1984: Decaf and Dystopia

I can't drink decaf anymore because it makes me way too wired. I just yelled at Brandi, "HOW DOES EVERYONE NOT HAVE JOY WHEN THEY READ BOOKS? THEY ARE ALL SO WEIRD AND HORRIBLE AND I LOVE THEM!" This is without caffeine. WITHOUT. Add in a latte, and I am done.

So, yeah, decaf.

Anyways, I'm not necessarily interested in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) for the dystopian aspect of it, but for its small representation of family. We are most horrified by the destruction of family bonds. Incest is worse than rape; families fighting over money is worse than coworkers fighting over salary; brothers and sisters ceasing to speak is worse than friends ending a friendship. Think about our horror movies: The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, and Antichrist. We are terrorized by the destruction of a family, the suppression of a family, or the potential power of a broken family.

So how does this connect to Nineteen Eighty-Four? Well, one of the ways the text identifies that this is a dystopian society is through the parental-child relationships. Readers are told relatively early on that:

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, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

As readers, we are naturally horrified. They turn children against their parents? How unnatural! The subjugation of the family in favor of the government is a fear we have been taught since the Red Scare. We were taught that communism used family as a tool of the government/community while the government/community should, in fact, be a tool of the family. That's cultural, though, and so we need to keep in mind that this is a cultural anxiety.

To capitalize off of this anxiety, the novel transforms Winston's mother from a shadowy memory to a metonym for the family and familial affection. As Winston develops a relationship with Julia, he increasingly reflects upon his mother. After a sexual encounter--an exchange that they have already identified as one that redirects energy away from the party and towards the individual--Winston considers:

He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.

The mother, then, represents what we consider the most essential aspects of human nature: love, loyalty, care. Without the mother, the text seems to imply we are rendered vulnerable to other influences that rely on our more animalistic (rather than humanistic) qualities. Maybe animalistic is the wrong descriptor. It's definitely something that is simultaneously natural and unnatural, but perhaps it is not unnatural so much as unbalanced. Fear, hatred, and pain are not inherently bad emotions; they are often good guides and safeguards, but only when they are tempered by love, friendship, and loyalty. To indiscriminately hate or fear allows easy manipulation.

So wait: is this my small amount of caffeine talking or does the text seem to imply that mothers are the primary obstacles to totalitarian governments manipulating and controlling populations?

Right before Winston attempts to join the supposed resistance, he explores one of his few memories of his mother. After his father disappeared--presumably taken by the government, Winston remembers his mother changing. While she still performed all the same tasks, she was somehow different. Winston remembers that "[v]ery occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen." That is, Winston's mother and her physical imparting of love is directly tied to his desire to rebel against the government. He wants to replace Big Brother with Memorialized Mother.

But Winston fails. He is led to betray Julia, betray love, and embrace Big Brother. In the last paragraphs of the novel, Winston finally succumbs and internally declares his love for Big Brother and the government. We don't immediately see this change, though. We see the betrayal and we know O'Brien has conquered Winston, but we don't see the initial effects. Winston's thoughts are murky and incomplete, making it difficult to piece things together and truly understand his state of mind. He remembers seeing Julia after they betray one another, and they discuss their mutual betrayal. Julia admits:

""Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' 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 really 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.'"

But there is someone who is willing to let the bad thing happen to them in place of the one they love: mothers. We see Winston's mother and the refugee mother sacrifice themselves for their children. Winston, when seeing these images, considers it one of the most natural and instinctual gestures. And so while we know Winston and Julia have changed, we do not know to what effect until Winston once more recalls his mother, remembers her care, and promptly dismisses it as a false memory.

It is only then that Winston truly embraces Big Brother and joyfully concedes, "He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

No more families. Just government.

Theorist to potentially consider within this context: Lee Edelman.

#1984 #orwell #government #dystopia #bigbrother #rememberedmother #motheraspathos #motherasethics