The Role of the Three Key Female Characters in Orwell’s 1984
In his novel 1984, George Orwell depicts an idealistic totalitarian utopia through the main character Winston’s life. The novel begins by introducing Winston Smith, a thirty nine year old man who works at the Ministry of Truth, where history can be rewritten. Orwell assigns women to play key roles in his novel to develop Winston’s character. The three most important women who affect Winston’s life are his mother, his wife Katherine, and his coworker Julia. Through their similarities and differences in characteristics, these three women encourage Winston to commit thought crimes and allow him to experience temporary freedom from Big Brother’s despotic control.
Winston’s mother was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. Winston rarely has memories about his mother since she disappeared when he was ten or eleven years old. “He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own.” ( p.30) Winston felt guilty since he thought that he was the reason his mother and sister disappeared. He felt that his mother’s disappearance was somehow caused by his higher social status. “He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here.” (p.29) Winston’s longing for his mother still exists even thirty years after his mother’s death. In the mean time, he also dreams of a romanticized past where there was still basic freedoms like privacy, love, and friendship. “Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. (p.30)” However, in Orwell’s utopia, such virtues are alien to Winston. Regardless Winston fantasizes about them and questions them, and consequentially begins to resent his society where there is no longer love and care in families.
It was when Winston got married to his wife, Katherine, that Winston finally recognized the Party’s ideologies about sex more clearly. Katherine is a tall, fair-haired girl who has a bold, aquiline face. Although she was physically attractive, Winston realizes that she does not have any sexual instincts or attributes that can give him satisfaction. “To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. (p. 67)” She was dispassionate and a model for the Party’s ideals as she upheld their virtues of emotionless sexual relationships. “She had two names for it. One was ‘making a baby,’ and the other was ‘our duty to the Party’.” (p.67) Katherine was so loyal to the party that she was cold even in making love. Winston is often annoyed by a thought that all women of the party are all alike: the promiscuity and indiscriminateness was distasteful and boring to him.” And what he wanted more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thought crime. (p. 68)” This excerpt suggests Winston’s inability to understand the party’s doctrine and his disfavor for the party rules.
Winston’s rebellious tendencies against the Big Brother Party become more evident after he meets a dark-haired girl who also works at the Ministry of Truth. At first, Winston thinks that dark haired girl is one of the members of Though Police and maintains a distance from her. However, he quickly realizes that like him Julia shares common resentment against the Party. “I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.(p. 122)” Winston and Julia develop a relationship and secretly meet together and have an affair, a taboo in their society. “I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. (p. 126)” By saying this, Winston suggests that he has been waiting for a woman who does not care about party rules. At first, Winston wanted to have an affair because he wanted to rebel against party doctrine, but slowly Winston falls in love with Julia who is
free-spirited and rebellious. “It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act (P.126).” With presence of Julia, Winston becomes more idiosyncratic in his actions and begins to openly share his resentful thoughts against Big Brother.
The three women who most affect Winston’s life are different, yet have similarities. Winston’s mother is an old woman who had no power; Katherine is a woman who is a party loyalist; and even though at the end of the story, Julia becomes cold like Katherine to Winston and loyal to the party, Julia is a girl who was rebellious to the party. Despite of all these differences among them, each of them influenced Winston to change his attitude toward the Party. Winston’s longing for his mother and past encouraged him to desire a more liberal society; Katherine’s dispassionate sexual relationship with Winston caused Winston to further dislike the strict unsentimental doctrine of the party, and finally Julia’s rebellious character triggered Winston digress from the norm to commit crimes against the party and struggle for freedom.
