1984 - Part 2, Chapter 3 & 4

by Alessandro, Rita, Pang Ruosha, and Zhou Yuanhang

1984 - Part 2, Chapter 3

Characters

Wiston

The main protagonist of Orwell's 1984. He resents the authoritarian regime of the Party and tries to rebel, but is finally crushed in body and soul.

Julia

A member of a party and Winston's girlfriend. She also starts out with a strident anti-party stand and is suppressed in the same way as Winston is.

Katharine

Wiston’s wife.

Settings

A clearing in the wood, a church in ruins in a desert stretch in the countryside.

Summary

At the beginning of the chapter Julia thought about the way she could come back. She advised Winston to take a different route from the one by which they had come, “...never go home the same way as you went out”, she said. She could leave before and he would follow her after half an hour. Before going away, Julia said the name of a place where they could meet four evenings hence. Then she kissed him and she pushed her way into the wood. The next months they could meet only in the streets, every evening in a different place: they walked along the crowded pavement, never looking at one another and they made an intermittent conversation that Julia called “talking by installments”. Only in May they had the possibility to makie love: in the belfry of a ruinous church in a desert stretch of the country. On that occasion, Julia introduced herself:s she was twenty-six years old, lived in a hostel with thirty other girls and she worked on the novel-writing machines in the fiction department. She was not interested in reading the finished products. For Julia “books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces”. After a long conversation, Julia interrupted and she asked Wiston about his wife, Katharine. Wiston defined his wife “Goodthinkful” ,that is a person who is incapable of thinking bad thoughts. He began to tell her the story of his marriage, now ended. Winston described the stiffening of Katharine’s body as soon as he wanted to make love. Katharine wanted to be faithful to the party, which prohibited whatever relation. Julia explained the reason: the sexual privation induced hysteria, a phenomenon which should be desiderable because it could be trasformed into war-fever and leader-worship. Then, Winston told her an episode in which he was going to kill his wife by making her fall into the ruins and he explained the reasons why he did not it. Julia sisagreed and changed subject, thinking of another place where they would meet again.

Personal Comments

After reading this chapter, we can know Julia, an unruly girl against the party. She is obliged to obey the party’s laws. Wiston was contrary to such laws but he did not have the courage to oppose to them. Thanks to Julia, Winston is capable to show his sense of rebellion and his feelings about love. Julia can live in freedom only in her hiding place: running away makes her more responsible. She knows places, searches hiding places and nobody sees her. This forbiden freedom of the two characters shows us the world where they live: a world where they must respect the laws and they cannot express their opinions. This kind of world is unthinkable for us, who live in a society where freedom is an important ritgh for the people. Much freedom can be negative because mankind does not know the difference between right and wrong, for this reason freedom has limits, rules for a peaceful human coexistence. The party imposes so many limits that the two protagonists must rebel.

Some Quotations

If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones.

Life as she saw it was quite simple.You wanted a good time; ‘they’, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught.”

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, and report their deviations.”

...and in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon’s nest began drawing a map on the floor.

by Rita

1984 - Part 2, Chapter 4

Characters

Winston and Julia

Settings

An apartment above Charrington’s shop

Summary

This chapter starts with Winston (the protagonist) that is waiting for Julia (his woman) in the apartment above Charrington’s shop. This is an old apartment containing an old and big bed with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster, an old clock, tin oilstove, etc. While he is waiting for Julia he hits upon the idea that this is absolutely mad, sheer folly. Of all the crimes that a party member might commit, this one was impossible to obscure.

Mr Charrington is very friendly, because without any question, gives the room to Winston. A song attracts Winston’s attenption. He looks out of the window and sees a woman that is between a washtub and a clothes line. Whenever her mouth is not corked with clothes pegs, she sings. It is a popular song , created for the proles by a sub section of the Music Department. Winston hears the woman singing, the cries of the children in the street, but the room seems silent, maybe there isn’t a telescreen... Now in his mind there is only a word: folly, folly... but the wish to be with Julia was a lot and he can’t resist.

The week of hate increases the working hours but fortunately he has received a free afternoon on the same day. At this moment there is a quick step on the stairs and Julia bursts into the room with a big bag full of prohibited goods: real coffee, not cofee of the party, not the blackberry, sugar , real sugar not saccharine, bread, jam.

Winston was astonished and immediately asks Julia when she has found these goods. With nonchalance Julia says that the servants of the party can obtain these goods, because there is nothing those swine don’t have, nothing. Julia asks him to turn round for a few seconds, when he turns back he can’t recognize her: she has painted her face. They fling their clothes off and climb onto the huge mahogany bed.

Down in the yard the woman has stopped singing. After the passion time Winston asks himself if "in the abolished past it had been a normal experiece to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they choose, talking of what they choose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary". Julia wakes up and decides to prepare a cofee, but she has throw a shoe on the floor to chase away a rat. She tells him about the rat. In some parts of London there are rats everywhere, or streets where the children can’t stay because rats attack them. Don’t go on , said Winston with his eyes tightly shut. She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to reassure him with the heat of the body. The chapter finishes with a comparison between the story of Winston and Julia and the paperweight.

Personal comments

Winston is thirty-nine, while Julia is twenty-six. His childhood took place largely before the Party came to power around 1960 (as he remembers it). Julia, on the other hand, is a child of the Party era. Many of the regime’s elements that seem most frightening and evil to Winston fail to upset or even faze Julia. Like Winston, she hates the Party and sees through many of its techniques. She understands, for instance, that it uses sexual repression to control the populace. She even has a better intuitive grasp of the Party’s methods than Winston does, planning their affair and often explaining aspects of the Party to him. However, the Party’s large-scale control of history does not interest or trouble her as it does Winston, because she does not remember a time when the Party was not in control.

In stark defiance of Party doctrine, Julia enjoys sex and rebels against the Party in small ways. But growing up under the Party regime has made her apathetic to the difference between truth and falsehood. She has no patience for Winston’s desire for a categorical, abstract rejection of Party doctrine. Rather, she falls asleep when Winston reads to her from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, epitomizing her simple, self-centered, pleasure-seeking approach to life

Some quotations

He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?

She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.

He wished that they were a married couple of ten years’ standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household.”

By Alessandro, Rita, Pang Ruosha, and Zhou Yuanhang

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