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Winston Smith – hero or not?
George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, Nineteen-Eighty Four, published in 1948 was become a part of global culture with its pessimistic portrayal of a future England, now known as Airstrip One (a tiny part of huge world power called Oceania), under a the totalitarian rule of the Party – which masquerades behind a mask of socialist and communist rhetoric, but, in reality, is simply a state designed to maintain power in the hands of an élite. Orwell had seen at first-hand the machinations of the Russian Communist Party when he took part in the Spanish Civil War and had written Animal Farm, an allegory based on the Russian Revolution and the subsequent history of the Soviet Union: in Animal Farm the Bolsheviks are portrayed as pigs and Stalin, the Soviet leader, is a hugely obese pig who kills off his enemies and betrays the ideals of the revolution. Even during the Second World War, Orwell had seen the British government take unprecedented control over the private lives of its citizens. Nineteen Eighty-Four then is a warning about the danger of totalitarian dictatorships and the erosion of personal freedom. Winston Smith, the central character of the novel, rebels against the system, but is caught by the authorities and by the end of the novel is a broken man, having betrayed his lover Julia. How far is Winston Smith a hero or not? Orwell once defined heroism as ordinary people doing whatever they can to change social systems that do not respect human decency, even with the knowledge that they can’t possibly succeed. To a certain extent, Winston can be considered an unlikely hero, despite his capitulation at the end of the novel, but then he is presented by Orwell as living in an imagined dystopia in which heroism is almost impossible to achieve.
Orwell is certainly at pains to present Winston as very ordinary. We are told he is “a smallish frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine....” (Orwell 4). His job is not remarkable: he works at the Ministry of Truth and spends all day altering or substituting public documents and newspaper articles to change the past – often to cover up the abduction, interrogation and death of former celebrated Party members –. to ensure that their very existence is erased from all public records. Perhaps it is his job that leads Winston to undertake his first act of rebellion – because of his work at the Ministry of Truth, he is entirely aware that the Party lies and receives the citizens of Oceania.
His first act of rebellion is to buy a book – and it is a heroic gesture. He was attracted to the book because of its age:
It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. (Orwell 8)
The material fabric of life in Oceania is primitive with most products of very poor quality and regular shortages of basic items. Throughout the novel Winston is fascinated by the past and desperately tries to recall the past, because he knows that the Party conceals the truth about the past. It is the same motive that leads him to buy the coral paperweight and tries to discover the missing lines of the nursery rhyme that he half-remembers from childhood. Simply by buying the book Winston is putting himself at risk; Orwell calls it a “compromising possession.” (Orwell 8). Then he shows significant heroism:
The thing he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. (Orwell 8)
This can be seen as a heroic act – especially because Winston knows the consequences. However, it is a personal act of rebellion and hardly likely to bring about social change: in that sense, while a brave act, it does not really fit Orwell’s definition of heroism.
Winston’s other main act of rebellion is his love affair with Julia. An interesting feature of Orwell’s dystopia is the Party’s attempt to control people’s sex lives. Sex as a pleasurable and loving act is discouraged, and sex is encouraged only for procreative purposes. Such is the Party’s intrusive power and desire to control the population, even the act of Winston and Julia having a conversation together can be seen as a seditious act, and they are unable to show any signs of affection in public., or even that they know each other. It is due to this stultifying situation that Winston decides to rent the room from Mr Charrington – so that he and Julia have a space where they can be alone and together, unwatched by the Party, free to be just a couple in love. It turns out, of course, that kind old Mr Charrington was a member of the Thought Police and that there was a telescreen behind the painting on the wall. In one sense, that is besides the point – in consummating their love for each other, Winston and Julia do show heroism, because they are aware of the risks and what will happen to them if they are found out. Any society that forces two free adults to conceal their love in this way does not respect human decency, but, again, Winston and Julia are hardly effecting or trying to effect social change. The decision to meet at the flat shows a heroic commitment to each other, simply because it increases the risks of them being caught, but it remains a very personal rebellion. As a character Julia is less intellectually curious than Winston – she falls asleep while he is reading from Goldstein’s book. She simply does what she wants to do because she enjoys it, but she shares an element of heroism with Winston: she tells him that renting the room from Mr Charrington means that they will be caught more quickly.
To fit Orwell’s definition of heroism, Winston could do more arguably to change social systems, but he does not. The words Orwell wrote about heroism were written years before Nineteen Eighty-Four was written; it is hard to see how anyone could show Orwell’s type of heroism in the repressed society of Oceania. Winston recognizes that his personal rebellion is meaningless. Orwell tells us that Winston and Julia
...talked of engaging in active rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one’s way into it. (Orwell 159)
It turns out that the Brotherhood does, in one sense, exist, but that it too is a creation of the Party, designed to help reveal would-be rebels.
Once they are captured and tortured in Room 101, they not only admit the truth under torture, but they betray each other. Faced with their own worst fear, they are prepared to shift the suffering on the person they once loved. As Julia says:
And perhaps you might pretend afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself. (Orwell 305)
Psychologically the Party wins – not simply because Winston and Julia have been caught – but because they have betrayed each other, and admit their love for Big Brother.
Winston lives in a society that does not respect human decency, but he does nothing to change the social system – but then the social system is wholly controlled and monitored by the Thought Police. There is nothing practical that he can do, and Winston realizes (and Orwell surely wants to believe) that the only hope for change lies in the proles: “They were not loyal to a party or to a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. The proles had stayed human.” (Orwell 172) It is possible to admire Winston’s courage in rebelling against the system, his desire to know the truth, to retain some shred of humanity, while recognizing that he achieves nothing and is defeated in the end. It is harder to judge whether one might emulate him, since we are lucky enough not to live in the same type of society. In the novel, only the proles have the potential to be heroes.
Works Cited
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eight-Four. 1949. London. Martin Secker and Warburg. Print.
