Reading 1984 as a Feminist
WARNING: this review will contain some minor spoilers. I can’t discuss what I want to discuss without them, although I promise I am not giving away anything major about the plot or ending.
Ever since I read The Handmaid’s Tale during my senior year of college, I have loved dystopian fiction. The Handmaid’s Tale introduced me to an entire genre that could help me process my own angst about modern day politics and the state of the world. 1984 is often ranked as one of the most quintessential books in the genre. But while I was reading 1984, I couldn’t look past the main character’s attitude toward women. Eventually, I found myself questioning whether the attitude belonged to the character, or to the author himself.
About 50 pages in, I realized I had actually tried to read this book before, but had stopped when I hit this line:
“[Winston] disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy” (page 56).
The first time I read it, this just didn’t sit right with me. Clearly this perspective is the fictional character’s, but it’s so blunt, so resolute, so assertive, I just felt uncomfortable reading it. But this time, I forced myself to push through, hoping that further reading would show me this perspective really was just the character’s, and not the author’s.
Having finished the book now though, I’m not convinced it’s the character’s. Although the particular woman (Julia) who Winston was describing on page 56 does turn out to be…slightly more complex, I found that the women in Orwell’s novel were mainly bucketed into two limited, two-dimensional personas:
Uneducated and promiscuous. Example: all of the female “proles” described in the novel. In one scene, Winston observes a couple of them “disgustedly” (page 124).
Educated but ignorant. Example: Katherine, Winston’s estranged wife. Winston says that Katherine “had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he has ever encountered” (page 122).
It’s true the main female character in the book, Julia, does not fit cleanly into one of those two buckets, but she contains elements of both and not much else. She is educated, but ignorant because she gets “bored and confused” during discussions about politics. While she doesn’t subscribe to the Party’s beliefs, she is still blindly obedient to Winston. There is not much else to her character — essentially everything she says and does in the entire novel can be described by these characteristics and traits.
A literature reviewer I found on Medium named Meia wrote an excellent essay on misogyny in 1984. Meia writes that throughout the novel, it’s difficult to distinguish whether misogynistic views are coming from the character or from the author himself. But she points out that the appendix to the novel (which is about the language spoken in Oceania), is not written from Winston’s perspective, but from a fictional historian’s, and it still contains misogynistic language:
“Oppression of women, thus, is actually described in Party doctrine. That is why it is strange that while the whole story is about criticizing the Party doctrine, oppression of women is [consistently] left out. Did the narrator simply not notice, as his own misogyny is too deeply ingrained to find it odd?” (Meia)
This, for me, is what convinced me that this worldview comes from Orwell himself. What makes me sad is that this book is considered a canonical piece of literature, but I don’t ever hear misogyny mentioned when it’s discussed. If I had read this when I was a teenager, I am certain I wouldn’t have had the life experience or perspective to recognize the sexism in the novel. I would have definitely internalized it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think we should write off 1984 or ban it from schools. I found it to be a well written and fascinating dystopian novel. I think Orwell is a master at world building in a way that many modern day authors struggle to emulate. And I’m glad I read it because 1984 offered me interesting insight into the political dynamics of the 20th century.
I just hope that for any middle school or high school students who read this in class, it’s taught in context. And I hope that more adults who read it and talk about it and write about it at least acknowledge that it represents some flawed perspectives instead of just lauding it as the greatest dystopian novel of all time.