Dystopian? Yes. A novel about the destruction of truth and the collapse of the private self? Absolutely. One of the most politically prescient books of the 20th century? Probably. But misogynistic?
I hadn’t thought or followed the misogyny of the novel until I was reading around the book last month and came across a Substack essay by Sandra Newman discussing her feminist retelling of 1984, Julia. I bought it and devoured it immediately.
Newman writes 1984 entirely from Julia’s perspective, giving her the interiority Orwell never does. She felt Orwell intended to show Winston’s misogyny as a product of the Party’s sexual repression rather than his own nature - but that he failed to properly inhabit Julia as a character. So she wrote the novel that answered the questions Orwell didn’t ask:
Why does Julia tell Winston she loves him before she properly knows him?
Why does a man who fantasises about killing her become the person she loves?
That last question sent me back to the original with different eyes.
The Confession
The first time Winston and Julia meet on their own, without the watchful eye of the telescreens, she asks him what he thought of her before she passed him the note declaring her love.
He tells her he hated the sight of her. Then - and the novel presents this as intimacy - he tells her:
‘I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone.’
She laughs. Delightedly, Orwell says. She takes Winston’s visceral confession as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise.
Why does a man announcing to a woman that he fantasised about raping and murdering her land as a form of honesty, intimacy even, rather than a threat? And why does the novel let it pass?
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