- cheats - write some real essays.
Okay. You asked for it.
Emotion in '1984'
Winston's attempts to regain his humanity are a major component of the story in '1984'. He remembers his mother, and that she loved him and his sister. Winston compares this love that she felt with the way Big Brother's society is set up, where love does not really exist. Big Brother has destroyed the freedom to feel, a freedom Winston reflects on;
“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)
Big Brother's society has also destroyed the concept of friendship. Party members are supposed to have friends, only comrades. To form personal relationships with another person is frowned upon. This is yet another example of the way Big Brother's society destroys the individual's ability to feel.
“He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.”(Page 43)
The family cannot be abolished, so it is perverted. Children are taught to turn their parents in as 'Thought Criminals' if their parents show any signs of unorthodoxy. There is no real love between parents and children. The family serves to raise new Party members, and little else. This attack on the family is yet another of the attacks on emotion that Big Brother's society perpetuates. The lack of any familial affection is shown vividly, and Orwell uses it to warn us of the dangers of totalitarian societys like Big Brother's.
“That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old- fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.” (Page 110)
Big Brother's attack on emotion even extends to the sexual impulse. Even this is attacked, with organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex league. Affection, even physical affection, cannot be tolerated. This would undermine Big Brother's power, and Big Brother, like all totalitarian rulers, must have absolute power. Julia, Winston's lover, explains it best:
“When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwords you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”(Page 110)
When Winston thinks about emotions and how the Party has removed them from life, he realizes for the first time he does not despise the proles, nor does he think of them as an inert mass that will one day rise against the Party. The proles still feel emotion, emotions that Winston must relearn how to feel. They are human beings. Party members are not quite human.
“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)
Much of the book is devoted to the sexual and romantic affair between Winston and Julia. This is a rebellion, in and of itself. Through this rebellion, Winston eventually realizes that regaining his ability to feel is a way of attacking Big Brother's society. More importantly than actually physically opposing the Party, Winston does this emotionally. To love Julia, to regain his emotions and humanity, is to beat Big Brother.
“But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They (the Party) could not alter your feelings, for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought, but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.” (Page 138)
Yet Winston's victory is only temporary, and his love is eventually crushed. During his torture, O'Brien takes him into Room 101. In Room 101 is different for everyone. It is THE worst imaginable thing for the person that goes into it. For Winston, it is rats. O'Brien fastens a cage with two rats onto Winston's face. He releases one cage. The rats will bore through Winston's face. He readies the release of the second cage, and Winston finally betrays his love. "Do it to Julia!" he shouts. (Page 236)
This final betrayal is Orwell's strongest condemnation of totalitarianism. A person is not only deprived of their rights to freedom of speech, of movement and of the press, but of their right to feel. For Winston has betrayed Julia and can never love her in the same way again. 1984 is about the loss of humanity and the destruction of emotion under a totalitarian regime.Winston admires his mother, for instance, because she remained true to a set of private ideals and obligations. But such days are over. When Winston attempts to stay loyal to his lover, Julia, he fails. And in the end, Winston is utterly destroyed when he is broken so severely that he cannot remain true to his emotions.
P.S: I actually hate this essay - my teacher would not let me use my origional thesis of 'honor'. And I had to 'dumb down' the damn thing.
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