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rfmcdonaldThe Atlantic's Noah Berlatsky has convinced me that Kirsten Stewart was right to claim that George Orwell's 1984 was a love story. (She'd be wrong to say that it was only a love story, but I don't think she said that.)
The Eurythmics' song "Julia", written for a movie version of 1984, could be taken as a sort of secondary proof. If nothing else, it's an elegant song.
Orwell is, of course, famous for linking totalitarianism to the denial of history and objective reality: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four." But, as Stewart suggests, the bulk of the novel, and the main content of Winston's betrayal, is not an exercise in mathematics, but rather the romance plot.
It is when Julia first passes Winston a note saying, "I love you" that his half-formed rebellion takes concrete shape and form. The couple's first sexual encounter is specifically described as "a blow struck against the Party … a political act." It isn't math or history that strikes that blow, but love. "If they could make me stop loving you, that would be the real betrayal," Winston says. To which Julia replies, "They can't do that … It's the one thing they can't do." Even if you read that as doomed, it's still a fairly romantic bit of dialogue, insisting as it does on the existence of love "in a world where," as Stewart says, "love really doesn't exist anymore."
It turns out, alas, that Julia is wrong; "they" can get inside you.
[. . .]
Orwell is able to imagine Big Brother with great power, but when he comes to portraying Julia, he flails. She's just a stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
[. . .]
Orwell is able to imagine newspeak and Big Brother and the chief torturer O'Brien with great power, but when he comes to portraying Julia, he flails. She's thoughtless, primitive, interested only in things of the body rather than the mind — "only a rebel from the waist downwards," as Winston calls her. We never really learn why, or feel why, she loves the older, not particularly attractive Winston. We merely know she does because she says so and because, as soon as they meet in private, she starts calling him "dear.” She's just a stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's part of Winston's story, not the other way around. So it's not exactly a surprise that she betrays Winston immediately, or that, as O'Brien says, just about licking his lips, "All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everything has been burned out of her." None of it was ever really there to begin with.
[. . .]
I prefer to think, though, that whatever Eric Blair's limitations as a writer of female characters, he did, in fact, believe in love. Winston, at the end, abandons Julia for big Brother. But does that mean that the relationship with Julia never existed? O'Brien would say it didn't. Memory, history, love; for the Party, none of them are real. It seems to me that Kristen Stewart is on the side of the resistance, and of Orwell, when she says that O'Brien is wrong, and that 1984 is a romance.
The Eurythmics' song "Julia", written for a movie version of 1984, could be taken as a sort of secondary proof. If nothing else, it's an elegant song.
