George Orwell broadcasting on the BBC in London in 1943. Alamy Stock Photo
Almost since its publication, people have been saying George Orwell’s 1984 is “more relevant now than ever”. In one respect, though, it hasn’t aged well. This is in its treatment of women, and particularly the character Julia, the lover of the protagonist Winston Smith.
Like many female characters in 20th-century novels, Julia feels like a projection of male fantasy. First, there is no clear explanation for her infatuation with Winston: a puny, timid man with skin ulcers and varicose veins, whose conversation sends her to sleep. In her perpetual cheerfulness and sexual availability, her patience with Winston’s occasional impotence and constant self-absorption, her eagerness to introduce him to the few joys still available in Airstrip One, without ever seeming to notice that all she gets back is negativity, she feels like a mythic creature invented to soothe the egos of insecure men.
What makes her truly disturbing, though, is the degree to which she is a focus of misogyny. Before they’ve ever spoken to each other, Winston hates Julia purely because she is hot but unavailable. In the Two Minutes Hate, it is towards Julia he directs his hatred: “He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.” Later, when he suspects her of spying on him, he considers not only bashing in her brains, but raping her first. After their affair begins, he is filled yet again with the desire to murder her when she once says she can’t meet for sex.
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This might just be Winston’s character; we’re told he “disliked nearly all women”. Perhaps Orwell’s prescience extended to the invention of the incel? But Julia shares Winston’s dislike. She comments about the women’s hostel where she lives: “Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” When Winston tells her about a time when he was walking beside a cliff with his wife, and had a passing thought of pushing her off, Julia blithely says: “Why didn’t you give her a good shove? I would have.” Though all the crimes in the book are committed by men, there is no similar homicidal yearning towards a man.
At 20, I found it profoundly demoralising to read all this, especially since I’d just been tearing through all of Orwell’s political non-fiction and finding my own ideas sometimes confirmed and sometimes demolished by his marvellous clarity. I was most of all impressed by his ability to see through the distortions of privilege to comprehend the full humanity of the poorest people in society. But even for Orwell, it turned out, some animals were more equal than others.
In setting out to write a novel from the point of view of Julia, I was partly hoping to heal this gap – to expand Orwell’s world into one in which women, too, had full humanity, where they weren’t just projections of male desires, but people with desires of their own. I initially worried that Orwell’s text would be an obstacle to this. But I found that Julia does feel real, almost startlingly real in some scenes. Or she does if you throw away Winston’s assumption that she’s being completely honest with him.
Does she really hate all of the women at her hostel for being women, or does she just know this line is likely to impress a man like Winston Smith? Is she really disappointed with Winston for not killing his wife, or is she probing to find out how serious his desire to murder women is? At 26, she’s had scores of previous lovers, yet she introduces herself to Winston with an “I love you” note. He swallows this hook, line and sinker – but is she really so head-over-heels with this stranger who will be her 50th or 100th lover? Is she even faithful to him? Seen this way, Julia becomes both more believable and more interesting.
It was also fun to follow her to the places Winston never goes and Orwell barely mentions: to meetings at the Junior Anti-Sex League, to her dealings on the black market, to trysts with her other lovers and to her old job at Pornosec, where pornographic novels are written for proles. The work soon absorbed me completely. It also felt detoxifying. I never felt as if I was rebuking Orwell, much less correcting him. It was more like an intimate conversation, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing, where I was able to say to him everything I’d always wanted to say. And perhaps, I sometimes thought, the disagreement was smaller than it appeared.
Perhaps the book’s misogyny was an attempt to explore the problem, to understand it and transcend it? Perhaps Orwell saw how he’d shortchanged Julia, but had been taught that women’s real experience had no place in serious fiction? Perhaps her inconsistencies were evidence he’d begun to chafe at this?
This is probably fantasy, the fantasy of someone who isn’t ready to let go of Orwell, but can’t make her peace with certain things he wrote. But after two years of working with Orwell’s depiction of Julia, I feel a certain level of comfort in projecting my fantasy back on him.
Julia by Sandra Newman (Granta) is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here
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