Honor is defined as:
“A nice sense of what is right, just, and true, with course of life correspondent thereto; strict conformity to the duty imposed by conscience, position, or privilege.” (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)”
I would add that this sense of what is just and right is internal. In Orwell's Oceania, this cannot be allowed to exist. For a totalitarian state such as Orwell described, allowing the individual to determine their own sense of honor would be suicide. The state is the source of morality, even the source of truth. As Pilate put it
“Quid est veritas?” - (What is truth?)
The answer, in the form of an anagram:
“Est vir qui adest” - (It is the man who is here)
The State determines morality and cannot abide by a rival to this power. We see here an analog to Stalin's persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church. Just as a church might have a different conception of morality than the state does, so might an individual. This cannot be allowed, and one of Winston's earliest musings is on the subject of honor.
“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”(Page 26)
The ideals of the past are dead. Orwell was a truly Quixotic figure, living in an age where 'might makes right' yet wishing that 'right' could be based on something other than power. Throughout his novels, one can detect this almost Absurd (although the relationship of Orwell to the Absurd is best explored on its own) determination that might cannot make right.
From Wignan Peir, to his essay 'The Art of Donald McGill', Orwell exhibits a deep sympathy for the working classes throughout his works. This sympathy is seen in his treatment of the proles. The proles may be powerless, but they have retained their loyalties to one another. This is honor at its most basic and primitive form, but also at its most powerful. It is from the chivalric codes and systems of feudal obligation that the European concept of honor emerged, and from the codes of loyalty in fuedal Japan that Bushido emerged.
“The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.” (Page 137)
Winston's dilemna is not to regain his freedom (a task which he realizes is impossible) but to regain his honor and his humanity. This is where his affair with Julia, unfortunatly neglected in most analysis of the book, becomes of paramount importance. While Winston never truly 'loves' Julia in the conventional romantic sense, they share a bond that transcends the convention.
It would be a mistake to say that 1984 is a love story. It would be a bigger mistake to say that 1984 is a fuck story. Sex, to Winston and Julia, is the ultimate act of rebellion, because it is the only act of intimacy permitted them.
