 48). Nevertheless, they accepted Fascist aid to gain
their ends. Because of this, Orwell thought the Loyalists'
harsh treatment of the clergy was almost inevitable. The
Loyalists "perfectly well understood that the Spanish Church
was part of the capitalist racket" (p. 52). There would be
at least one good result if the Government won. It would be
"anti-clerical and anti-feudal" and would control the Church
for at least some time (p. 181).
Orwell considered the Spanish Civil War to be a genuine
revolution. The common man was actually taking control;
therefore, the counter-revolutionary force throughout the
world— capitalists, Communists, and Roman Catholics— had to
help crush this threat to a hierarchical society. So The
17
Homage to Catalonia, p. 48._________________________
Daily Mail in England "amid the cheers of the Catholic
clergy" represented "Franco as a patriot delivering his
country from hordes of fiendish 'Reds 1 ” (p. 49). He became
a Christian patriot fighting "Bolsheviks dripping with
blood" (p. 51). Orwell also later claimed in "Looking Back
on the Spanish War" that Catholic and reactionary presses
all over the world lied about a Russian army being in Spain,
yet they said nothing about the Russian Communists1 betrayal
of the Loyalists in the Spanish Revolution because a Loyal
ist victory threatened the existence of a hierarchical soci
ety. It was essentially a class war in which the religious
and political reactionaries banded together to defeat the
lower classes. This is seen in the hatred "millionaires,
dukes, cardinals, playboys, [and] blimps" felt toward the
Loyalists (p. 146).
This collusion between state and church for reactionary
ends is seen in Animal Farm. In the narrative, religion is
represented by Moses, whose name has obvious religious con
notations. While organizing the rebellion, the pigs have
trouble counteracting his lies. He had been Mr. Jones'
favorite pet and always talked about "a mysterious country
called Sugarcandy Mountain to which all animals went when
they died" (p. 15). Following the revolution Moses leaves
| ;
the fa[rm. But when the pigs betray the revolution their
attitude toward him changes. After several years, they let |
him return. The pigs, on one hand, "declared contemptuously|
65
that his stories about Sugarcandy Mountain were lies," yet
they let him stay on the farm, "not working, with an allow
ance of a gill of beer a day" (p. 98). The other animals do
not understand this; they fail to see how religion helps the
rulers of the state defeat the revolution's goals. Despite
their criticism of Moses, the pigs hope that his talk will
direct the other animals 1 attention away from the miserable
conditions of their lives.
Orwell's hatred of the reactionary tendency of religion
is seen most fully in his condemnation of Roman Catholicism.
In his early works he did not focus his criticism on it. In
A Clergyman1s Daughter, for instance, where his major inter
est is religion, he says almost nothing about Catholicism.
In Keep the Aspidistra Fivincr he mentions Father Hilaire
Chestnut’s book of Roman Catholic propaganda. But this mild
thrust in the form of a portmanteau word at Hilaire Belloc
and G. K. Chesterton, then the two leading Catholic apolo
gists in England, follows a comment about a book, Jesus the
First Rotarian (p. 8). Here Catholicism is just part of the
larger swindle of religion. However, after his experiences
in Spain, Catholicism came to represent precisely the things'
he disliked in religion. He equated it with totalitarian
ism— Communism in particular— as an evil, reactionary insti-,
; j
tution. Both institutions exemplify Lord Acton's remark:
I
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts abso- j
lutely." j
Even before his Spanish experiences he had seen various
analogies between Communism and Catholicism. In The Road to
Wigan Pier he argued that only the educated become com
pletely orthodox Communists or Catholics. Only they have
the ability to manipulate and distort reality to fit their
beliefs (p. 149). This is especially true of converts.
They do everything with the sense that they are Catholics.
A working class Catholic is never so consistent; “only the
'educated man1 . . . knows how to be a bigot" (p. 150).
G. K. Chesterton, according to Orwell, was a prototype for
his time of the converted, educated literary man. His hold
on reality became distorted whenever his loyalty, his
"political Catholicism," was involved; so he felt no contra
diction in admiring Mussolini and democracy at the same
time. Mussolini came from a Catholic country; therefore, he
had to be good. Much of Chesterton's effort was taken up in
18
proving Catholics superior to Protestants and pagans. His
mentality was like the totalitarian mentality. Reality is
divided into two parts: the things on his side are good;
the things on the other side are bad. He was the prime
example of Orwell's generalization made in 1945: "Ten or
twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely cor
responding to Communism today was political Catholicism"
(p. 78).
18
"Notes on Nationalism," Such, Such Were the Joys,
P. 78. __________ _ _________ _________________ _______
.......... 67
Another similarity Orwell found between Communists and
Catholics is their "evil spirited" apologists. Again this
is intensified in converts. After discussing a book by a
Communist convert, he says the likeliest place to find
another as evil-spirited is among the popular Roman Catholic
apologists. There you will find "the same venom and the
19
same dishonesty." He concludes that Communists and Catho
lics say opposite things and "would gladly boil the other in
oil," but to an "outsider they are very much alike" (p. 153).
According to Orwell, Roman Catholics and Communists are
also alike in assuming that their opponents cannot be "both
20
honest and intelligent." "The truth" has been revealed—
in Rome or Moscow— and the heretic is either a fool or else
he resists truth "out of selfish motives" (p. 117). For
this reason both oppose freedom of the intellect and both
have attacked it at different times in this century. In
"The Prevention of Literature," written in 1946, Orwell
says,
Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the
intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives,
against Catholics, and to some extent— for they were not
of great importance in England— against Fascists. Today
one has to defend it against Communists and "fellow
travellers." (p. 118)
This opposition to freedom of the intellect causes the state
of mind found in the popular Catholic apologists' astonish-
19
The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 153.
20
"The Prevention of Literature," Shooting an Elephant, ;
p. 117. J
ment "When a scientist utters an opinion on such questions
21
as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul."
Another fault Orwell found in Catholicism was its ef
fect on certain literary forms. He believed that orthodoxy
22
of any kind is damaging to prose. The need to adhere
rigidly to any ideology destroys the creative impulse; the
"real Socialist writers, the propagandist writers'1— Shaw,
Barbusse, Upton Sinclair, Waldo Frank— have been "dull,
23
empty windbags." So too with orthodox Catholics. The
literary form that suffers most is the novel. In "Inside
the Whale" he asks how many Roman Catholics have been good
novelists. The good Catholic novelists "have usually been
bad Catholics" (pp. 187-188). Why? "The novel is practi
cally a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free
mind, of the autonomous individual" (p. 188). He reiterated
this view later in "The Prevention of Literature," adding
that "certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and
24
tyranny is one of them. "
Clearly then, Orwell felt the case against religion
could hardly be put too strongly; yet, as was so often the
case, he also acknowledged some values in it— something he
21
"Politics vs. Literature," Shooting an Elephant,
p. 64.
22
"Inside the Whale," Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 187.
23
The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 155.
24
Shooting an Elephant, p. 128.
never acknolwedged in totalitarian forms of governments.
Toward the end of his life, as he became more and more
interested in political problems, he said less about reli
gion directly; however, his view of the future included by
implication judgments on religion and its role in society.
He was aware of possible dangers in a society without reli
gion.
Early in his writing he created characters who were
completely divorced from any religious beliefs. In A
Clergyman 1s Daughter, Warburton is treated sympathetically,
partly because his insight as a skeptic into the human con
dition allows him to understand and to react sympathetically
toward Dorothy's plight. On the other hand, a minor charac
ter, Mrs. Creevy, the owner of the school where Dorothy
teaches, and incidentally one of Orwell's most successful
character creations, lacks any vestige of religious belief.
A complete materialist, her God is money. Her anti-clerical
ism and hatred of religion is just part of her hatred of
humanity in general. She criticizes the Church, maintaining
that its sole purpose is to get money. However, this does
not stop her from using prayer for economic ends. Orwell
satirizes her money grubbing instincts in the morning pray- ;
brs with which she opens her school. Lacking any interest j
; i
in prayers as an act of worship, she uses them as a propa- j
!
j
ganda medium. In them she criticizes neighboring schools, !
; !
ultimately hoping to get more students and more fees. Such
is her concept of "the economics of prayer." Fees and
profits justify almost any action to her. At first she
hesitates to let Dorothy attend the local Church of England;
it might cause unrest among the predominately Non-Conformist
parents of the students. Then she decides to take a finan
cial gamble, hoping to get more fees. Dorothy can attend,
if she tries to find students for the school.
It is in 1984, however, that Orwell portrays the hor
rors of a society lacking any traditional religion. Al
though Orwell criticized contemporary Christianity, he
recognized that its ethics instilled some moral restraint
and rationality absent in other possible forms of religion
found in this century. He had seen the fanaticism of a
state religion in Nazi Germany and knew its extremes were
infinitely more horrible than those of Christianity. Under
standing the "profound hostility" of Fascism toward the
Christian ethical code, he preferred Christianity to
25
Fascism's occultism and hatred of democracy. After all—
and here Orwell pays Christianity one of his greatest com
pliments— it was the common Englishman's "deep tinge of
Christian feeling," despite his "almost forgetting the name
of Christ," that had protected him against the power-worship
^"W. B. Yeats," Dickens, Dali and Others (New York,
1946), p. 167.
71
[that infected the English intelligensia before World War
;II.26
In 1984 the State is supreme. It can be indifferent
about traditional religion, no longer fearing that it •will
exert political influence. If the proles needed religious
worship, it would have been allowed (p. 7 2). The existing
religion is state worship and the worshippers are Party mem
bers. This religion helps stabilize society by undermining
the power of the lower social classes and strengthening the
political power of the oligarchy.
The center of the Party members' existence is the State.
The State directs their lives and provides a kind of state
religion in which Big Brother, as the leader of the state,
replaces God. The priests, the O'Briens, lack any moral
restraint, and the main religious ceremony is the hate ses
sion at which the Party members worship fanatically. At
these sessions zealous party members cry out "My Savior" to
; i
Big Brother. In his sessions with Winston, O'Brien has the
air of a priest (p. 249). Winston the "heretic" must be j
I
"converted" from his "evil" and be "washed clean" (pp. 258-
259). Winston’s need to love Big Brother, to love the
State, not God, is thus described through the use of per
verted Christian terminology.
The attack of the State on the traditional concept of
I
; oc
"England Your England," Such, Such Were the Joys,
p. 205 . __________________________________________________________
72
God has peculiar manifestations. An acquaintance of Win
ston's, the poet Ampleforth (interestingly enough, in this
context, Ampleforth is the name of a Benedictine monastery
in England) is jailed because he allows the word God to re
main in a poem. His job is to help produce new editions of
poems in newspeak. In an edition of Kipling, however, un
able to find another rhyme for rod, Ampleforth left in the
word God, and so met disaster.
The state1s attack is also symbolized in the new func
tion of St. Martin's Church. In 1984 it is a museum for
scale models of rocket bombs and other weapons of war.
Although unable to accept any of the contemporary re
ligious faiths himself and despite his many criticisms of
religion, Orwell realized that some people need religious
faith. In a poem in "Why I Write," he said "A happy vicar
27
I might have been." But he added an important qualifica
tion— if he had lived in an earlier period. In Coming Up
For Air, part of George Bowling's memories of the past in-
clide "that peculiar feeling . . . Church" (p. 34). But
Church, like so many things, belongs to the past? in the
present, it is dead. As noticed earlier, Orwell believed he
lived in a political age and religious faith could not solve;
the age's problems. Yet he feared the implications of polit-4
ical faiths, such as worship of the State. - j
In A Clergyman's Daughter, Orwell concedes that even if
27 i
Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 8. j
7 3
the church's overall purpose is absurd, one still finds
"something of decency" in it (p. 277). It gives people
something to cling to when they lose faith. Even when faith
vanishes, often "the need for faith remains the same as
before" (p. 312).
Orwell believed the absence for many people of a viable
religious tradition created major problems. In his essay on
Arthur Koestler, Orwell says that contemporary life has
28
given little reason for optimism. Religious believers who
see this life as a preparation for the next might feel opti
mism. But, according to Orwell, the problem is that most
people no longer believe in immortality. For Orwell, one of
the major problems of our time is this "decay of the belief
29
in personal immortality." So one great problem xs "to
restore the religious attitude while accepting death as
30
final." In other words, he is restating a problem that
man has struggled with for centuries. How can man find an
ethical basis for human conduct without religious sanctions i
and without the promise of immortality? He believed that
"laissez-faire capitalism and . . . liberal-Christian cul-
31 ■
ture" were breaking up. Therefore, belxef xn Chrxstxanxty;
i
no
"Arthur Koestler," Dickens, Dali and Others, p. 200.
29
"Looking Back on the Spanxsh War," Such, Such Were
the Joys, p. 151. I
“ ^"Arthur Koestler," Dickens, Dali and Others, p. 200.
31 !
"Inside the Whale," Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 197.J
:is on the whole bound to be ineffectual. Yet "sooner or
later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards
32
life and society. " The problem is to find something to
fill the void at the center of things. This dilemma ex
plained for Orwell why many writers in the thirties went
into the Communist Party. It was "a Church, an army, an
33
orthodoxy, a discipline." It was something to believe m.
What was Orwell's solution to modern man1s religious
dilemma? What was his ideal religion? Some comments he
makes about Dickens are relevant. He says "The truth is
that Dickens' criticism of society is almost exclusively
34
moral." His message boils down to the platitude: "If
men would behave decently the world would be decent" (p. 6)
Orwell says essentially the same thing; it is action, not
belief, that is decisive in man's life. Orwell also found
"the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in
his [Dickens'] work" (p. 5). Dickens attacked the law, par
liamentary government, and the educational system without
suggesting specifically what would replace them. Orwell did
much the same. Instead of cursing man's "moral inter-
;
interdebtedness," as did Melville's Ahab, he wanted to
strengthen the bonds between men. But he believed that in- ;
stitutionalized religion could not do this. In his Utopia, i
I
^"T. S. Eliot,” Little Reviews Anthology, p. 216.
■^"Inside the Whale," Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 183.
34
"Charles Dickens," Dickens, Dali and Others, p. 5. !
75
secular ethics based on man's need for love, friendship, na
ture, and work would replace the religious ethics sanctioned
by religious beliefs.. Man would be the measure, and he
would create values out of his own experience. The core of
this secular ethic would be man's responsibility to and love
for his fellow man.
Thus Orwell's ultimate criticism of religion is that
its beliefs are not true. The transcendental order does not
exist. Man must break free from his isolation by his ac
tions, not by his religious beliefs. Belief alone will not
fill the void at the center of things; only a life lived in
love and friendship offers genuine hope in the face of the
finality of death.
CHAPTER III
NATURE AND MODERN MAN
The opening chapter of this study sought to stress
Orwell's awareness of modern man's sense of isolation. As
has been seen, he believed that two causes of this isolation
are the lack of satisfactory human relationships and the
absence for most men of a viable religious tradition. How
ever, he attributed modern man's sense of isolation and
fragmentation to more than these two things. A third major
cause is that the conditions of modern life are cutting man
off more and more from nature. Modern man's submergence in
a world of chrome, cement, and tin cans is causing him psy
chological harm by narrowing, in yet another way, his re
sponse to life. Orwell would have agreed with Joseph Wood
Krutch's statement that most modern men see themselves "as
part of society or, more specifically, members of some pro
fession or slaves at some industry, rather than as part of
nature."^ Orwell himself sees man's relationship to man—
his social relationships— as the primary part of his
i
^"In Back of Man a World of Nature," Ten Contemporary
Thinkers. ed. V. E. Amend and L. T. Hendrick (New York,
1964), p. 133. |
; ' 77
existence; however, he also feels that man's relationship to
nature is of fundamental importance. Man's failure to see
this relationship, however, does not abolish it; instead
this blindness creates problems. Again Krutch expresses
views similar to Orwell's about what happens if man ignores
this relationship to nature.
But our physical as well as our spiritual dependence
upon nature is merely obscured,not abolished, and to be
unaware of that fact is to be as naively obtuse as the
child who supposes that cows are no longer necessary be
cause we now get milk from bottles. (pp. 136-137)
Orwell's concern about the results of modern man's
estrangement from nature permeates his work. For instance,
Homage to Catalonia is essentially a record of his experi
ences as a "political animal" in the Spanish Civil War. In
many ways it is his most purely political book; but it is
also significant that, even here, Orwell never loses his
awareness of nature. In fact, two incidents embody his
basic feelings about nature. The first incident is related
to a bullet wound he received. Soon after he was wounded he
realized that he would not die, but the whole incident
prompted him to think about the nature of life and death.
As he was being taken to the ambulance, leaves on the silver:
poplars fringing the trenches brushed against his face. He
thought "what a good thing it was to be alive in a world j
' 2
where silver poplars grow." The second incident is related
to his reaction to the scenery around Zaragoza. It "was j
2 !
(New York, 195 2) , p. 187._______________________________j
;.... ..... .. ~ “ ..... ..78
stupendous, if you could forget that every mountaintop was
occupied by troops and was therefore littered with tin cans
and crusted with dung" (p. 24). Thus we find two ideas that
run through Orwell's works: Nature is something that makes
man's life more worth-while, yet man constantly defiles it
and fails to recognize his organic relationship to it.
If we ask why he had this deep love, the answer lies in
his experience both as a youth and as an adult. In "Why I
Write" Orwell maintains that one of a writer's main motives
comes from his perceiving "beauty in the external world" and
3
from his wanting to communicate it. This love of nature
played a great part both in Orwell's life and in his work.
Laurence Brander, who knew Orwell personally, says that he
took his pseudonymous surname from the Orwell river in
4
Suffolk. Although xt is impossible to say exactly why he
chose this particular name, it is highly possible that he
chose the name Orwell because he associated it with the
beauty of southern England. !
Orwell, like so many other writers, believed that
youthful experiences strongly influence a writer's later
work, maintaining in "Why I Write" that it is impossible to
"assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his ;
early development" (p. 5). Furthermore, the writer who cuts
j i
i
himself off from his early influences kills "his impulse to I
!
i
3 |
Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 6. i
^George Orwell (New York, 1954), p. 2. ________ _
write" (p. 6). In Orwell's early development, nature was a
main influence. He describes his childhood world-view:
I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon
the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as
I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly
about prose style, to love the surface of the earth
[italics mine], and to take a pleasure in solid objects
and scraps of useless information. (p. 9)
Lionel Trilling was right in saying that Orwell had a love
affair with the language; he also could have added that he
had a love affair with nature.
Various personal experiences intensified his love of
nature, a love that is an integral part of the English tra
dition. During his boyhood and young manhood he lived in
places of great natural beauty— in India, Burma, and the
south of England. An intelligent, sensitive boy who felt
isolated from his parents and others, he found in nature
some consolation for his loneliness. Early in his life he
became fond of wandering about and closely observing nature
In later life, most of the happy memories of his boyhood
were connected in some way with nature.
This is seen in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys
. . . 1 1 which tells of his boyhood experiences at Crossgates
the expensive prep school he attended before going to Eton.
It is a record of mostly depressing experiences— being pun
ished for wetting the bed, living in uncomfortable condi
tions, and being exposed to snobbishness based on wealth.
However, his happy memories of this time are almost all
linked with nature in one way or another. He went on______
f " ' 80
"■wonderful expeditions across the Downs, or to Beachy Head,
where one bathed among the chalk boulders and came home
covered with cuts" (p. 29). He had "the pleasure of keeping
caterpillars," and "the excitement of dredging the dew-
ponds . . . for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies"
(p. 30). A high point in each school year came when Mr.
Brown, one of the two adults Orwell liked in the school,
would take several boys for an afternoon of butterfly hunt
ing. On these expeditions he escaped "the barrack-like
atmosphere of school" (p. 30). Much like Huckleberry Finn,
the young Orwell found that in nature he could escape many
of the dictates of a repressive society.
In both his life and works one sees that he preferred
the country to the city. Whenever possible, he lived in the
country. Before going to Spain he "kept hens, ran a pub
5
. . . and set up a small general store" in the country. On
returning to England he lived in Hertfordshire, again keep
ing hens and also growing vegetables (p. 8). During the war
he lived in London, but shortly before its end he moved to
the isolated and beautiful island of Jura off the west coast
of Scotland.
Despite this love of the country, however, most of his
novels are set in the city. These fictional cities are
dreary and depressing; for instance, in the opening pages of!
i
i
1984 the reader discovers that London under the Party is ]
i
: i
i
5 1
Brander, p. 6. ____ ’
81
characterized by vile smells, dirt, sordid living conditions,
inefficiency, and a lack of privacy. In most of his works
the main characters spend some time in the country. For
them the country has a regenerative power; there one can ex
perience emotions the city destroys. The country, or na
ture, in most of Orwell's novels has a function like that of
the river in Huckleberry Finn: as Huck and Jim are able to
form a deeper human relationship with each other away from
the restrictions of the shore, so Orwell's characters often
have deeper emotional responses for each other in the coun
try than in the city. In Orwell's fictional cities, man's
relationship to man breaks down and he remains isolated
among other isolated men. The city is a source of decay;
the country, a source of renewal and life. Again one sees
this in the contrast between the city and country in 1984.
When Winston first goes to the country, he is keenly aware
of the difference between it and the city.
The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves
daunted him. Already, on the walk from the station, the
May sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a
creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in
the pores of his skin.^
The civilization of Big Brother and the Party is found in
the city. It is against this anti-Utopia that Winston
places his vision of a pastoral Utopia, the Golden Country. :
; j
Throughout Orwell's works one sees this contrast of the;
i
| I
country to the city. Although Orwell says little about
i 6 (New York, 1949), p. 120._______________________________ I
f ....... “ ........ ' “ " 82
nature in Down and Out in Paris and London, his suggestion
for solving the problem of vagrancy shows how his awareness
7
of nature permeates his thought. He suggests that instead
of forcing tramps to wander about the countryside from work
house to workhouse, authorities should let them stay at one
to grow vegetables. They could stop wandering, gain a
satisfactory living, and feel some sense of accomplishment.
This, as Laurence Brander says, is "the first hint of his
philosophy that sanity lies in the country, working the
land, rather than in cities’ 1 (p. 7 2) . Later Orwell made a
similar suggestion about unemployment. Every unemployed
man should have a "patch of ground and free tools ’ ’ if he
g
wanted to grow vegetables for his family. It would help
him economically and psychologically. Even if a man is
helpless before economic forces, he can at least retain some
dignity if he can work the ground and grow some of his own
food.
i
The regenerative power of nature also appears in 1
9
Burmese Days. After making love to his Burmese mistress,
Flory feels guilty and bored. His ennui becomes "frantic,
suicidal. Work, prayer, books, drinking, talking— they are
all powerless against it; it can only be sweated out through
the pores of the skin" (p. 69). To escape, he goes to the
I i
^New York, 1933.
8The Road to Wigan Pier (New York, 1961), p. 80.
9New York, 1934._____________ _______ _______ __________
“ ““ ■“ ~.83
jungle. Swimming in a jungle pool and seeing the beauty of
the forest— "beautiful beyond all words"— help improve his
mood, although he still feels his intense loneliness (p. 71).
Flory1s reaction to the beauty of nature is often like that
of many Englishmen of his day, D. H. Lawrence, for example.
Away from the repressive atmosphere of settlements, this
beauty revives Flory psychologically.
In A Clergyman1s Daughter Dorothy's experiences in the
hop fields and in London further illustrate the difference
between the country and city."^ While working in. the fields
she feels happy; in fact, she finds it an "unreasonable
happiness" (p. 124). The people in the country aid her and
extend emotional warmth to her, but in the city human rela- ;
tionships are distorted. Men see other men as impersonal
economic units to exploit. In London, Dorothy has horrible
experiences: she accidentally rents a room in a hotel used
by prostitutes; and when penniless, she spends her nights in
i
Trafalgar Square becoming "used to the enormous sleepless
nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom and the horrible
communism of the Square" (p. 199). Then she is arrested and;
jailed for begging. Even after her father's wealthy cousin :
gets her released and finds her a job teaching, her life re-
: i
mains dreadful.
j j
In many ways, his next novel, Keep the Aspidistra Fly
ing, foreshadows 1984. In both there is a tone of despair, j
i
i
I
■^New York , 1936. _ J
and in both most of the action occurs in a London that is
dreary and filthy, whereas the country is a place where peo
ple can escape the oppressive city. One of Gordon's few
happy moments occurs when he tabes Rosemary to the country.
At first his reaction is like Winston's. Both feel "etio
lated," to use Orwell's word, like creatures that have
emerged from the underground of the city into the loveliness
of nature. Gordon and Rosemary hike through the woods,
going no particular place, "so long as it was away from
London.They feel "extravagantly happy" wandering about,
looking at a jay's feather they pick up or at pools or trees
(p. 128). Like other characters in Orwell's novels— Flory
and Elizabeth in Burmese Days and Winston and Julia in 1984— -
Gordon and Rosemary often have their deepest emotional re
sponses for each other when they are together in the coun
try. In one instance, while they are watching some rabbits,
one leaps out and startles Rosemary. She "threw herself
into Gordon's arms" (p. 127). His response lacks the bit
terness, sexuality, and self-pity he always feels in London.,
Instead he holds her "in a sort of sexless rapture" and
realizes he loves her (p. 127). ;
I
In 1984 the way of escape from the dreary city is also j
the country. Of course, to go there is suspect; and one |
! j
might be watched. Winston's first private meeting with
I t i
Julia is in the country. There the atmosphere is strikingly
1Vew York, 1954), p. 126. __________________
;. '. ' . ' ' ' “ ' ~ — ' 85
'different from that in London under the Party. To arrange
this rendezvous they meet in a public square. Standing in a
crowd and looking straight ahead, they speak with barely
moving lips. To look at each other "would have been incon
ceivable folly" (p. 118) ; instead, they watch trucks carrying
Mongolian prisoners. This scene stands in stark contrast to
the one in the country immediately following.
Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled
light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wher
ever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of
them the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed
to kiss one's skin. It was the second of May. From
somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the dron
ing of ring doves. (p. 118)
As we saw earlier, while walking from the station into the
country, Winston had felt like Gordon Comstock, "dirty and
etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of
London in the pores of his skin" (p. 120) . But once in the
country, the "sweetness of the air and the greenness of the
leaves" daunt him (p. 120). All of this helps create in him;
a "mindless tenderness," a feeling impossible in the city
(p. 127).
After the Party has forced them to betray each other
and has destroyed them psychologically, they accidently meet;
again. This time they are in the city, and again nature re-;
fleets their moods. Nature here has been stunted and cor
rupted by the city, just as Winston and Julia have been de- ;
stroyed.
: ~ “ ' " ' 86
Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in
the Park, on a vile, biting day in March— when the earth
was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there
was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had
pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind.
(p- 293)
A "clump of ragged leafless shrubs" is a physical correla
tive to the desolation of their souls (p. 293).
Before his destruction, Winston’s ideas and dreams
about the Golden Country juxtapose a pastoral Utopia against
the Party's anti-Utopia. His picture of the Golden Country
is vague, a result of subconscious wishes and memories of
youth and better times. But it is the standard by which he
criticizes his world. After dreaming of the Golden Country
for many years, Winston comes to a field. He has "a curi
ous, slow shock of recognition" (p. 124). Here is the
Golden Country of his dreams. A thrush lands and begins to
sing. Winston wonders, "For whom, for what, was that bird
singing? No mate, no rival was watching it" (p. 125). A
nearby hidden microphone might pick up the song. If so,
"perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small,
beetlelike man was listening intently— listening to that"
(p. 125). The italicized that stresses the vast gulf, the
hostility, between nature's beauty and the Party's phil
osophy.
But the very emotions the Golden Country evokes in
Winston in one sense betray him. During the time he is
undergoing extensive torture, he imagines in a reverie that }
he is not in the Ministry of Love, but in the Golden Country'.
; .......... . ' ' " ' 87
The feelings aroused by this vision cause him to cry,
;"Julia! JuliaJ Julia, my love! Julia!" (p. 283). For a
moment he thinks she is present; then he knows that wherever
she is, she needs his help. He also realizes his mistake in
revealing his love. Having surrendered his mind to the
Party, he "had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate"
(p. 283). His cry reveals all this. After his outburst
O'Brien tells him that intellectually little is wrong with
him, but "emotionally . . . you have failed to make progress1
(p. 285). Winston's outburst, caused partly by his reaction
to nature as found in the Golden Country, shows he still has
deep human loyalties, precisely the thing the Party— an
agency of the city— opposes.
Thus, in Orwell's works nature causes people to respond
in ways that they otherwise would not. This is seen in
Dorothy's response in A Clergyman's Daughter. Her father
dismisses "Nature-worship," as he calls it, as "mere panthe
ism" and "a disgusting modern fad" (p. 47). His influence
pauses her to feel guilty whenever she reacts too deeply
toward the beauty of nature. But despite his warnings, she
has several almost mystical experiences prompted by nature.
Early in the novel the conflict arises between her re
ligious beliefs and her love of nature. Every morning the ;
> ;
Reverend Hare gives Holy Communion. Usually only Dorothy
and Mrs. Mayfill attend. Mrs. Mayfill is extremely old and j
the only person of any social standing and wealth that the i
; 88
Reverend's bad temper has not driven away from his church.
During one such service, Dorothy notices Mrs. May.fill's
physical ugliness; her
under lip, pendulous with age, slobbered forward, expos
ing a strip of gum and a row of false teeth as yellow as
the keys of an old piano. On the upper lip was a fringe
of dark, dewy moustache. (p. 14)
When Dorothy realizes she will have to drink from the chal
ice after Miss Mayfill, she prays spontaneously "0 God, let
me not have to take the chalice after Miss Mayfill" (p. 14).
Realizing that her prayer contradicts her religious beliefs,
she drives a pin into her arm to punish herself. She then
kneels on Miss Mayfill's left so she will have to take the
chalice after her. But her sense of guilt keeps Dorothy
from praying; she feels unworthy to eat the wafer or drink
from the chalice. Then, looking by chance through an open
door, she sees sunlight piercing the clouds and striking the
leaves of a lime tree.
It struck downwards through the leaves of the limes, and
a spray of leaves in the doorway gleamed with a transi
ent, matchless green. . . . It was as though some jewel
of unimaginable splendour had flashed for an instant,
filling the doorway with green light, and then faded. A
flood of joy ran through Dorothy's heart. The flash of
living colour had brought back to her, by a process
deeper than reason, her peace of mind, her love of God,
her power of worship. Somehow, because of the greeness
of the leaves, it was again possible to pray. 0 all ye j
green things upon the earth, praise ye the Lord; She
began to pray, ardently, joyfully, thankfully. (pp. 15-
16) !
: i
I
I
Her emotional response to nature helps her fulfill her re- j
ligious duties; the beauty of nature even transcends the |
ugliness of Mrs. Mayfill. After seeing the sunlight she____
i ..' " ..... ~ ' 89
takes her ■wafer and drinks from the chalice "without repul
sion" (p. 16).
In another experience Dorothy's love of nature and her
religious beliefs conflict. As part of her duties she
visits her father's parishioners. During one especially de
pressing visit she has to massage the legs of an old female
parishioner in a room reeking of urine and paregoric. She
detests the task, and when she leaves she is invigorated by
the sun and the air. While resting by a meadow, she looks
closely at a wild rose. Kneeling among the weeds, she hears
insects humming and feels the sun's heat. Almost instinc
tively she pulls a leaf of "the fennel against her face" and
breathes "in the strong sweet scent" becoming dizzy for a
moment (p. 62). Orwell then describes in detail her re
sponse to nature.
Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical
joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of
things that she recognized, perhaps mistakenly, as the
love of God. As she knelt there in the heat, the sweet
odour and the drowsy hum of insects, it seemed to her
that she could momentarily hear the mighty anthem of
praise that the earth and all created things send up
everlastingly to their maker. All vegetation, leaves,
flowers, grass, shining, vibrating, crying out in their
joy. Larks also chanting choirs of larks invisible,
dripping music from the sky. All the riches of summer,
the warmth of the earth, the song of birds, the fume of
cows, the droning of countless bees, mingling and ascend
ing like the smoke of ever-burning altars. (p. 63) }
She prays "ardently, blissfully, forgetting herself in the j
joy of her worship" (p. 63). When she finds herself kissing
the leaf, she draws back quickly, wondering if she is wor
shiping ^3od or the earth. She feels guiltily that she has__
fallen into "a half-pagan ecstasy" and admonishes herself
because her father had "warned her against Nature-worship"
!(p. 63). To satisfy her conscience, in an act symbolic of
the clash between nature and religion, she pricks her arm
three times with the thorn of a wild rose to "remind herself
Of the Three Persons of the Trinity" (p. 63). But it is too
late; the beauty of nature has awakened her deepest emotions.
After Dorothy loses her religious faith, she reflects
on the change in herself. The change has been both in her
religious beliefs and in her attitude toward nature.
Something had happened in her heart, and the world was a
little emptier, a little poorer from that minute. On
such a day as this, last spring or any earlier spring,
how joyfully, and how unthinkingly, she would have
thanked God for the first blue skies and the first flow
ers of the reviving year! And now, seemingly, there was
no God to thank, and nothing— not a flower or a stone or
a blade of grass— nothing in the universe would ever be
the same again. (pp. 291-292)
Thus one effect of her loss of faith is seen partly in her
changed attitude toward nature. No longer does it remind
her of God or bring her closer to Him.
George Bowling, like Dorothy, responds deeply to na
ture. While driving in the country during spring, he finds ,
the weather too good to miss, so he stops to "have a smell
12
at the spring air." Looking at the field and trees, he
feels "something that's so unusual nowadays that to say it
sounds like foolishness. I felt happy” (p. 192). He does
not need women or youth again; he only wants to be alive
'
I
1 7 I
Comincr Up For Air (New York. 1950) . p. 191. J
j ' ' " ' “ " 91
(p. 193)- And he feels alive while "looking at the prim
roses and the red embers under the hedges" (p. 193). While
looking at a nearby pool, he makes a Thoreauvian affirmation
of nature.
Why don't people, instead of the idiocies they do spend
their time on, just walk round looking at things? That
pool, for instance— all the stuff that's in it. Newts,
water-snails, water beetles, caddis-flies, leeches, and
God knows how many other things that you can only see
with a microscope. The mystery of their lives, down
there under water. You could spend a life-time watching
them, ten life-times, and still you wouldn't have got to
the end even of that one pool. (pp. 193-194)
Thus Bowling believes man must simplify his existence and
deepen his ties with nature. An approaching car, however,
destroys his contemplation. He feels foolish. Why would a
modern man be standing looking at nature? To escape suspi
cion he pretends "to be doing up a fly-button" (p. 196).
This is acceptable. During his boyhood his parents had for
bidden almost everything worth doing, especially things con
nected with nature. His adult world is little different.
But while leaving the field he has an idea. He will
visit his boyhood home, and recapture some of the "peace andj
quiet" he once had there (p. 197). He will escape the
"everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of
buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells" (p. 198). In the un-j
spoiled nature of his youth, he will temporarily escape the
modern world.
You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air^ Like the
big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface,
stick their noses out and fill their lungs with a great
! " ..... ' ' 92
gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and
the octopuses. (p. 198)
In a world on the verge of World War II, George Bowling
finds nature a refuge from the prevailing hatred and tension.
Orwell's belief that man must simplify his life and
deepen his ties with nature appears also in his essays. In
"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad" he examines the implica-
13
tions of man's response to nature. He says that when he
writes anything favorable about nature, people often accuse
him of being a reactionary. They complain that an interest
in nature causes "political quietism" (p. 205). But he
asks: Is it wicked to enjoy spring? Is it politically
wicked to show that certain parts of nature, such as a
blackbird's song, make life "more worth living?" (p. 205).
These acts are justifiable even if they lack "what the edi
tors of the Left-wing newspapers call a class angle"
(p. 205). He explains his reasons:
i
I have always suspected that if our economic and politi
cal problems are ever really solved, life will become
simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of
pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will
loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eat
ing an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. (p. 206)
Much of his quarrel with other socialists and leftists
in England resulted from the importance he attached to na
ture. He accused them of over-enthusiastically accepting
machines, industrialism, and progress at the expense of na- j
ture. In The Road to Wigan Pier he recalled that a j
: j
13
Shooting an Elephant, p. 202._________________________ !
: ..... ' " ~ " " ".93
prominent I. L. P ’er shamefully confessed to him "that he
was 'fond of horses.’" About the man's shame, Orwell re
marked, "Horses, you see, belong to the vanished agricul
tural past, and all sentiment for the past carries with it a
vague smell of heresy" (p. 168).
The way the I. L. P.'er responds has its counterpart in
Orwell's fiction. In his novels the way a character re
sponds to nature is always significant; this response is one
way Orwell distinguishes between "good" and "bad" charac
ters. O'Brien, in 1984, for instance, is almost completely
dehumanized and this is partly illustrated by his alienation
from nature. The absence of windows in the building and
rooms in which he works symbolizes this alienation? his
world is one of tile floors and artificial light.
O'Brien is the last in a line of many of Orwell's char
acters who dislike nature or have a distorted view of it.
They see it as something to exploit or destroy, but are
blind to the organic relationship between man and nature.
Elizabeth, in Burmese Days, is thrilled when she kills or
I
hears about others killing animals. Flory scarcely sees her
admiration for him when he tells about his killing an ele
phant some years earlier. For him it had been a dreadful
experience— an experience like Orwell's own described in
"Shooting an Elephant." But Elizabeth admires him when he i
talks about tiger hunting and shooting instead of "mucky j
poetry" (p. 207). When they hunt together, she feels j
94
"almost an adoration" when she sees his shooting skill
(p. 211). Looking at a beautiful imperial pigeon he had
shot, he says, "It's murder to shoot them" (p. 211). How
ever, Elizabeth is envious, saying, "I wish I could do it
like you doi " (p. 212). After she kills one, she can hardly
give it up: "She could have kissed it, hugged it to her
breast" (p. 214). Then "she was conscious of an extraordi
nary desire to fling her arms around Flory1s neck and kiss
him; and in some way it was the killing of the pigeon that
made her feel this" (p. 214). Ironically, Elizabeth's de
sire for Flory is aroused by killing, by destroying; her
destructive urge is thus directed not only at human beings,
but also at nature.
As might be expected, the Reverend Hare, who is at odds
with everything and everybody, contemptuously dismisses any
interest in nature. As noted earlier, such an interest
might lead to Nature-worship, "a disgusting modern fad"
(p. 63). A humorous incident illustrates his dislike.
Dorothy makes the mistake of asking him to look at the beans;
in his back garden. She proposes to decorate his pulpit .
during the Harvest Festival with "runner beans and a few j
tomatoes hanging in among them" (p. 25). He hates the Har- '
vest Festival and objects to giving his sermon among "fes
toons of runner beans," arguing that he is "not a green
grocer" (p. 26). His hatred of Harvest Festivals had caused
trouble in the past. One wealthy parishioner, a Mr. Toagis,
95
;"anima naturaliter Nonconformistica, 1 1 as Orwell described
him, had been kept "Church" by the privilege he got each
year of helping to decorate the church with vegetables dur
ing the festival (p. 25)- One summer he brought an enormous
pumpkin to the festival and spent his days loitering around
the chancel admiring it in the display. When the Reverend
saw it, he demanded the "revolting thing" be taken away. As
a result, Mr. Toagis was lost to the church forever (p. 27).
Mrs. Creevy is another figure in A Clergyman1s Daughter
whose character is partly delineated by her reaction to na
ture. She is almost joyless except for her avarice; she is
the kind of miser who would "take a farthing from a dunghill
with his teeth" (p. 233). Another of her characteristics is;
her "pure, purposeless malignity"{p. 233). This distorted
view of life is seen in her attitude toward nature. Her
gardening consists of "mutilating with a pair of shears the
unhappy shrubs that grew amid wastes of gravel in the back
garden" (p. 231). Under her care, her garden resembles
Dante's landscape in the Wood of the Suicides.
Her malignity manifests itself in petty acts— acts in
which nature as well as people figure. She feuds with a
neighbor, Mr. Boulger, who is no match for her. She so en
joys the feud that she even spends money to conduct it.
Interestingly enough, in two of the three incidents Orwell j
i
relates about the feud, Mrs. Creevy destroys some part of
nature. She wins her first victory "with a dustbinful of j
..... ~ 96
iwet ashes thrown on to Mr. Boulger' s bed of tulips" (p. 234).
Then her major victory comes after she discovers that the
roots of his plum tree grow under her garden. She puts
weed-killer into them and hills the tree. This act of de
struction leads to the "only occasion when Dorothy ever
heard Mrs. Creevy laugh" (p. 234).
While Orwell is quick to criticize those unsympathetic
to nature, he is equally quick to forgive faults in those in
sympathy with it. This is seen in the essay "A Good Word
14
for the Vicar of Bray." Orwell tells about visiting the
Berkshire church where the Vicar was once the incumbent. He
was not an admirable character, but he supposedly planted a
yew tree that "has rested the eyes of generation after gen
eration and must surely have outweighed any bad effects
which he produced by his political quislingism" (p. 207).
After digressing about the Vicar's unfaithful wife, Orwell
says that "the planting of a tree, especially one of the
long-lived hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to
posterity at almost no cost" (p. 209). He had recently seen;
some trees planted where he once lived. The pleasure he and;
others had received from them made Orwell feel happy, as
George Bowling felt looking at the trees and fields. Orwell
humorously admits that one cannot "discharge all one's obli
gations towards society by means of a private re-afforesta
tion scheme" (p. 212). But planting trees might help make
14
Shooting- an Elephant. __________________________ ______
amends for certain anti-social acts. He concludes:
And, if even one in twenty of them comes to maturity,
you might do quite a lot of harm in your lifetime, and
still, like the Vicar of Bray, end up as a public bene
factor after all. (p. 212)
Although Orwell loved the country and nature, he was
not sentimental about it. As George Bowling in Coming Up
For Air says, "I'm not soppy about 'the country.' I was
brought up a damn sight too near to it for that" (p. 194).
Orwell disliked a pretentious love of the country. When
Bowling goes to his old fishing ponds, he finds that they
have been engulfed by the expanding town. He meets an
elderly man who lives in the housing tract now built near
the old ponds. The man— one of the many "rabbit faced"
characters in Orwell's works— tells George: "We live in the
midst of Nature up here. No connection with the town down
there— the dark satanic mills— te-hee!" (p. 254). He also
talks about living with "the primeval forest brooding round
us" (p. 254). This forest consists of a half dozen acres
left standing from George's youth. George understands and
despises the man's philosophy: "vegetarianism, simple life,
poetry, nature worship, roll in the dew before breakfast"
(p. 255). After George finds one pond drained and half
filled with cans and learns they call the remaining clump of
trees the Pixy Glen, he can only think:
Doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're
doing in England, with their bird-baths and their plaster
gnomes, and their pixies and tin cans, where the beech-
woods used to be? (p. 257)
98
The "dark Satanic mills" were not anathema to Orwell.
Although he was critical of some aspects of industry, it is
important to remember two things. One, he believed that a
better future depended partly on the wise use of technology
and industry. Two, he believed that on the whole industry
had benefitted the lower classes of western Europe. His
main complaint against modern industry was not that it was
ugly or that it further widened man's alienation from na
ture, but that the social structure accompanying industry
often forces people to lead intolerable lives. For this
reason he criticized an unexamined acceptance of "modern
progress" and industrialism. Much of what he objected to in
this social structure has been seen in his attitude toward
the city. He hated the large cities which in Western Europe
are, to a great extent, products of the Industrial Revolu
tion. In them man is separated from nature. George Bowl
ing's reaction to a "modern" milk bar dramatizes this. Its
i I
atmosphere depresses him: "everything slick and shiny and
streamlined; mirrors, enamel and chromium plate" (pp. 25-
26). When he eats, he finds his frankfurter has "a rubber
skin, of course," and then he realizes it is filled with ;
fish (p. 27). As he leaves in disgust, he remembers reading
about "food factories in Germany where everything's made out
of something else. Ersatz, they call it" (p. 27). He feels
that he had "bitten into the modern world and discovered
what it was really made of" (p. 27). Then he reflects on
99
the state of the modern world. It is worth quoting in full
because here Bowling speaks for Orwell.
That's the way we're going nowadays. Everything slick
and streamlined, everything made out of something else.
Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arclamps
blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios
all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything
cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral
fruit-trees. (pp. 27-28) '
It is this artificial world, the world of the city, divorced
from nature, that Orwell hates.
In Burmese Days Flory criticizes "modern progress"
partly because of its adverse effects on nature. Dr. Vera-
swami defends imperialism, arguing that it has brought
progress to Burma. But Flory argues that progress has
brought destruction. In two hundred years "'all this will
be gone— forests, villages, monasteries, pagodas'" (p. 50).
It will be replaced by a far different world. There will
be,
pink villas fifty yards apart; all over those hills, as
far as you can see, villa after villa, with all the
gramophones playing the same tune. And all the forests
shaved flat— chewed into woodpulp . . . or sawn up into
gramophone cases. (p. 50)
Like Warburton in Somerset Maugham's "The Outstation," he
finds the gramophone symbolic of the sameness, the drabness,!
and the vulgarity that the world is moving toward in the
name of progress.
It is true that Orwell complains that progress has
brought with it much ugliness, often at the expense of j
i
I
natural beauty. Yet it is always important to keep his j
main, larger complaint in The Road to Wigan Pier in mind:
!"a belching chimney or a stinking slum is repulsive chiefly
because it implies warped lives and ailing children" (p. 98).
Describing his trip to Wigan, he says that only in the pot
tery towns and to their north do "you begin to encounter the
real ugliness of industrialism— an ugliness so frightful and
so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to
terms with it" (p. 95). This ugliness forces one to see
industrialism's effects on nature. "The monstrous scenery
of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals,"
these are the by-products of industrialism (p. 29). The
"planless and functionless" slag-heap epitomize this ugli
ness (p. 95). After it sinks, only an "evil brown grass
grows on it" (p. 95). These "lunar landscapes" form part of
the world where "vegetation had been banished; nothing
existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water"
(p. 96).
In this world without vegetation— where nature has been
destroyed— a city like Wigan is ugly, but beautiful if com
pared with a city like Sheffield, which "could justly claim ,
i
to be called the ugliest town in the Old World" (p. 96). j
Even Sheffield's stench is horrible. "If at rare moments
you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun '
smelling gas" (p. 96). Even the river running "through the
town is usually bright yellow with some chemical or other"
(p. 96). Prom Sheffield one scene especially lingers in his
101
mind:
a frightful patch of waste ground (somehow, up there, a
patch of waste ground attains a squalor that would be
impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and
littered with newspapers and old saucepans. (p. 97)
Sheffield is a grotesque symbol of a world alienated from
nature, a world of slag-heaps and tin cans.
He believed, however, that industrialism is not neces
sarily ugly (p. 98). Since the first war, as it has moved
south, the factories have not been as ugly as in the past.
But its total impact is still one of ugliness. He felt
this most strongly when he went from an industrial area to
open country. While in an industrial area, he felt it as
endless; the "smoke and filth must go on forever" (pp. 29-
30). Part of man's estrangement from nature can be seen in
his accepting the city and industry as natural.
In a crowded, dirty little country like ours one takes
defilement almost for granted. Slag-heaps and chimneys
seem a more normal, probable landscape than grass and
trees, and even in the depths of the country when you ;
drive your fork into the ground you half expect to lever
up a broken bottle or a rusty can. (p. 30)
Thus he invariably contrasts the ugliness of industrialism
to the beauty of nature. When leaving Wigan, he passes ;
slag-heaps, great piles of scrap iron, and foul canals
j
(p. 29). Soon he comes to the country; there the fresh snow|
is in marked contrast to the soot blackened snow in Wigan.
f
He also sees some rooks treading and, with his usual inter
est in birds, he describes their ritual of courtship. Al
though he has been on the train for only thirty minutes, it
j ' " " . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " ' ” 102
iseems a long way from Wigan to the "empty slopes of snow,
the bright sunshine and the big gleaming birds" (p. 30).
Reflecting on this, Orwell adds:
The whole of the industrial districts are really one
enormous town of about the same population as Greater
London but, fortunately, of much larger area; so that
even in the middle of them there is still room for patches
of cleanness and decency. (p. 30)
Significantly he finds these "patches" away from the city.
That man "has not yet succeeded in doing his dirt every
where" encourages him (p. 30). At least "The earth is so
vast and still so empty that even in the filthy heart of
civilization you find fields where the grass is green in
stead of grey" (p. 30).
Orwell detested the fact that in twentieth century
i
England "the filthy heart of civilization" keeps extending
itself. Countless English writers— from Bertrand Russell to
John Betjeman— have deplored this trend in which tin cans
replace flowers. In Comincr Up For Air, Orwell renders the
effect of this extension in the longings of George Bowling.
In this novel— which in a sense is Orwell's pastoral—
Bowling has "a hangover from the past," resulting mostly
from his love of nature and his nostalgia for the good
things of an Edwardian past that are disappearing (p. 23).
In the early 1900's he had been "breathing real air" (p. 35)L
i
But in England just before World War II "all the ponds are
(drained,” and the streams are either poisoned with chemicals
or full of rusty cans and tires (p. 87).
i - - - - • • 1 0 3
f
j '
Returning to his boyhood town after an absence of
twenty years, to recapture some of the atmosphere of his
youth, George Bowling finds nature spoiled; the world of
glass and concrete has replaced the beech trees. Only "the
ghosts of hedges and trees and cows" remain from his child
hood (p. 213). Bowling finds "houses, houses everywhere"
(p. 213). The trees by the big fishing pool are gone; in
stead children play there under a sign saying "Upper Bin-
field Model Yacht Club" (p. 25 2). He had dreamed about re
turning some day and catching the huge fish in the nearby
Small pool. But it has been drained and has become a rub
bish dump.
For Bowling, fishing symbolizes the vanishing world of
his youth. A later English fictional character, Arthur
\
Seaton, in Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morn-
15 .
incr, has similar feelings about fishing. He goes fishing
to escape the atmosphere and life of the town which he hates:
"There's nowt I like better than going out into the country ■
on my bike and fishing . . . and sitting for hours by my
self" (p. 145). Bowling also sees in fishing a way to es
cape the town and have privacy. John Wain accurately judges;
Bowling's feelings about fishing. "In George Bowling's boy-
j
hood memories the fish is sacred, since fishing typifies all!
? I
|
"^London, 1959.
! 104
j
•the slow savour of unorganized happiness. George knows
I
he is sentimental about his childhood.
And fishing is somehow typical of that civilization.
As soon as you think of things that don't belong to the
modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a
’ willow tree beside a quiet pool— and being able to find
a quiet pool to sit beside— belongs to the time before
the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before
Hitler. (pp. 86-87)
In the contemporary world, as Orwell said in The Road to
Wigan Pier, if you look, "you might even find streams with
live fish in them instead of salmon tins" (p. 30). But too
often man has defiled and destroyed nature. When Bowling
sees the Thames near his boyhood home, it is "poisoned with
motor-oil and paper bags" (p. 250). Looking at his old
fishing pool, he observes: "The water looked kind of dead.
No fish in it now" (p. 253). Modern man has seen to that.
Despite his love for it, George has had a strange ex
perience with fishing in his adult years. Although he
thinks about it often, he cannot even call himself a fisher-i
man, since he last fished when he was sixteen (p. 93). It
is as if all modern life conspires against it. Once at the :
seashore, he suggested that he might do some fishing; but
Hilda, his wife, argued that it would be a waste of money— ■
■the greatest of sins to her. She also admonishes him not to,
; |
be "such a baby" (p. 101). After all, Hilda thinks, grown
i
men do not fish. George's children pick up the gist of |
; i
16
"Here Lies Lower Binfield," Encounter, XVII (October,!
1961), p . - . .7?. I
i .. " ' 105
Hilda's complaint and begin to chant "Far-ver1s a babyi
Far-ver's a baby." George can only think to himself: "Un
natural little bastards I" (p. 101). Underlying this curse
is Orwell's belief that too much of modern life is unnatural.
Perhaps the most revealing way Orwell expresses his
love of nature is in the close attention he pays to particu
lar parts of it. Laurence Brander said, "it would be pos
sible to collect from his books one of the brightest aviar-
17
ies in the whole of English literature." One could also
put together one of the largest flower gardens from his
Countless references to flowers. They appear constantly,
even in unlikely places like "Politics and the English
TO
Language." There, in a footnote, to illustrate a point
about language, he claims that Greek flower names are oust
ing English ones— hence antirrhinum replaces snapdragon
(p. 90). And in "England Your England" he claims that the
19
love of flowers is a minor English trait. This interest
!
recurs throughout his major works. In such a book as Homage!
to Catalonia— although the political experience dominates—
he never loses sight of nature. Like Ernest Hemingway in
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Orwell is keenly aware of the land-j
i
scapes of Spain, and of the Spaniards' close relationship to|
| |
^ George Orwell, p. 22.
18
Shooting an Elephant.
19
Such, Such Were the Joys, p. 203.
; ' 106
the land. Everywhere he goes he describes the landscape and
jf lower s.
In his imaginative works, flowers also help support his
themes and the psychological states of his characters. The
happiness of Gordon and Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Fly-.
jncr that results from their hike in the country disappears
when they eat at a resort, "a vulgar pretentious place" that
overcharges and gives bad service (p. 131). There they find
a "bowl of paper flowers" in the middle of each table
(p. 133). These artificial flowers contrast the resort's
artificial and vulgar atmosphere to the country's atmos
phere. This difference causes the change in Gordon's and
Rosemary's mood.
In Burmese Days there are detailed descriptions of the
English flowers around the Club— the phlox, larkspur, and
hollyhock— and the native Burmese plants. During their
first meeting, Flory and Elizabeth talk about flowers. j
: j
i
After identifying various flowers and commenting about them,
Flory describes his view of their significance in Burma. i
That's about the only merit of this beastly country, !
it's good for flowers. I hope you're fond of gardening? [
It's our greatest consolation, in this country. (p. 105) j
|
Later in their first encounter, Flory mentally compares i
Elizabeth's eyes to flowers: they are "paler than a hare- j
bell" and the skin around them is "like a petal" (p. 106).
When he later proposes to her, she looks "like a flower”
;(p. 231). Flory also sees his exile in similar terms.
; “ “ ' ' " 107
While standing with Elizabeth against a frangipani tree he
thinks "that alien tree symbolized for him, his exile, the
secret, wasted years" (p. 228). And his description of life
in Burma— "the foreignness, the solitude, the melancholy!
Foreign trees, foreign flowers, foreign landscape, foreign
faces.”— shows how he constantly sees things in terms of
nature and, more specifically, of plants and flowers
:(p. 231).
Orwell again uses flowers to help objectify themes and
the psychological states of characters in his next novel,
A Clergyman's Daughter. After Dorothy's first exhausting
morning in class, she dreads the afternoon. As it starts,
the girls give her "a pathetic bunch of browny-yellow
chrysanthemums" (p. 229). They liked her and took a sub
scription to buy the chrysanthemums. This "childish gentle
ness" moves Dorothy so deeply that her indifference toward
them changes to pity. The flowers symbolize the generosity ;
and gentleness that has not been crushed by "the horrible
darkness in which they had been kept" (p. 229). Dorothy
vows to help them out of their darkness. But Mrs. Creevy,
; |
whose personality is expressed in the bleak, desolate garden!
j
around her house, impedes Dorothy's efforts.
; i
Throughout Orwell ' s works, flowers are a part of the j
■ i
i ' '
world of the past that is disappearing. They will have no
utilitarian value in the new, mechanized world. George
Bowling, who loves that past, is at one point so impressed
! 108
I
by the beauty of flowers that he almost picks some for his
wife. This foreshadows a more significant event in 1984.
During Winston's first trip to the country he has "a vague
idea that he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer
to the girl when they met" (p. 119). This vague idea is a
remnant from an earlier day, a time when beauty could be
appreciated for its own sake. But in the world of 1984 such
ideas are not tolerated. Man is a machine to be manipulated;
the beauty of flowers is irrelevant.
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a flower serves as a
I
central symbol. The "aspidistra became a sort of symbol for
Gordon" (p. 44). It symbolizes both much of English life
and his psychological mood. The lowest moment in his for
tunes comes after he is jailed for drunkenness. He loses
his job, finds a poorer paying one, and rents a room in the
slums. He sees his life as "three decades behind him and
nothing, nothing accomplished!" (p. 219). The aspidistra in:
; I
his room reflects his descent and failure. It "had died a
week ago and was withering upright in its pot" (p. 219).
Like Gordon, it seems past redemption. Then Rosemary lets
i
him seduce her. Ironically, this experience in his squalid \
i
room brings about his redemption. After several weeks he j
notices that the aspidistra "had not died after all" (pp. 222-
223). It was putting out a few green shoots. Shortly
afterwards he learns that Rosemary is pregnant. Just as the
aspidistra, when once seemingly dead, came back to life,
109
Gordon marries Rosemary and re-establishes his ties with
|
life. He decides to work once again in the advertising
agency, seeing that the clerks and others who beget children
are "bound up in the bundle of life" {p. 239). And the as
pidistra, the symbol of these people, is "the tree of life"
(p. 239). While destroying the manuscript of the long poem
he has been trying to write, Gordon thinks "Vicisti, O
aspidistra" (p. 240). After his marriage he insists on buy
ing a new aspidistra as a symbol of his new life. It is
after they buy it that they feel the child's first movement
inside Rosemary (p. 247). Thus Gordon's redemption is com
plete. The child's movements make him feel joined to Rose
mary "in some subtle way he had never imagined” (p. 247).
Like the aspidistra he has re-entered life.
It is peculiarly apt for Orwell to use a flower, a part;
of nature, as a symbol of life. His belief that man should :
stay close to nature is but another facet of his belief thatj
man should live as fully as possible. He opposed much of
religion and totalitarianism because he felt that they pre- j
i
vented this. On the other hand, he felt that man's response
to nature could widen his response to life. He did not pro-;
pose to go back to some pre-industrial state; instead he j
j I
precognized both the inevitability and the potentiality of ah
industrial society. However, he felt that "progress" that
cuts men off from nature would reduce and cripple his re
sponse to life.
r 110
i :
1 Although much of modern life conspires against man's
i
i
|en joying nature, Orwell found some consolation in the fact
that even the state cannot completely stop people from en
joying it. The perfect expression of this is "Some Thoughts
on the Common Toad, 1 1 one of Orwell's most moving essays and
20
effective pleas for man to see the significance of nature.
The final paragraph from this essay sums up much of his be
lief in the importance of man's relationship to nature and
his opposition to the forces that threaten it.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London, N. 1, and
they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying
reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the
toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match
in the young corn, and thought of all the important per
sons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But
luckily they can't. So long as you are not actually ill, ;
hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday
camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling
up in the factories, the police are prowling through the
cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers,
but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither
the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disap
prove of the process, are able to prevent it. (p. 207) ;
i
When Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying looked at
Piccadilly Circus, he said, "The lights down in hell will
look just like that" (p. 168). Orwell saw the city and much'
of the modern industrial world as a hell on earth. Nature
at least gives man partial salvation from this hell. I
20
Shooting an Elephant.
CHAPTER IV
POVERTY AND WORK
George Bernard Shaw was not Orwell's favorite author.
Tn fact, he put Shaw first in a list of Socialist writers
who were all "dull, empty windbags."1 Despite this view,
however, Orwell and Shaw shared many feelings. Dominant
among these was an intense hatred of poverty. Like Shaw's
Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, both believed poverty
was an evil that should be eradicated. From the start of
his writing career, Orwell was occupied with the problem of
poverty. For the epigraph of his first book, Down and Out
in Paris and London, he used Chaucer's lines, "0 scathful
harm, condition of povertei" Early in the book Orwell says
2
"Poverty is what I'm writing about." It was a subject he
never forgot.
He came to know abject poverty during a psychological
crisis in his life. Returning to England after five years'
service in the Indian Police in Burma, he felt he had to ex
piate the sins he had committed as a member of an unjust
1The Road to Wigan Pier (New York, 1961), p. 155.
^(New York, 1933), p. 7.
jforce, imperialism. In The Road to Wigan Pier he says that j
I
he identified the working class as the "symbolic victims of
injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese
played in Burma" (p. 128). To atone for his past, he wanted
to submerge himself, "to get right down among the oppressed,
to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants"
i(p. 128) . As a result of his going "down and out, 1 1 he dis
covered the world of poverty, and he reached a fuller under
standing of man's need and right to do significant work.
The great evil of poverty is that it deprives large
masses of people of any chance for a full, decent life.
Near the end of Orwell's life, he described what working men
want:
Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unem
ployment, the knowledge that your children will get a
fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably
often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough working ;
hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is
done.
For the upper classes, these conditions are a bare minimum
for life, but poverty prevents many people from even hoping
to get them. Thus Orwell believed privation has "to be
abolished before the real problems of humanity can be j
tackled" (p. 151). In his Utopia, man would abolish poverty;
and do decent and significant work. j
| The psychological effects'of two kinds of poverty— ab
ject and "shabby genteel"— especially interested Orwell. In
; i
i
3
"Looking Back on the Spanish War," Such, Such Were the
Joys, p. 151. _______ ___________________
P “ .. " " " ' ' ■“ 113'
Iparis and London he learned about abject poverty among the
4
"fantastically poor." He knew a widower, for example, who
>as forced by poverty to share his bed with two consumptive
daughters (p. 4). He learned that abject poverty frees
people "from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money
frees people from work" (p. 4). But most of the time he
sought the significance of poverty in the implications of
his own experiences. He became a microcosm wherein the
larger world of poverty was reflected.
His "first contact with poverty"— in the sense of ex
periencing it himself— came in Paris after his room was
robbed (p. 18). Left almost penniless, he soon discovered
that poverty is complicated, debilitating, and boring. Per
haps the most surprising aspect of poverty is the many com
plications that accompany it. Poverty has a secrecy at
tached to it that forces you to live in a net of lies. This
is especially true if you have just fallen into poverty.
i
You must conceal your new status, even though you cannot af-l
ford some things you once could. If in the past you sent
your clothes to a laundress, you cannot do so when poverty
i
stricken. Instead you hide your poverty and the laundress
suspects you are taking your laundry somewhere else. As a
result, you become her enemy (pp. 18-19). j
i
Poverty teaches lessons about hunger. Going two and a
half days without food is "an ugly experience" (p. 49); it
4
Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 3. _________
114
"reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition,
more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else"
(p. 50). Inertia replaces effort. After a week on bread
and margarine you are no longer a man, "only a belly with a
few accessory organs" (p. 21). Orwell found the "great re
deeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates
the future" (p. 23). But he did not believe this compen
sates for poverty's great evil which is "not so much that it
makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spir
itually" (p. 279).
The final evil of poverty is the boredom it causes.
One sees this in Gordon's experiences in Keep the Aspidistra
5
Flying. After quitting his first job, he finds that pov
erty initially kills thought. Life on two quid a week is
dreary and the lack of money damages your brain and soul
(p. 57). Looking back over the two years of poverty after
he quit his second job, Gordon admits to himself that the
"moneyless existence to which he had condemned himself had
thrust him ruthlessly out of the stream of life" (p. 237).
Thus poverty leaves no hope for a full life. As seen
in The Road to Wigan Pier, it causes crowded housing, inade
quate diet, and, worst of all, despair. This despair is
seen in the poors' awareness of their plight. Orwell de
scribes a young woman he saw from a train while leaving
Wigan.
^New York, 1954._________________________________________
115
I I had time to see everything about her— her sacking
apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold.
She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near
enough to catch her eye. She had a round apple face,
the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-
five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudg
ery; and it wore, for the second in which X saw it, the
most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It
struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that "It
isn't the same for them as it would be for us," and that
people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the
slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant
suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was
happening to her— understood as well as I did how dread
ful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter
cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a
stick up a foul drain pipe. (p. 29)
The same crushing effects of poverty are found in Katie, a
minor character in Coming- Up For Air.^ Her parents were ex
tremely poor and she married a tinker, a descent in rank
even for her. Poverty soon aged her and left her desiccated.
The last time George Bowling saw her she was around twenty-
seven. They had been children together, but to George she
looked like "a wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair
coming down and a smoky face, looking at least fifty years
old" (p. 46).
According to Orwell, the lower classes' fear of poverty,
is so deep that it determines their whole idea of socialism.
The appeal socialism has for the "warm-hearted unthinking
Socialist, the typical working-class socialist" is that it
7
promises to abolish poverty. The lower classes are worlds j
apart from Verrall, the young, titled officer in Burmese I
|
^New York, 1950.
7
The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 153. __________________
i' - - . 3.16
I ■
Days. He finds poverty disgusting, but assumes the poor
| g
prefer it. Gordon in Keep the Aspidistra Flying sees the
plight of the poor more clearly than the "working class
socialist" or Verrall. When an old man and woman, probably
tramps or beggars, try to sell him some books, he realizes
that they are by-products, throw-outs of the money-god, an
inevitability in a society such as the one in England be
tween the two world wars.
Poverty does not always distort human relationships—
Boris, the Russian £migrd, and Orwell were close friends de
spite it— but it usually does. In "How the Poor Die" Orwell
criticizes the impersonal treatment of the poor in a Pari-
9
sian hospital. Since the patients are poor and receive
charity, the doctors and medical students look upon them as
specimens, not as human beings. This impersonal treatment
deprives the poor of their dignity and corrupts the sensi
tivity of the doctors and students; they forget the patients^
are human beings. Orwell himself feared dying in a place
where human relationships had been so degraded.
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, seeing money as the
mainspring of all human action, Gordon complains that "all j
human relationships must be purchased with money" (p. 14). j
His constant worrying about money corrodes his friendship |
with his wealthy friend, Ravelston, and complicates his
®(New York, 1934), p. 261.
9
Shooting an Elephant, p. JL8■ ________________________
j 117;
| i
relationship with Rosemary. Unable to afford a place of
!
privacy, Gordon and Rosemary can find privacy only on the
istreets in dark alleys or behind houses (p. 109). They be
long to the army of "lovers in London with 'nowhere to go';
only the streets and the parks, where there is no privacy
and it is always cold" (p. 122). Gordon knew that making
love in a cold climate is almost impossible if you lack
money: "There is no emotion that matters greatly when one
is standing at a street corner in a biting wind" (p. 217).
Orwell himself was rather proud that he received many let
ters praising his accurate description of an existing situ
ation in London.
The way poverty further distorts human relationships is
seen in Gordon's early failures to seduce Rosemary. On one
occasion, she is willing to submit, until she discovers that
he does not have a contraceptive. This infuriates Gordon.
Before her objection, "it had seemed so right, so natural
1
. . . now it seemed merely squalid and ugly” (p. 141). But
after her objection, he can only complain, "this birth-
control business" is another way money has of "bullying us" :
(p. 142). In one of his poems, Gordon writes that the money
god "lays the sleek, estranging shield/ Between the lover
and his bride" (p. 151). To Orwell, the "money god" is
I !
principally responsible for corrupting this natural act. !
■ j
Society's disapproval of illegitimate children partly ac- j
I i
counts for Rosemary's fears, but she also fears that she ]
! " ' ' 118;
yill lose her job and Gordon is almost penniless (p. 142).
Here Orwell1s views on the use of contraceptives are not en
gendered by religious ethics, but instead are linked to his
vision of an ideal society where people could have children
without fear of the money involved.
As mentioned earlier, two kinds of poverty deeply
interested Orwell: abject and "shabby genteel." He con
sidered himself a product of the shabby-genteel class, and
believed their poverty is as psychologically crippling, in
its own way, as abject poverty. In the heavily autobio
graphical second part of The Road to Wigan Pier he says:
In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking
about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in
any working-class family above the level of the dole.
Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending night
mare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an un
warrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family
income goes in keeping up appearances. (p. 109)
This quotation delineates the crippled lives of many of the
shabby-genteel characters in his works. These characters, I
however, are not all alike; some try to climb socially;
others cling to their present station, fearing otherwise
that they might drop.
His first "shabby-genteel" character is Elizabeth in
Burmese Days. When her father became rich during the last
years of World War I, she attended an expensive boarding- ;
school for two terms. Here her character was fixed. She
"rubbed shoulders with the rich," and formed her definition
:
of "Good"— "the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic"—
’ and "Bad"— "the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious"
(p. 114). Unfortunately her father lost his money and the
j"Bad" prevailed. Left with little money after his death,
Elizabeth and her mother went to Paris to live. Her mother
followed her "art" career and Elizabeth tutored and learned
to hate art and despise work, especially since tutoring
often included fending off lecherous fathers of her stu
dents. After her mother's death, Elizabeth went to Burma to
find a husband, well knowing that she faced a life of work
if she failed. Beneath her abhorrence of work lay her fear
of poverty. In Burma, penniless, homeless, and frightened
about the future, she has to tolerate her uncle's advances.
After he tries to rape her, she decides to marry Flory under,
almost any conditions. But once Flory is publicly disgraced
in church, Elizabeth is willing to face those things she
■fears most rather than marry him. She tells Flory that
rather than marry him she would marry the sweeper. Flory j
knows the mentality of the shabby-genteel— having been
reared in the tradition— and sees the hopelessness of his j
cause. With this awareness he goes to his bungalow and com-|
mits suicide. But all turns out well for Elizabeth. She
marries Macgregor— "rather old, perhaps"— but after all a j
Deputy Commissioner. Although in her younger years she had
hoped for a higher position, she was "happy" with him. She
i
has escaped a possible life of work and poverty; and,
i
equally as important, she has servants to keep in terror and
the pleasure of authority that allows her to put "wives of
subordinate officials in their places" (pp. 370-371).
In A Clergyman's Daughter, the small towels in the
Reverend Hare's house symbolize his shabby gentility. Un
able to "afford decent-sized towels at the Rectory," he has
to maintain the appearances of a certain position (p. 7).
This living on the edge of poverty causes Dorothy great an
guish. The Reverend, on the other hand, "seemed actually to
forget that he was only a poverty-stricken country Rector"
;(p. 34) . Because of his indifference to the money problems
of his parish and home, they become Dorothy's. She has to
hold off the tradesmen to whom they owe money. At the
novel's start, "one of the chief torments of her life" is
the unpaid butcher's bill (p. 8). She has to avoid the
butcher, knowing that she has not the remotest chance of
paying the bill in full. Her torment over money— worrying
about unpaid bills and making ends meet on inadequate funds-f
is one more dimension of her dreary life. '
In creating Gordon Comstock, in Keep the Aspidistra j
Flying, Orwell,drew heavily on his own experiences. Both
came from "shabby-genteel" families: Gordon from a "middle-!
i
i
middle class" family (p. 37); Orwell from a "lower-upper- j
middle-class."^^ Both attended boarding schools where they
feecame intensely aware of wealth; both had artistic aspira
tions, and both went "down and out" in response to their
| ~^The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 107. ____________ ___
[ ' ~ “ ' '121
i
I
^experiences in the world of work.
Gordon's boyhood experiences illustrate an important
part of the values of the "shabby-genteel." He grew up in
ian "atmosphere of cut-down clothes," in a world deeply aware
Of poverty (p. 40). His family had accepted, in the tradi
tion of the "shabby-genteel," the money code and by its
standards had failed. Yet no sacrifice is too great to pre
vent them from sending their children, especially the boys,
to school. For Gordon's education, his sister's future is
isacrificed. To send him to a third-rate school, she is de
prived of an education and ends up working in a tea shop and
living a drab life on the verge of poverty. For Gordon, as j
for many boys, the ultimate worth of such sacrifice is ques-i
tionable. Even at the third-rate school Gordon attends, his
classmates constantly remind him of his parents' comparative
poverty. Looking back at Gordon's school experiences,
i
Orwell reflects:
Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child
is to send it to school among children richer than it
self. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish
agonies such as a grown-up person can scarcely even ima
gine. In those days, especially at his preparatory
school, Gordon's life had been one long conspiracy to j
keep his end up and pretend that his parents were richer j
than they were. (p. 41)
The immediate result of his schooling is that he gains a ;
i j
crawling reverence for money. Orwell had a similar experi
ence, as described in The Road to Wigan Pier (pp. 119-120).
At school Orwell learned to hate anyone not describable as a
gentleman, and also to hate the "hoggishly rich, " especially
122
[the nouveau riche. Only later did he revolt against this
snobbishness implanted by his education.
Orwell, like Gordon, suffered humiliation in school be
cause his family lacked wealth. He describes his experi
ences as a "poor boy, " a scholarship boy, at an expensive
school in "Such, Such Were the Joys . . .”11 Bingo, the
head master's wife and a power in the school, tried to in
still a humble outlook in poorer scholarship boys by favor
ing the rich boys and by publicly reminding the others of
their parents' relative poverty. She forbade scholarship
boys to have birthday cakes, although Orwell says his par
ents could have afforded one. Such experiences eventually
caused Orwell, like Gordon, to rebel against such standards.
But for many of the "shabby-genteel” this respect for wealth
and for the values of the Establishment, as inculcated by
the Public Schools, remain the true values. |
In Coming Up For Air George Bowling's wife, Hilda, is j
one of Orwell's most pathetic and comic "shabby-genteel" j
characters. She was reared in the "poverty-stricken officerj
class," (p. 156) a group Orwell knew from his own family and;
i
i
his years in Burma. In marrying George, she actually mar- j
ried beneath herself. Wot until after their marriage did
i |
George begin to understand Hilda's social class. He re-
I
fleets that "one thing I certainly didn't grasp was that the
girls in these penniless middle-class families will marry
11
Such. Such Were the..Joys. .___________________________ J
I 123;
i
anything in trousers, just to get away from home" (p. 156).
|He also learns that these people deeply fear poverty. Al
most the first thing Hilda "can remember is a ghastly feel
ing that there was never enough money for anything" (p. 160).
|This fear dominates her response to life. She lives in a
"state of alarm and dismay" (p. 7) because the price of but
ter is going up. For her, disaster is reduced to rising
butter prices and enormous gas bills. Her constant lament
is, "We can't afford it," or "I don't know where the money's
;to come from" (p. 161). George sees that around her and her
family "there's more sense of poverty, more crust-wiping and
looking twice at sixpence, than you'd find in any farm
labourer's family" (p. 160).
Hilda's grim response to life is colored by this fear.
At the table George complains about the cheap marmalade
Hilda buys. George notices that it contains neutral fruit- j
juice and sardonically asks what "neutral fruit-trees" look j
j
like. She becomes angry because "in some obscure way she |
thinks it's wicked to make jokes about anything you save
money on" (p. 9). Anything free is good to her. Although
}
ipolitics does not interest her, she attends Left Book Club |
meetings because they are free. She spends her holidays
i i
i [
Ifiguring out how much people are swindling her. Lacking
;"any kind of joy in life, any kind of interest in things for
their own sake,” Hilda's "vitality has been drained away by
j . . . . . . . . . " " 124
lack of money, 1 1 and replaced by a "ghastly glooming about
moneyI" (p. 160).
! In addition to these somewhat humorous aspects of the
"shabby-genteel," as seen in Hilda, poverty and near-poverty
intensifies another fear, even more grim: the fear of los
ing one's job, of being "sacked." People at the mercy of
economic forces outside their control naturally fear unem
ployment. Warburton1s favorite saying in A Clergyman 1s
Daughter— which Orwell later used as the epigraph for Keep
the Aspidistra Flying— expresses the central place of money
in the modern world: "if you took I Corinthians, Chapter
thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'char-
12
ity, ' the chapter had ten times as much meaning as before."
This fear of unemployment and its accompanying poverty
haunts Orwell's characters. In A Clergyman's Daughter,
Dorothy must tolerate Mrs. Creevy's insults before the par- ;
ents of her students for fear of losing her job. To keep j
the job she agrees to teach what Mrs. Creevy dictates, even ■
though it is drivel (p. 185). She has learned her lesson i
i
about unemployment. Coming to London from the hop fields, ■
she had looked for a job. A sign of her naivet£ then was i
•that "looking for a job" did not sound dreadful (p. 149) . j
j. j
She soon discovered, though, that finding work unaided was j
almost impossible. She learned the Eleventh Commandment of
the modern world: "Thou shalt not lose thy job" (p. 256).
! ... ..12(London, 1936), p. 211.________________________________
125
Gordon argues in Keep the Aspidistra Flyincr that when
! ;
boney-worship is "the only really felt religion" the "deca-
i
■logue has been reduced to two coramandments." The employer's
Commandment is "Thou shalt make money." The employees' is
"Thou shalt not lose thy job" (pp. 43-44). Gordon under
stands the clerks’ fears as they scurry to work everyday.
They ask themselves, "Is my job safe?" (p. 65). In one of
Gordon's poems, clerks think, "Here comes the winteri/
Please God I keep my job this year!" (p. 65).
This fear manifests itself in peculiar ways. In Coming
Up For Air, Bowling hears a floor-manager curse a clerk
mercilessly for miscounting some change. Considering the
cause of the manager's rage, Bowling realizes that the "lit-;
tie bastard with the spiky, moustache was probably a damn
sight more scared for his job than the girl was. Probably
got a family to support" (p. 18). The manager's act is
another symptom of the fear permeating modern life. Bowling!
j |
understands that among "the realities of modern life . . . |
the chief one is an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell
things. With most people it takes the form of selling them
selves— that's to say, getting a job and keeping it" (pp.
149-150). A consequent fact of modern life is that "there*s|
; I
I I
always somebody after your job," and that next month a re- j
duction in the staff might cost you your job; George swears
this "didn't exist in the old life before the war" (p. 150).
i *
!
Man did not consider himself a commodity that he had to sell.
; " " ' 126
As has been seen in the discussion of abject and
i ”shabby genteel" poverty, one of the most ruinous conse
quences of poverty and unemployment is that it destroys men
psychologically. In Down and Out in Paris and London,
Orwell described the typical tramp as "abject, envious,"
having "a jackal's character" (p. 209). Despite his sym
pathy for tramps, he saw that their characters had been
warped by being cut off from work. Cut off from the rest of
humanity as well, they see little purpose or meaning to
their daily existence. On the other hand, at the end of A
Clergyman1s Daughter, after Dorothy loses her faith, work is.
the answer to her prayers. While she is gluing together
some costumes for a church pageant, she realizes she cannot I
recapture her old faith. Unable to accept any modern sub
stitute for faith, she does not see that "the smell of glue
was the answer to her prayer" (p. 315). But Orwell insists !
that Dorothy must realize
if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ulti- !
mate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that
faith and no faith are very much the same provided that ;
one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable. !
I (p. 315) j
At the novel's end the "problem of faith and no faith had
vanished utterly from her mind." She works "with absorbed, j
^ith pious concentration, in the penetrating smell of the \
j ;
gluepot" (p. 317). Like Candide, she finds partial salva
tion in the work at hand.
Orwell's convictions about man's need to work are at
..... . _ - - - - - - • 127
the center of his painful concern over the psychological
i
consequences of unemployment— one of England's major prob-
i
lems between the two wars. He went to Lancashire and York
shire to see and to record the conditions of this mass unem
ployment. He saw this enforced idleness ruining young men
helpless before economic forces, victims of the "deadening,
13
debilitating effect of unemployment." To men who have
worked all their lives, unemployment brings its "worst
evil," the "feeling of impotence and despair" {p. 81). In
Wigan, Orwell learned about the worst kind of poverty—
"'respectable' poverty" (p. 129). He found it "a deadly
thing to see a skilled man running to seed . . ."(pp. 79-80).
He had not seen this effect of poverty among the "down and
outs" in Paris and London. In northern England, he was
appalled:
The frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly
thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work,
his agonised struggles against economic laws which he
does not understand, the disintegration of families, the
corroding sense of shame— all this was outside the range
of my experience. (p. 129)
In Wigan he discovered the living confirmation of his ear
lier comment in Down and Out in Paris and London that "peo- ;
pie are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only
worries about losing his wages" (p. 131). An educated man
can tolerate "enforced idleness, which is one of the worst ;
1 i
evils of poverty," much better than an uneducated man "with j
13
The Road to Wicran Pier, p. 78.________________________
[ ' ' " 128
j ;
[the work habit in his bones." This man "needs work even
i
more than he needs money" (p. 131). He lacks the resources
|of mind to occupy the empty hours and he largely defines his
identity by his work.
Thus, for Orwell, a job is something much more than a
means of avoiding poverty. Man needs to work. It is a
psychological necessity. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell
discussed Professor Saintsbury's views on unemployment.
Saintsbury believed that unemployment insurance simply con
tributed "to the support of lazy ne'er-do-wells" (p. 117).
He believed that unemployment is inevitable, and, in fact,
ishould exist, so long as, to use Orwell's words, "the unem- ’
ployed are made to suffer as much as possible" (p. 117).
Saintsbury asked, "Is not 'casual1 labour the very secret
and safety-valve of a safe and sound labour-system gener
ally?" (p. 117). In answer, Orwell said, "what exactly is
to happen to the 'casual labourer' when no casual labour
happens to be available is not made clear" (p. 117). Pre-
I
sumably they go to the "workhouse or sleep in the streets"
(p. 117). But,
As to the notion that every human being ought as a mat
ter of course to have the chance of earning at least a
tolerable livelihood, Saintsbury dismisses it with con
tempt. {p. 117)
’ Orwell thinks unemployment is so debilitating that he
believes, as a last resort, men are better off in a "nasty
YMCA atmosphere" doing work that is intrinsically rubbish
rather than doing nothing (p. 79). To help an idle man_____
j 129;
I !
'avoid "running to seed, year after year, in utter, hopeless :
idleness," (p. 80) he should at least have "the chance of
using his hands and making furniture and so forth for his
own home, without turning him into a YMCA cocoa-drunkard"
i
(p. 80). If one has to choose, Orwell believed it is better
•to die of overwork, as did Boxer in Animal Farm, than to
waste away in idleness.
Thus, it is the world of poverty and unemployment dis
cussed in this chapter that Orwell hates. This world denies
man access to work, and for Orwell there can be no Utopia
that does not let man engage in meaningful effort. His con
stant awareness of this is seen in his attention to the work
his fictional characters do. Their response to work dic
tates much of their larger response to life. Here Orwell
differs greatly from novelists, such as Hemingway, who usu
ally say little about a character's work. It amazed Orwell,
for instance, that Dickens seldom wrote about work. Orwell I
i " l
points out that in Great Expectations Pip's working life !
14
takes up less than a page. To Orwell, this absence of an j
"ideal of work1 1 makes Dickens seem remote to modern men j
j
(p. 51). "With the doubtful exception of David Copperfield,"
Orwell says, it is impossible to find a single character of
Dickens "who is primarily interested in his job" (p. 51). j
i !
With Orwell the converse is true. His central characters'
reactions to their jobs are carefully delineated. Even in i
14
"Charles Dickens," Dickens, Dali and Others, p. 45.
! 130
! ;
[the dreary world of 1984 there is some pleasure: Julia en- '
joys her work; and before Winston meets Julia, his "greatest
pleasure in life was in his work."'*''’ In Dickens, however,
I 16
the motif of great devotion to work is missing. Orwell
thinks one of Dickens1 goals in life is like that of Charles
Reade1s in Hard Cash; the ideal life is one "of complete
idleness" (p. 53). "No work" is the ideal (p. 55). This is
one of the things, Orwell says, that separates us from
Dickens: "No modern man could combine such purposelessness
with so much vitality" (p. 56).
In The Road to Wigan Pier, he argues that the need tor
effort is essential in man. In a Carlylean statement he af
firms that man needs work.
Above the level of a third-or fourth grade moron, life
has got to be lived largely in terms of effort. For man
is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a
kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye
and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lop
ped off a huge chunk of your consciousness. (p. 165)
Thus "having the power to avoid work . . . is not a reason j
> 17 ‘
for doing so."
This belief in man's need for effort shaped Orwell's j
I
attitude toward machines. He was not a Luddite; he believed
I
!
that machines in the long run bring more good than harm. j
|
I '*'^1984 (New York, 1949) , p. 44.
j “ ^"Charles Dickens," Dickens, Dali and Others, p. 52.
; 17
j Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell
j(Chicago, 1956), p. 87. Hollis quotes from Orwell's "Plea-
sur.e_ Spot; s."___________________________________________________
j ' ' ~ ~...... “ - - - 131
i
Like Laura in "Flowering Judas," he believed machinery would
help improve the lot of the lower class, yet he loved parts
of the past that the machine threatens to destroy. While
serving a Socialist cause, Laura still loved hand-woven
lace, a product of old ways of production that she thought
enslaved the working class. Many of Orwell's reservations
about machinery came from his fear that an over-mechanized
world would help destroy many characteristics that he valued
in man, characteristics often rooted in the world of work in
the past. In a world mechanized as fully as possible, some
machine will be "cutting you off from the chance of work-
18
ing— that is, of living."
These reservations underlie some of his complaints
about socialism. As he says in The Road to Wigan Pier,
socialism is bound up with machine production and a social
ist world has to be mechanized (p. 157). But he believes
that Socialists too often see mechanical progress as an end j
i '
in itself (p. 158). They overlook the possible dangers in
it, failing to see the implications of merely mechanical j
i
progress. It aims toward increased efficiency where j
"nothing goes wrong" (p. 161). j
i
i
Orwell is apprehensive about the price man will have to|
pay for this mechanical progress. Those things man admires j
will not exist in a world where mechanical progress has
eliminated physical danger. Physical bravery will disappear?
18
The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 1 6 5 . _________
! 132
such things as loyalty and generosity will be irrelevant
;(pp. 161-162). Qualities such as bravery arise from man's
"opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty"
(p. 162). Machines eliminate too much of this. They make
life "safe and soft" (p. 162). Consequently, Orwell has a
dim view of the direction in which man is moving: "The
logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human
being to something resembling a brain in a bottle" (p. 167).
Man will become soft and helpless, a condition like that
pictured in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" and H. G.
Wells' The Time Machine. Man does not intend to go in this
direction, yet he must guard against it. Machines have come
to stay, but like drugs man must use them carefully (p. 169):
As noted earlier, Orwell believes that working for the
sake of work is better than idleness, but he also believes
that the worker must feel that his work is significant and
serves a purpose in society. In Down and Out in Paris and
London, he complains that in a world where money is the test!
of virtue, the beggar's offense would seem to be that he
i
does not earn enough money. He is more honest than most j
; i
sellers of patent medicine, but people do despise beggars.
Is it because they fail to earn enough money? To Orwell !
! - L
this view overlooks the central significance of the beggar's!
j
life: the beggar's work is ultimately useless and this fact
eventually poisons his whole existence.
For Orwell, the fact that certain onerous jobs are
! .." ~ ' 133:
absolutely necessary posed a problem. In The Road to Wicran
Pier he described the coal miners 1 horrible and dangerous
working conditions. The importance of their work to society
presented Orwell with an unsolvable problem. Like Joseph
Conrad, who in the opening pages of Victory called coal "the
supreme commodity of the age," Orwell understood that much
of modern civilization depends on coal. Even the humani
tarian must partially close his eyes to the horrors of the
miners' work; it is the price we pay for coal and, ulti
mately, for civilization. So important is it that "even
now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women
dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it
19
rather than deprive ourselves of coal." The upper-classesi
may look at the coal miner with contempt, but he does vital
work— far more vital and significant than many people
'"higher" in society. I
Some comments in The Road to Wicran Pier help further to;
: I
I
clarify his definition of "significant work." He rejects !
the idea that work is tedious and leisure desirable (p. 164)1
Work should be something more than an activity done to pro- j
i
vide leisure (p. 161). If a person's work is meaningless to
him, if it gives him a sense of waste, this will permeate
his whole existence. Orwell experienced in his own life
I
this reaction to a job. His desire to go down and out, to
submerge himself, resulted, he thought, from the guilt he
19
The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 41. __________
I 1341
jfelt because of his work with the Imperial Police in Burma.
He describes this reaction in The Road to Wigan Pier.
I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had
got to expiate . . . if you do for five years a job that
you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the
same. (p. 128)
According to Orwell, nearly all Anglo-Indian officials feel
guilty occasionally, except those few who do good, such as
doctors and engineers (p. 126). Orwell drew upon his Bur
mese experiences in creating Flory in Burmese Days. Flory's
dissatisfaction with his work causes much of his unhappiness;
He considers himself part of a larger exploitation: "The
official holds the Burman down while the business man goes
through his pockets" (p. 48).
In Coming- Up For Air George Bowling likes his work, but
he understands the psychological effects of unsatisfying
work. He can see that many boys working in grocery stores ;
should be in a blacksmith's shop, instead of obsequiously
satisfying customers (pp. 17-18). At a Left Book Club meet
ing, George understands why one boy is attending. Osten- j
sibly he wants to fight against Fascism, but George sees be-
!
heath this.
As a matter of fact I knew just what he felt. He's a
hefty lad, probably plays rugger for the bank. Got
brains, too, And here he is, a bank clerk in a godless
suburb, sitting behind the frosted window, entering fig-
I ures in a ledger, counting piles of notes, bumsucking
! to the manager. Feels his life rotting away. And all
the while, over in Europe, the big stuff's happening-
Shells bursting over the trenches and waves of infantry
| charging through the drifts of smoke. Probably some of
his pals are fighting in Spain. Of course he's spoiling
for a war. How__c_an__you__blama_.h imZ__Xp_. 17_9_)_____ _
135:
i
i
^The boy is right. Instead of wasting his life at a foolish '
i
i
gob, he hopes to gain some order and purpose in it by fight
ing for a good cause
i One sees again the significance of meaningful work in
20
Animal Farm. The animals feel discontented partly because
kian steals the products of their labor (p. 7) . Major tells
the other animals, "get rid of Man, and the produce of our
labour would be our own" (p. 8). The summer after the ani
mals win control of the farm, they work hard and effieicntly.
They feel happy beyond their expectations.
Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure,
now that it was truly their own food, produced by them
selves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a
grudging master. (p. 24)
Despite their hard work, they are happy because they have a
purpose, the success of the revolution. However, this dream
proves to be chimerical. The revolution is betrayed by the -
animals who have one thing in common: they exploit the pro-|
duction of others. The good animals work and produce; the j
bad animals do not. Most of the animals hate Moses the I
I
raven because "he told tales and did no work" (p. 15). One J
of the horses, Mollie, does not do her share of the farm
work; and shortly after the Revolution she defects, leaving
i i
jthe farm so that she may serve man again as a carriage |
horse. On the other hand, Boxer’s hard work and personal
motto "I will work harder I" is praised throughout the book.
j
: 2QNew York, 1946. _________________________________________
He "was the admiration of everybody" and "seemed more like
three horses than one" (p. 24).
Napoleon and his followers also work hard, but only to
■gain power for themselves. The speech of Squealer, Na
poleon's "Minister of Propaganda," expresses a perverted
yiew of "the joy of service and the dignity of labour"
(pp. 62-63). The betrayal of the revolution is clear when
Squealer denounces Snowball's dream of giving the animals
"'stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the
(three-day week" (p. 107). The pigs revise the goal of the
revolution for the other animals. Happiness lies in "work
ing hard and living frugally" (p. 107). This goal, of
course, does not apply to the pigs. As leaders of a total
itarian state, they deny a full life to the masses. To do
this, the pigs exploit the work of the other animals. Thus
at the end of the book, when the animals stand outside the
farmhouse, they have difficulty distinguishing between the
men and the pigs. Both exploit.
In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell describes
his various jobs while he was on the verge of poverty and
bomments about their relative value. In a large Parisian
i
hotel once a week— on his bad day— he washed crockery and j
j j
silver for the dining room (p. 90). It was boring and silly
krudgery, but what appalled him was that he replaced a sixty
year old woman who worked thirteen hours a day, six days a
(
week. Such people live in different universes from the
middle-class; they are like coa1-miners, except that miners
do a useful task. Orwell found that a ploncreur1 s life was
not always horrible, although he is "one of the slaves of
i
the modern world" (p. 158). But he is "a wasted slave, do
ing stupid and largely unnecessary work" (p. 165). Para
doxically enough, although most hotel work is "beastly and
silly," hotels keep going largely because "the employees
take a genuine pride in their work" (p. 102). "Everyone in
the hotel has his sense of honor" about his job (p. 106).
Cooks and waiters are proud, and even plongeurs have the
!"pride of the drudge," feeling equal to doing any quantity
bf labor {p. 105).
A man's pride in his work in the end compensates for
many things. Orwell admired Bozo, a pavement artist he met
while down and out in London. In one sense Bozo was a beg
gar, but he took pride in his skill, criticized other pave-
I !
ment artists' drawings, and refused to feel guilty about the!
j I
way he earned his money. He felt that the lack of money did!
not mean a man had to give up life; he kept his mind alive
by reading and practicing amateur astronomy; he proudly toldj
! i
Orwell he had two letters from the Astronomer Royal thanking!
21
him for writing about meteors.
| i
; Bozo's pride in his work helped sustain him during oc
casional periods of poverty. His attitude is in direct con
trast to that of the newspaper-canvassers Orwell met in
j
I
I 21
Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 225. ____________
| ~ 138
northern England. Their job was "so hopeless" he wondered
Ihow anyone could put up with it when "prison was a possible
i 22
^alternative." They were usually out-of-work clerks or
Commercial travellers frantically trying to sell at least
the minimum number of subscriptions. Many of them were
i
middle-aged men who worked desperately ten hours a day sell
ing and long hours at night filling in forms to keep their
sales up to the minimum, because once they fell below this
the newspapers replaced them with fresh men. Despite their
effort, most of them could not afford to pay a pound a week
bn board; instead they ate what Orwell called "shamed-faced";
meals of bacon and bread-and-margarine that they carried in
their suitcases (p. 24).
The plight of these commercial travellers most fully
symbolizes what Orwell opposes. He sees them as victims of
forces beyond their control, driven by poverty, fear, and ;
despair to do senseless work. In Orwell's Utopia, such i
I |
forces would be abolished. As we have seen, Orwell believed!
! j
that man needs effort, but it should be significant. His !
i i
concern with the failure of his society to provide work for |
men was a reflection of the problems of the "thirties" that
immediately shaped his thought. But, to a larger extent, ;
| j
this concern reflected his always present belief that all
men must have a chance to lead a full.life.
22
i The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 23.______________________
CONCLUSION
As has been seen in this study, at the center of
Orwell's response to the modern world is his "Utopian
Vision." This vision puts him directly in the tradition of
the English moralists— Bunyan, Swift, and Arnold, to name
only a few— whose moral vision shaped their response to life
and art. His values also stem from two other traditions.
He is both a descendant of the Eighteenth Century Rational
ists, believing that man with the aid of reason can solve
his problems on earth, and a. descendant of the English Ro
mantics, believing that man is fundamentally good and that
his relationship to nature is of central importance,
through his commitment to his vision, Orwell gained the
point of view, the moral standards, that the satirist needs.
: I
So, in what is often called a century of relative values, I
Orwell's commitment provided him with absolute values.
\
At the heart of his "Utopian Vision" was his belief !
that all men should have a chance to live a full life. Like
; i
E. M. Forster, Orwell wanted men "to connect." But, unlike !
the members of the Bloomsbury Group, Orwell was not an |
]'elitist"; instead, he believed that the opportunity for a
full life should be open to all men, not just to the soci
ally superior.
[_________________________ ___139 ___________
140;
i As -we have seen, Orwell outlined the characteristics of
an ideal society wherein the good life could be attained,
jln this society human love would flourish, a secular ethic
would guide man's conduct, man would have access to nature,
poverty would not exist, and man would have meaningful work.
In response to the political and social developments of
his time, Orwell came to believe that man must love or per
ish. Man must break out of his sense of isolation and
loneliness and create a society that will disprove Marlowe's
statement in Heart of Darkness that "We live, as we dream—
alone. . . ." Thus Orwell examines the effects of psycho
logical isolation throughout his work. In his first novel,
Burmese Days, the ultimate evil of colonialism is that it
corrupts both the colonizer and the colonized, further
alienating man from man and intensifying his loneliness.
Qrwell constantly restated the destructive effect of per
sonal loneliness and isolation. This theme reached a climax;
in 1984. There the state consciously attempts to prevent j
; i
any love between people and to make each person an isolato. j
The unnatural conditions of this anti-Utopia, like the
totalitarian states of Orwell's own time, ran counter to and
threatened the traditional values of western civilization.
Yet, even in the world of 1984, Winston Smith embodies the
I
instinctive urge of man to love. In some ways an anti-hero,
a man with a varicose ulcer and little personal or social
j
distinction, Winston in other ways is heroic. He defies the
r _ . . . . . . . . . ' " “ i 4 i
I
i
istate and condemns himself to eventual torture in his quest :
! ;
Ifor Julia's love, despite the state's determination to abol-
!ish all love.
! For Orwell, the importance of marriage and the family
followed naturally from his attitude about man's need to
love. One horror of 1984 is that the state corrupts family
life and makes children extensions of the state, persuading
them to report any suspicious behavior by their parents.
Such a perversion of family relationships infects the source!
bf some of the deepest and most important emotional commit
ments possible. The possible depth and implications of
these commitments is seen in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. In
this novel Gordon finds his salvation in marriage and the .
coming birth of his child. Faced with the choice of marry
ing Rosemary or letting her submit to an abortion, he
chooses the former, feeling that an abortion would be a sin |
against the sacredness of life. After their marriage, when j
; i
he feels his child move inside Rosemary, he realizes love's ■
full significance and ineffable meaning. j
Whereas Orwell's ideas about the need of man to love i
i i
spring from a positive attitude, the second characteristic
bf his "Utopian Vision" grows from a negative source. His
i
boyhood memories of the effete Anglican tradition in which
he was reared and his adult experiences with reactionary and
bigoted religious groups caused him to believe that secular
fethics must replace religious ethics. Man must be inter-
! 142
I
jested in the here and now; he must achieve his New Jerusalem
jon earth and "in-history.“ Orwell dismissed great segments
of religious belief and thought as false. Stephen Spender
commented on this aspect of Orwell. "He has simple views
t
about matters which more learned men have not been decided
about, for example, he thinks that God and belief in immor
tality are nonsense."'*' To him religion simply is not a
yital or, for that matter, even necessary part of culture.
Any good it might do is dwarfed by the problems it creates.
The harmful results of religion are present everywhere
in individuals and society. The main destructive conse
quence is that religious beliefs narrow one's response to
life. This is seen in Dorothy Hare's psychological paraly
sis in A Clergyman's Daughter. On one hand, her narrow,
puritanical beliefs keep her a prisoner of her inhibitions;
and, on the other, her father's selfishness and exploitation
bf her are protected from censure by his being a priest and
: |
having a facade of holiness.
i i
i The failure of religion on the personal level is also
seen on the institutional level. The corrupt clergy de- ;
picted in Burmese Days are for Orwell the rule, not the ex- ;
ception; and the church as an institution remains indiffer- ;
ent or hostile towards the needs of the people. Thus reli
gion, lacking redemptive power on both the individual and
I
i
i !
! ‘ *'"One Man's Conscience," New Republic, CXXVIII (March
16, 1953), 18._________________________________________________
j " - - - - ~~ 143
the institutional level, is for Orwell an active agent of
jevil when it enters into collusion with reactionary forces
to prevent the kind of social change that would widen the
opportunities and response to life for large numbers of peo
ple. Whether religion is reactionary and elitist, like the
Catholic Church in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, or
whether it nairows its followers' response to life by its
bigoted, puritanical beliefs, like the Non-Conformists in
A Clergyman's Daughter, it should be banished. Orwell would
replace religion with a secular ethic, the crux of which
would be man's responsibility to humanity. Man must commit
himself to the future of man on earth, not to some kind of
after life. Richard Rees, Orwell's friend for a quarter of '
a century, said of Orwell: "To accept death as final was
for him a test of intellectual honesty; to care passionately;
about the fate of mankind after your death was an ethical
2
imperative." Rees correctly asserts that to Orwell sin !
"was to be unconcerned about what would happen to the world
after you die" (p. 11).
I
Man needs not only to love and to be free from the |
j
bonds of religion, he also needs to maintain a close connec-j
!
tion with nature. He should not retreat from the city and j
: I
seek some kind of transcendental unity with nature. However;
a sense of his relationship to nature can help modern man
maintain his mental and emotional equilibrium in a highly
2
"George^ Orwell," Scots Chronicle, 1951, p. 11._________
| . ~ ” ~ ” “ ~ 144
i
industrialized society. Even in the corrupt system of im
perialism portrayed in Burmese Days, Flory can gain some
jsense of contentment and psychological balance in the for
est. In Coming Up For Air, part of George Bowling's nostal
gia for the world of his youth results from his memories of
a time when man was close to nature. However, in 1984 the
state attempts, as part of its plan to limit its subjects'
response to life, to keep man from establishing any hind of
relationship with nature. Such a relationship would make
some people more aware of and discontented with the drabness
of the Party’s artificial world of tile and concrete.
Although Orwell inherited his love of nature from the
English tradition, his ideas about the evil of poverty were
engendered by specific historical events in his own life
time. The economic catastrophe of the thirties convinced
Orwell of the necessity of man's having adequate material
goods. His experiences of going "down and out" and observ
ing the effects of poverty in northern England during the
Depression demonstrated to him that poverty is one of the
greatest evils in the modern world. Pover;- makes people
abject, as seen in the tramps in Down and Out in Paris and
London; it limits people's response to life, as seen in
Gordon Comstock’s experiences in Keep the Aspidistra Flying;
'and it is debilitating, as seen in the unemployed workers
depicted in The Road to Wigan Pier. So, poverty, like
' ' “ 145;
religion, prevents people from living a full life, and hence
jis evil.
i
His experiences in the thirties also taught him that
j
man needs not only freedom from poverty but also the oppor
tunity to work. To deprive people of work is to deprive
them of a significant dimension of life. It was the despair
of the unemployed in Wigan that convinced Orwell that man
must work to satisfy both material and psychological needs.
The helplessness of the unemployed coal-miners before in
tangible economic forces is an indictment of a social sys
tem. For these men, work is the center of their lives, and
to lose their job is to lose a great part of their reason
for living. They lack the inner resources of the jobless
educated person who can at least read and partially account
for his plight. Coal-miners, for example, have the need in
their bones to work. Any other life for them is largely
hollow and meaningless. The psychological damage resulting
from unemployment or doing meaningless work is also borne
put in Orwell's fiction. The futility and senselessness of ;
their work adds to the despair of both Flory in Burmese Days!
! j
and Dorothy in A Clergyman 1s Daughter. In contrast to theirj
: i
response, the only satisfaction Winston finds in the drab j
| i
I I
world of 1984 before he meets Julia is in his work.
!
! Orwell's "Utopian Vision" gives truth to George Wood
cock's assertion that "the wholeness and homogeneity of his
![Orwell's] attitude, centered on a love of life and a hatred
146
1 3
;of the forces that seemed to harm and defile it. . . . His;
'"Utopian Vision" also shows that his thought was not wholly
negative. Woodcock also correctly asserts that Orwell's
i
attitude "springs from a very positive love of the concrete
aspects of living" (p. 29}. During his life, Orwell saw
that modern totalitarian states threatened the kind of world
in which his values could be achieved. He understood the
inevitable tension between the citizen and the modern state,
which by its nature demands a degree of centralized power.
This centralization is not all bad; it is necessitated by
mass production and its accompanying social institutions
that, in turn, are responsible for the material improvement
in the lower class's standard of living. Yet, he believed
that the state's power must be limited to ensure individual
rights, and this is the precise limitation the totalitarian ;
state will not accept.
The growth of totalitarian states was, to Orwell, j
another indication that the former sources of many of the |
values of Western Civilization are defunct or, at best, j
decadent. Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism have
; |
decayed and have lost their vitality, thereby creating a j
yacuum in the values of Western European man. Although he
hoped Democratic Socialist governments, or comparable forms
of non-Communist leftist governments, would fill this
3
"Orwell and Conscience," World Review, Aprxl 1950,
P* 28.__________________________________________________________
_ - - 147
vacuum, he was keenly aware that totalitarian states might
emerge from either the Right or Left. To protect himself
against this possibility should be one of modern man's main
f
concerns. One way to stop the growth of totalitarian states,
is, according to Orwell, to affirm and act upon the values
of his Utopian Vision.
Thus, to meet the changes and possible dangers of the
future, Orwell was committed to the ideals of human brother-
jhood and a full life for all men. He did not pretend to
|have a faultless plan for the future, but he believed that
|
jas long as man exploits man, the ideal human condition is
i
denied. For this reason, the reappearance of slavery in
totalitarian states during his lifetime horrified him. In
jhis Utopia, all history would move in the opposite direc
tion. Every man would have access to the material and psy-
i
chological conditions needed for a full emotional response
to life— the condition totalitarianism and "all the smelly
J i
little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls"
:deny.^
His suggested solutions for the problems man faces were
jnot revolutionary. Instead, his "Utopian Vision," as we
i !
have seen, embodied many of the traditional values of West
ern Civilization. Although he firmly believed that some j
form of socialism will be needed in the future, he knew that
4
George Orwell, "Charles Dickens," Dickens, Dali and
Others, p. 75._________________________________________________
political theories alone are not enough. Thus, in his
"Utopian Vision," he sought and found the specific positive
values to sustain man on earth.
[
j
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Asset Metadata

Creator Jackson, Alan Stewart (author)

Core Title George Orwell'S Utopian Vision

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format dissertations (aat)

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Arnold, Aerol (committee chair), Anderson, Totton J. (committee member), Lecky, Eleazer (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-174797

Unique identifier UC11359162

Identifier 6509978.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-174797 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6509978.pdf

Dmrecord 174797

Document Type Dissertation

Format dissertations (aat)

Rights Jackson, Alan Stewart

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA