George Orwells 1984 - Essay Example

George Orwell’s 1984 Many critics, especially feminist writers, have argued that George Orwell’s 1984 portrays women as stereotypes. I do not fully agree with this perspective. This book was written in 1948, the stereotypical English woman in those times was very conservative, and sexually repressed. This is the opposite of Julia’s character. Julia is one of the key characters in 1984. It stands for the opposite of a “brotherly”, anti-sexual, entirely repressed society. At first “sight”, or if you read superficially, Julia would seem like a very lighthearted person, a woman who goes with the flow and just cares about having fun and fulfilling her own sexual desires. “I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in us." If you look closely, perhaps she is the true rebel. She is realist about the system and she believes that a true rebellion could only be carried out secretly and individually. In spite of being part of the Anti-Sex League, she chose to be free about her choices and to decide about her own body. This argument has been used to claim the opposite, that Orwell’s vision of women was limited, thinking of Julia as the forbidden, the fun and sexually active, pretty but not so smart girl; while only mothers were honorable and cause for admiration. Orwell’s famous line: “You’re Only a Rebel from the Waist Downwards” can be thoroughly discussed; it has even become the title of a feminist critic text by Anne Mellor. This critic points that “the roles assigned to women in Oceania and in Winston Smith's mind fall into very limited stereotypes: the pure self-sacrificing mother, the frigid wife, the sexually aggressive and emotionally supportive mate.” (Mellor,1983 in Reed, 1984). Is it possible that the same writer that talked about a totalitarian system in one of his most influential works ever, had an attitude as conservative and repressed as the Party in the book? I hope not. I don’t believe that by making his female characters look somewhat stereotyped, Orwell was trying to encourage people to praise that, but the opposite. I think he was pointing his finger towards a world that shouldn’t be like that. Let’s have a look at the other female characters. For Winston, hope was symbolized by the Prole mother. He wrote: "If there is hope it is in the proles." The prole mother, although it may be seen as a stereotypical character, I believe the author meant her to be that way because her purpose in the story is to precisely to symbolize hope. She is a woman who will give birth to a future generation free of the totalitarian system. She is a symbol, and that is why perhaps her character seems so exaggerated and superficial. It is true that Winston’s mother appears as the self-sacrificing, caring, giving, admirable woman. But let’s not forget that the mother of Winston is an idealized character; we only know of her through Winston’s dreams, so it is possible that her character comes as a stereotypical suffering mother who sacrifices for her children, but this is how Winston remembers her, not necessarily the way she really was. Winston’s relationship with his wife Katharine is completely cold and bureaucratic. The opposite of his affair with Julia. Katharine represents the system’s conception of ideal women, a person denied of all human desires. Winston is frustrated with his frigid wife but he assumes there’s nothing he can do about it. When he hesitated to throw her off a cliff, he thought: “In this game that we're playing, we can't win." Julia’s character is not like the mother, the wife or the prole. Hers is a well-rounded and complex character; it is not inferior to the male characters or less complete. As you read the book you realize that she has many sides, though and it is difficult to fit her into a label. Is Julia using Winston or the other way around? We can look at it both ways, which makes it difficult to categorize Julia as a stereotyped female character. Their relationship is much more complex than that; it deals with mixed feelings, it deals with the issues of love, fear, sex, guilt, and complicity. At first it would seem that they’re both having fun and they are intrigued with each other, but towards the end of the book there are signals that their relationship has come to mean more and that deeper feelings have begun to spring. On one hand, Julia is depicted as a pretty, but shallow woman. It seems that she really doesn’t care about what happens with the system, she has no interest in Party doctrine or the Brotherhood’s literature. On the other hand, she has some pretty interesting political ideas, like suggesting that that stories about Emmanuel Goldstein and the war in Eurasia are Party inventions designed to keep people in line. Let’s not forget that she is smart enough to realize that there could be a different way of life outside the system, that by living her sexual desires and feelings for Winston, she is more in touch with her humanity and that counts as a big step to go against a totalitarian system. Perhaps she was more practical than Winston, who ended up loving the Big Brother. She thought that the only solution was your own private choice to disobey the Party. "You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up." Her own rebellion is sexual. When Winston said “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards”, he forgot one little thing. Our sexual organs do not act by themselves. They are controlled by our mind. It is our intellect that makes the choice to act on, so we could say that Julia was a rebel from head to toes. Even though there are signs that women in 1984 could be appear as stereotypes, we should look with a little more depth to realize that George Orwell’s work is a warning. He is not praising but criticizing a terrible reality, a world where all humans would be deprived of any kind of freedom. Bibliography 1. Orwell, George. (1990). 1984. Signet Classic. New York. 2. Mellor, Anne. (1983). "You're Only a Rebel from the Waist Downwards”: Orwell's View of Women in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ed. Peter Stansky. Cited by: Reed, Kit. 1984. Barron's Educational Series. 1984 3. Reed, Kit. (1984). 1984. Barron's Educational Series. Available at: http://books.google.com.mx/books?ie=UTF-8&vid=ISBN0764191004&id=FckfgNqvweEC&vq=characters&dq=criticism+on+orwell+1984 Read More