Women in 1984

Author(s): Erwin Hester and Daphne Patai

Reviewed work(s):
Source: PMLA, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Mar., 1983), pp. 256-258
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462051 .
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that some readers may find in such debate occasion

to take offense. I must admit to being quite surprised at receiving Claude Summers' comments; my
surprise has not been lessened by rereading my
essay. Implicit in Summers' letter is the proposal of
an impractical burden for historical criticism, which
would be sorely hampered in pursuing its scholarly
aims with efficiency and grace if it had constantly
to interlard discussion with reiterated disclaimer.
The disavowals appropriate for a presentation to an
unsophisticated student audience are likely to be
more an insult than a service to the readership of
PMLA, one of the least of whose attributes we can
assume to be a grasp of historical perspective. Summers' quarrel, it would seem, is not with me, nor
with the Editorial Board, but with the fourteenth
century.
MELVIN STORM

Emporia State University

Women in 1984
To the Editor:
I found Daphne Patai's article "Gamesmanship
and Androcentrism in Orwell's 1984" (PMLA 97
[1982]:856-70) so rewarding that I am reluctant
to take exception to any aspect of her closely
reasoned argument. It seems to me, however, that
in making her strong case for viewing the gamesmanship in 1984 as an expression of an "essentially
masculine ideology" (868), Patai does not fully
examine the role women characters play in embodying alternatives to the desolate present depicted in
the novel.
Patai comments that there are few "positive portrayals" of women in 1984 other than that of Julia
and mentions as examples of such portrayals the
singing prole woman, Winston's mother, and the
mother in the film Winston sees (868). Certainly
these women play very minor roles in the plot of
the novel. I would maintain, however, that they do
have a major thematic importance in representing,
on the one hand, the only conceivable hope for the
future and, on the other, the vestiges of an almost
completely destroyed past that sets a standard by
which the present must be judged.
The prole woman, "swollen like a fertilized fruit
and grown hard and red and coarse" (Signet-NAL
ed., 181) from thirty years of scrubbing and laundering but still singing as she goes about her tasks,
shares with nature "the vitality which the Party did
not share and could not kill" (182). Winston envisions the "same solid unconquerable figure"

throughout the world as the "mighty loins [from

which] a race of conscious beings must one day
come" (182). Winston and Julia-who thinks that
"the dead," but
"all children are swine" (136)-are
the prole woman represents a life force beyond the
Party's ken or control.
Although Winston also attributes to the proles
inner humanity, this quality is most fully embodied
in his mother. Like the young lady's keepsake
album, the fragile paperweight, and the concept of
tragedy, Winston's mother belongs to the past that
Winston toasts with O'Brien's wine. Because she
obeys "private loyalties," because "it would not
have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless," she represents a world where, in contrast to the present, "a
completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a
word spoken to a dying man" have value as an expression of an individual relationship (136). In a
dream Winston recalls his mother making such a
gesture, reminiscent of the embracing gesture of
the woman in the film as she attempts to shield the
child from bullets. When Winston snatches a bit of
chocolate from his younger sister, his sister cries,
and Winston's mother, unable to provide more
chocolate, "drew her arm around the child and
pressed its face against her breast" (135). This
"enveloping, protecting gesture" seems to Winston
to contain the "whole meaning" of his dream: the
nobility and purity of actions that derive from the
private standards of the past.
A second memory of his mother floats "uncalled"
into Winston's mind while he is sitting in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, a memory of playing Snakes and
Ladders with her by candlelight on a miserably
rainy afternoon a few weeks before her disappearance. Patai contrasts this "recollection . . . of an
almost idyllic time, when games were not rigged,
when opposing players might take turns in winning"
(865) to the "game" Winston plays with O'Brien.
Surely this is a valid contrast, but the game of
Snakes and Ladders is cohesive rather than competitive; it replaces the earlier contention between
Winston and his mother and even includes his
younger sister, who "sat propped up against a bolster, laughing because the others were laughing."
Winston recalls that "for a whole afternoon, they
had all been happy together" (243).
I agree with Patai that the placing of this scene
is important, but for somewhat different reasons.
Winston's recollection of this incident, the one
totally happy memory of family life, occurs after
O'Brien has exerted his full powers to make Winston "perfect" (201), to "crush him down to the
point from which there is no coming back" (211).
Although Winston dismisses this recollection as one

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of the "false memories" that trouble him occasionally (243), the fact that he has recalled the
game at all suggests that O'Brien's methods have
not been totally successful. The "few cubic centimeters" (26) inside the skull still resist complete
domination of the Party; even the "victory over
himself" that Winston is to win a few minutes later
may yet leave a few pockets of resistance.
Assuredly, one can readily find evidence of Orwell's condescension toward women. Just as Julia,
who is only a "rebel from the waist downwards"
(129), has no interest in Goldstein's book and goes
to sleep while Winston reads, the prole woman has
"strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly"
but "no mind" (181) and Winston's mother has
not been, he assumes, "an unusual woman, still less
an intelligent one" (136). In spite of the intellectual
limitations Orwell attributes to women, however,
he assigns them crucial roles in maintaining what
he clearly regards as essential to human dignity. As
Patai points out, it is Julia, rather than Winston,
who first resists O'Brien's dehumanizing demands
of how they must fight against the Party (143).
The prole woman and Winston's mother carry even
more important thematic weight in representing the
unconquerable vitality of life itself and the private
loyalties that make that life significant. If, in my
view of 1984, Orwell's despair is not quite so absolute as Patai maintains, it is because of qualities he
embodies in these women characters. Hope, if there
is any hope, lies in the prole woman, and values
like loyalty, fairness, and love survive, if they survive, as legacies of women like Winston's mother.
ERWIN HESTER

East Carolina University

Reply:
Erwin Hester is surely right: there is much more
to be said about the portrayals of women in 1984.
I am completing work on this subject, and my full
argument will appear in my book Orwell's Despair:
Manhood and the Path to 1984.
I agree that Orwell views in what is for him a
positive way both the prole woman, who is a vigorous and enduring breeder, and Winston's mother,
who is a self-sacrificing and protective maternal
figure. But I do not see these examples as refutations of my argument; rather, such characterizations
are part of the problem, not the solution. Winston's
statement that hope lies with the proles is undermined by the opposing view that there is no hope
since the proles are unconscious. In various writings
Orwell saw lack of consciousness as characteristic

257

of the oppressed: proles, natives, blacks, and-I

would add-women. But, more important, Orwell's
portrayal of feminine stereotypes is part of his
idealization (and misrepresentation) of the traditional family, to which he wished to see women confined. That Orwell sometimes sees women's role
within the family as positive does not contradict
but indeed affirms his commitment to a society
based on unequal and sexually polarized social roles.
Orwell repeatedly expresses a longing for the
world of his childhood, when men were real men.
This conventional definition of manhood requires
traditional female roles as an opposing pole. These
roles are then valorized precisely because they intensify the contrasting "masculinity" of men, which
depends for its existence on a sharp differentiation
from "femininity," as Charlotte Perkins Gilman
pointed out decades ago. Given Orwell's commitment to sexual polarization, of course he is nostalgic for the idyllic days of conventional family
life, replete with maternal women. He lives in a
mental world peopled largely by men, with women
providing the domestic background for the activities
of men, breeding and rearing the next generation,
and of course valorizing the masculine role by embodying a ready contrast with it.
If Orwell had ever appreciated the maternal (i.e.,
"female") values in themselves, he would have addressed the issue of how to transform them from
private into public values. He never does this. Instead, he admires these values from a manly distance (and primarily in working-class families,
since he feels that there alone men still control their
wives and children), while giving vent to petty
misogyny. Orwell's misogyny is functional within
his texts: typically, incipient criticism of male protagonists is contained by means of misogynistic
comments that effectively derail the reader. In
addition, Orwell's writing is full of images of anger
and even violence against women in general. Early
in 1984 Winston has rape and murder fantasies
about Julia. Orwell's last notebook has a fictional
sketch concerning the devouring sexuality of married women, which, he says, may be due less to the
appetite for pleasure than to the desire to control
and humiliate their husbands. The same notebook
contains another sketch expressing sadistic impulses
toward a peasant-like stupid woman who is the
protagonist's mistress.
Orwell's own attitude toward women was contradictory, but I believe that nowhere in his worknot even in the nostalgia for nurturing women that
exists in 1984-does
he seriously elevate the admittedly stereotyped maternal behavior of women
into the proper model for human relations. We may
see this potential in the polarization that exists in

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Orwell's work, but he himself did not. We may see

Julia's lack of interest in politics as a positive trait,
but Orwell uses the detail as a mark of her ignorance and egocentricity. All his works contain such
characterizations of women, even Animal Farm
with its female animals; and, of course, the opposite
image-the activist or learned woman, especially if
she is a feminist-is
ridiculed and despised in
Orwell's writings.
Orwell misses seeing the hope that does exist because he cannot question the androcentric bases of
the morality that troubles yet fascinates him. We
need to distinguish between our critical reading of
the paradigm Orwell presents and his acceptance of
that paradigm as inescapable. Like most everyone
else operating within conventional rules of relevancy
and irrelevancy (to use Erving Goffman's terminology in his book Encounters), Orwell consistently
defines women in terms of their "femininity," while
applying a rule of irrelevancy to the "masculinity"
of men-that is, simply not allowing awareness of
manhood as a socially prescribed role to enter his
consciousness. Things need not be this way, but the
androcentric paradigm is the only way that, however
regretfully, Orwell can construe reality.
The problem is deepened, as my discussion of
gamesmanship showed, by Orwell's unacknowledged
adherence to a conventional notion of manhood.
Thus, the characteristics (of masculinity) that he
laments and the ones he promotes never appear to
him as they in fact are: united by the demands of
the male gender role. Instead, Orwell is left
puzzled and eventually driven to despair by the
possible causes of bullying and power worship,
which he considers typical of "human beings."

It is ironic that Orwell wrote, "To accept an

orthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions" ("Writers and Leviathan," Collected
Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
4:411). Had Orwell applied this observation to
himself, he might have been able to come to terms
with the contradictions that pervade his own work.
But to do so would have entailed questioning a
notion of manhood that he was committed to and
that he did not wish to scrutinize. The view of
women as inferior, and their maintenance as idealized reproductive specialists, forms an essential part
of that notion and thus does not conflict with Orwell's implicit values. But as an ideology it conflicts
with Orwell's attacks on hierarchy and injustice.
Critics, while proclaiming Orwell's moral stature,
have largely ignored this contradiction. In the December 1982 issue of the Progressive, for example,
a review of a new biography of Hannah Arendt
concludes that "Arendt, like George Orwell, remains one of the indispensable moral teachers of
our time." It seems unlikely that misandry would
have gone unrecognized in a woman writer or that
she would have been considered a great moral
teacher, a promoter of justice and equality, had her
works revealed misandry as consistently as Orwell's
reveal his misogyny. However much Orwell may
seem to have challenged his own society, in a fundamental way he not only failed to do so but in
fact affirmed and disseminated a central ideological
tenet of that society.

DAPHNE PATAI

University of Massachusetts, Amherst