1984: From Big Brother to Big Mother
George Orwell’s 1984 is an extraordinarily rich work, and its richness has given rise to many interpretations. It has been seen (with 1984 becoming, by transposition, 1948) as a vision, trapped in a distorting lens, of the post-war years of austerity in which Orwell was actually writing, shadowed by the memory of fascism and the threat of Soviet totalitarianism. Orwell, however, clearly intended it to be about the future – or rather a warning of one possible future, one that had hardened into three great totalitarian superstates, virtually identical, insulated not only from contact with one another but from all outside reality.
The threat of nuclear destruction, Orwell had come to believe, would put an end to major wars between the great powers and therefore remove any external test of their efficiency as social systems, as he explained in an essay in The Partisan Review in 1947:
‘It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast superstates, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything that the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilizations of this type might remain static for thousands of years.’
Europe, including Britain, could well be absorbed by either Russia or America, Orwell thought. The only – very slim – hope was that a unified Europe would evolve and pursue its own more sophisticated and liberal variety of socialism. That Orwell thought this scenario was unlikely, incidentally, gives a particular plangency to the first title he arrived at for 1984 – The Last Man in Europe.
But, as much as the future, 1984 is, I would argue, about the past, and specifically Orwell’s own sufferings at school. The parallels with a traditional English public school are striking: those within the school (the elite of party members) lead spartan, but in some indefinable way superior and more privileged lives. They are even distinguished by their own school uniform – the blue party tunic. Like the inmates of boarding schools, party members have little privacy, living largely in common, banished from family and private life. Their possessions could be fitted into a schoolboy’s locker, and their incomes seem to amount to little more than pocket money. They are subject to a ceaseless round of physical activities, drills and assemblies.
Just as public school pupils are expected to throw themselves heartily in the life of their individual ‘houses’ as well as that of school as a whole, party members have to devote their leisure hours to their neighbourhood associations. Above all 1984, like school, is a world where sex is ruthlessly stamped on. Julia and Winston conduct their affair with all the ingenious subterfuge of boy and girl meeting illicitly outside the confines of a rigidly segregated and supervised school.
Internally, the party – like Orwell’s Eton with its ‘Oppidans’ and ‘Collegers’ and its elite society, ‘Pop’ – is highly hierarchical. It has its ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ members who are accorded corresponding levels of privilege. Under a distant authority figure (Big Brother), 1984 is a world governed by complex, apparently arbitrary and often contradictory rules, only fully understood by the ‘prefects’ of the Inner Party but brutally backed up the muscular thugs of the Thought Police.
Orwell saw no necessary divide between the world of public school and that of Realpolitik. In a review of T C Worsley’s Barbarians & Philistines: Democracy and the Public School (1940) he commented that in an age, not of reason but of bombing planes, the ‘brutal side of public school life, which intellectuals always deprecate, is not a bad training for the real world’. School is never specifically mentioned in 1984 but it is a pervasive presence. Indeed the fact that school is never mentioned as a separate institution is a mark of its omnipresence: it does not need to be – the whole society it describes is school.
Within the ‘school’ of 1984 Winston Smith is that clearly identifiable type: the intelligent and inquiring but physically weak scholarship boy. From the first paragraph Smith’s childlike physique is emphasised: he has, we are told, ‘a smallish frail figure’ and the fine fair hair and fresh cheeks of a boy. He has a study – his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth – where intellectually taxing pieces of ‘prep’ (complicated textual revisions and articles to be written in New Speak) are delivered to him via pneumatic tube (they are literally ‘unseens’). He then appears to be taken – as often the case – under the wing of a literate and sophisticated older ‘boy’, O’Brien. Their mutual attraction and intimacy, especially during the final interrogation scenes, has its homoerotic undertones.
The ‘school’ elements in 1984, moreover, give the novel much of its distinctive humour. For 1984, despite all its horrors, is undeniably also a work of comedy. Indeed the comedy somehow fuses with, and heightens, the horror. If you do not read it for some time you can easily forget just how funny the book is. There is, for instance, Winston’s colleague, Parsons, with his ineradicable reek of sweat and endless boy scout enthusiasms, pathetically grateful even when informed on by his children for saying in his sleep ‘Down with Big Brother’ (‘Thought crime is a dreadful thing, old man … It’s insidious … I’m glad they caught me before it went any further.’)
Other instances include the cumbersome novel-writing machines which Julia has to service with a spanner; Winston’s hilariously bungled attempt at conversation with an aged Prole in a pub (‘Top ’ats … Funny you should mention ’em … I haven’t seen a top ’at in years. Gorn right out they have.’); and the committee in which the rehabilitated Winston is put work (‘something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed within brackets or outside’).
Two ‘school’ ingredients get stirred into this humour. The first is a cruel practical joke type of farce (Winston hit on the back of the neck by Parsons’ catapult-wielding children or Parsons copiously taken short in the prison holding tank). It surfaces verbally in O’Brien’s jeers in the interrogation cell and the odd ‘yellow note’ jibes that emanate at key moments from the telescreens.
The other characteristic form of comedy consists of wit, paradox and inversion, of logic pushed to such extremes that it becomes risible. The novel opens on just this note (‘It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’) and pursues it through all the mental convolutions of Ingsoc, Doublethink and Newspeak. Its angle is very much the cock-eyed humour of a sane and sharp-eyed child caught in an insane world, with only the weapons of its intelligence and clever mockery to fall back on, or, if you prefer, of an adult who finds himself suddenly and mysteriously trapped in a child’s body in a child’s world, as in one of Orwell’s favourite novels: F Anstey’s Vice Versa.
If school is the institution whose presence haunts 1984, its source is not so much Eton (whose relative freedoms Orwell actually quite enjoyed) but his prep school, St Cyprian’s near Eastbourne. Among the very last pieces Orwell ever wrote was an account of his experiences there, bitterly entitled ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’. In that essay he paints a grim picture of a totalitarian world in miniature, a world like 1984 of deprivation, degradation and bullying, and of unceasing supervision, interrogation and punishment. Orwell, as a scholarship boy, was expected to reflect credit on the school, became part of its relentless academic success machine, and the headmaster (known by the odd nickname of Sambo) lost no opportunity to remind Orwell that he had to do well because he was living on the school’s ‘bounty’.
The only relief from this grim world were the occasionally allowed rambles in the surrounding countryside – the source perhaps of the ‘Golden Country’ of which Winston dreams in 1984. But even beyond the school gates the young Orwell thought he was being spied on:
‘One day when I had been sent on an errand I went into a sweetshop a mile or more from the school and bought some chocolates. As I came out of the shop I saw on the opposite pavement a small sharp-faced man who seemed to be staring very hard at my school cap. Instantly a horrible fear went through me. There could be no doubt as to who the man was. He was a spy placed there by Sambo! …Sambo was all-powerful and it was natural that his agents should be everywhere.’
St Cyprian’s, like 1984, was built, Orwell believed, on a system of contradictions that snared its pupils in a constant series of ‘double binds’. The capricious queen of this tiny universe was the headmaster’s domineering wife, known as ‘Flip’. This nickname, actually derived from the jiggling of her capacious bosom, also suggests her habit of sudden volte-faces. Acts which one day might earn a caning were on other occasions laughed off or even commended for showing the right spirit. The boys coped with this by entering into a kind of unconscious schizophrenia that verges on the doublethink of 1984: ‘I think it would be true to say that every boy in the school hated and feared her. Yet we all fawned on her in the most abject way, and the top layer of our feelings was a sort of guilt-stricken loyalty.’
But Flip’s capriciousness was only an outward manifestation of a deeper ambivalence in values. ‘The various codes that were presented to you at St Cyprian’s – religious, moral, social and intellectual – contradicted one another if you worked out their implications,’ wrote Orwell. ‘The essential conflict was between the tradition of nineteenth-century asceticism and the actively existing luxury and snobbery of the pre-1914 age.’
Just as the citizens of 1984 live in constant dread of straying into the region of ‘thoughtcrime’, so at St Cyprian’s, wrote Orwell, ‘I also learned that one can do wrong without discovering what one has done or why it is wrong. There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned.’ St Cyprian’s generated in Orwell a pervasive sense of insecurity and guilt, especially with regard to the great unspoken issue of sex.
Similarly, if the essence of 1984 is eternal domination of the weak by the strong, Orwell also believed the same ethos had underpinned St Cyprian’s:
‘That was the pattern of school life – a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak … Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and the weak, who deserved to lose, and always did lose, everlastingly.’
One is reminded of the image which O’Brien uses in 1984 to sum up the undeviating message at the core of its ‘oligarchical collectivism’: ‘a boot stamping on a human face – forever’.
In the novel Winston Smith develops an instinctive loathing of the Party and the distant figure symbolising its power, Big Brother (of which he has to be finally ‘cured’. So at St Cyprian’s Orwell came to hate not just the immediate representatives of authority, Sambo and Flip, but looming behind them the Biggest Brother of them all – God.
‘You were supposed to love God … But I was well aware that I did not love him. On the contrary, I hated him, just as I hated Jesus and the Hebrew patriarchs. If I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel … ’
Ranked overpoweringly against him, the child Orwell felt, were all ‘the armies of unalterable law’ – ‘the schoolmasters with their canes, the millionaires with their Scottish castles, the athletes with their wavy hair’. Like Winston, the only option was to become an outcast and a conscious rebel, a deliberate thought criminal. ‘To survive, or at least to preserve any kind of independence, was essentially criminal,’ he concluded, ‘since it meant breaking rules which you yourself recognised.’
The similarities between St Cyprian’s and 1984 are underlined in a series of direct verbal parallels. The dominant image of 1984 is of course the figure of Big Brother with his eyes that ‘follow you everywhere’. Three times in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ Orwell draws attention to Flip’s eyes – ‘deep-set suspicious eyes’, ‘baleful eyes’, eyes ‘that never lost their anxious accusing look’. ‘It was very difficult to look her in the face,’ he continues, ‘without feeling guilty, even when one was not guilty of anything in particular.’
In his description of his final interview with Flip on leaving St Cyprian’s, Orwell writes that her eyes seemed to be piercing directly into his brain and reading all his most secret thoughts; ‘Oh don’t think we don’t understand you!’ he imagined her saying. ‘We know all about those ideas you have at the back of your head.’ In 1984 Winston feels similarly invaded at two points – during his interrogation, when a curious instantaneous telepathy seems to occur between himself and O’Brien, and, earlier, when he looks at a poster of Big Brother:
‘The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you – something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.’
Similarly, the physical one-down-ness of the child, when confronted by an adult, is the focus of another series of verbal echoes. In the rather depressing conclusion to essay on St Cyprian’s Orwell pondered whether adults could ever form a completely successful bond with children:
‘People are too ready to forget the child’s physical shrinking from the adult. The enormous size of grown-ups, their ungainly rigid bodies. Their coarse wrinkled skins, their great relaxed eyelids … Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.’
Significantly, during his interrogation in 1984, Winston is horrified by the magnified hideousness of O’Brien’s face seen from below as it looms over him. In his degradation and humiliation he has regressed to a child, physically as well as mentally. O’Brien jeers at the bedraggled Winston that he stinks like a goat. At St Cyprian’s Orwell had become obsessed that he smelt: ‘disagreeable people smelt, and presumably I did too’. In the novel this childhood fantasy is realised in the interrogation cell.
The psychological wound to the sensitive child, suddenly severed from its home and plunged into the brutalities of boarding school, are – along with the class system – one of the great submerged topics of twentieth-century English literature: a Great Barrier Reef, if you like, between those that suffered those brutalities and those that did not, one that can break the waves of later life in a pervasive sense of rootlessness and anomie (as in Graham Greene) or a flight into a childlike world of fantasy (for instance, C S Lewis). Orwell, though usually interpreted in a more adult and ‘social’ and ‘political’ light, is nevertheless one of this child-scarred band.
‘The conviction that it was not possible for me to be a success went deep enough to influence my actions till far into adult life,’ wrote Orwell in his essay on St Cyprian’s. That he should have devoted an essay of such length and savage intensity to his prep school almost on the eve of his death indicates just how fresh and painful the wound had remained throughout his life. It is as if he felt that while the breath was still in him he had to exorcise, and distance himself from, the school day demons that still tormented him.
That Orwell’s attempt was not entirely successful is, I think, indicated by the curious u-turn (itself a form of doublethink) he makes in the final section of the essay. At that point – after the savage autopsy he has carried out on Sambo and Flip – he abruptly claims that they no longer have any hold over him: ‘the place is out of my system for good. Its magic works no longer, and I have not even enough animosity to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead …’ That false note of denial – negation by disengagement, the blank adolescent shrug and turn-away – is revealing.
To interpret 1984 in the light of Orwell’s childhood and experiences at school is not to reduce its richness: rather it is an attempt to understand the core around which later meanings have attached themselves and grown. Orwell as a man – as he wrote elsewhere – may have felt that his life witnessed from the inside was a failure. But, as a writer, Orwell certainly did not simply remain fixated or imprisoned by his childhood perceptions. On the contrary, they become a huge source of strength. He made triumphantly successful use of them, in particular to cast a light on a salient feature of totalitarianism – its deliberate infantilization of the adult – and its curative converse: the retrieval of the reality of childhood and the recovery of personal life.
As the name ‘Big Brother’ indicates, the citizens of 1984 have been forced to forfeit their adulthood and revert to children. In order to control them better, they have been made to regress to the primitive urges and emotions of childhood. The classic example of this is the ‘hate’ session in the Ministry of Truth in which its workers reduced to children screaming at a screen. But in private Winston at first reverts automatically to child. Almost as soon as he starts to write in his newly acquired diary, he descends almost immediately into scrawled babbling – an unpunctuated stream of childish consciousness:
‘don’t shoot me I don’t care they’ll shoot me in the back of the neck I don’t care they always shoot you in the back of the neck down with big brother I don’t care down with big brother – ’
Gradually Winston – in the midst of a society which in which memory has been abolished and in which the past is constantly falsified and re-written – launches a determined attempt to reclaim and make sense of the past and specifically his own childhood. In 1984 he gets his answers in two forms. The first is a kind of dreamlike or trancelike memory. In his essay on St Cyprian’s Orwell stated that the child ‘lives in a sort of alien underwater world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination’. Fascinated by broken fragments of the past – old nursery rhymes and bits of antique bric-a-brac, Winston initially rediscovers his childhood in the integrative and healing shape of dreams. Later he receives enlightenment at a more rational level, reading the book given to him by O’Brien. But it is the dreams that have the emotional punch. In them Winston revisits scenes from his childhood, releasing his guilt over snatching food meant for his unwell sister.
The most poignant episode – maybe not even an actual memory – takes in some place deep underground or possibly in drowning ship (truly ‘a sort of alien underwater world’) in which Winston believes his mother sacrificed herself to save his life. From this dream Winston receives a piercing insight into the crucial change that the society of 1984 has brought about, stripping life not only of its essential privacy and dignity but of its capacity to have any meaning at all:
‘It as one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in he large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.’
The ideal in the depersonalised world of 1984 is ‘Comrade Ogilvy’, the fictitious fighter pilot whose obituary Winston has to compose in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth: a man with no family ties or indeed any inner life at all, a man whose idea of a private life is a couple of hours spent sweating at the gym.
However, bit by bit, the child-adult Winston ‘grows up’, not only learning from the past but – in Freudian terms progressing from ‘oral’ to ‘genital’ primacy – embarking on an adult affair with Julia. In the tiny room above Mr Charrington’s junk shop they briefly create an enclave of the past, snatching at the intimacy once possible between couples. In their conversations a new and adult tone of humour, teasing and affectionate, enters into the book. Winston tells Julia she is a rebel only from the waist down – a joke which delights her. A similar glimpse of a more sophisticated and adult way of life is caught during the visit to O’Brien’s apartment with its wine, cosmopolitan conviviality and foreign servant (also apparently a friend).
The attempt is of course doomed. Winston and Julia are being set up, and, when they are caught, are duly re-infantilized by the state. Significantly, it is with the closing line of the old nursery rhyme ‘And here comes a chopper to chop off your head’ that the secret police burst into their den and arrest them.
Once Winston is in the police holding cell the image of his mother – previously a poignant and healing presence – recurs, but now in brutal and degraded form in the shape of the drunken old woman who lurches into his lap. Struck by the surname that they share, the old woman suggests they might be mother and son. Oddly, Winston is not appalled. ‘She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and physique, and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty years in a forced labour camp.’ As an image she recalls the raddled old whore that Winston had gone with earlier in the novel, mocking and debasing his bid for sexual and emotional intimacy.
After Winston has been broken down by interrogation and torture, he regresses once more to a child, weeping in O’Brien’s arms. He is rehabilitated and released for a final, false taste of freedom, but his window of memory on to his real childhood has been permanently clouded and confused by his brainwashing. Sitting in the Chestnut Café, he dimly remembers playing a game with his mother, then abruptly brushes the memory aside:
‘It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not happened.’
When the telescreen announces the latest military triumph, the conditioning kicks in –with perfect efficiency this time: Winston now loves Big Brother. Quietly sobbing, drowning in Victory gin, he awaits the inevitable bullet in the back of the neck.
So is the vision of 1984 utterly pessimistic? Is it the fictional equivalent of O’Brien’s ‘boot stamping on a face – forever’. Not entirely. Because as well as tracing Winston’s Smith’s personal, and ultimately doomed, ‘Freudian’ journey of exploration into his subconscious, the novel also unearths at a ‘Jungian’ level a profound and healing archetype.
It is a very ordinary and down-to-earth figure: that of the washerwoman Winston and Julia glimpse from their upstairs room. Nevertheless she is the Earth Mother, the Eternal Feminine, a symbol of endless endurance, fecundity and renewal. She stands for the life of children and family and, by extension, the personal, inner life of the individual which the ‘school’ world of 1984 seeks to crush. Whatever horrors befall the protagonists, the power of that image remains as a permanent source of strength and truth. With her wide hips she sums up and contains all the other ‘positive’ women in the book, including Winston’s own self sacrificing mother, and even transcending his mistress, Julia, with her rather brittle ‘jolly hockey sticks’ sexuality.
Winston, unlike Julia, can appreciate the significance of that ‘solid, contourless body, like a block of granite’ that so resembles the archetypes of the female form that Henry Moore was sculpting in the decade when 1984 was written.
‘As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened and roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful.
… The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like fertilised fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.
… The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil and in the mysterious forbidden lands beyond the frontiers … everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future.’
The image commonly retained from 1984 is the figure of Big Brother with his eyes ‘that follow you everywhere’. Yet in terms of its images the novel is actually constructed on a polarity, strung on the tension between the figure of Big Brother and the washerwoman in the yard – built between, if you like, Big Brother and Big Mother.
As a piece of prophecy 1984 has failed. Society has not resolved itself – or not yet – into three identical superstates in perpetual phoney war with one another. We do not live in a world dominated by thought police and – at least in the West – by physical impoverishment. If anything, Huxley’s Brave New World, with its genetic manipulation, drugs and hedonistic consumerism, has proved the more accurate vision.
But in one regard Orwell was oddly prescient. Compared to fifty years ago, we inhabit a much softer, greener, more feminised and rounded world, pervaded by ideas of nurture and ecology, of ‘Gaia’ and of complex webs and cycles. Orwell was writing in a harshly masculine world, a phallic world – the world of the 1940s warlord leaders, of the Diktat, the fighting front, the tank and the dive-bomber, a material world of steel and armaments production and of the hard dialectical edges of the class struggle and Marxist economics. But Orwell foresaw that beneath and beyond the male tyrannies of the mid-Twentieth Century lay these feminine values, and he was right.