Problems in communication between Winston and the opposite sex are hi-lighted when he speaks about his original companion and now estranged wife, Katharine in chapter 6 of the first part. The problems that exist between men and women in this society are many it seems, but they all stem back to emotional repression and the indoctrination the party carries out on its subjects. When we are told about “pornosec”, the literature department Julia works in, we are told that all the workers are female, mainly because the Party believe that men are too uncontrollable despite the party’s repressive tactics. Not all contact with women is forbidden though, if Party members are willing to risk being caught in the proletarian area. As Winston tells us, the Party don’t mind “mere debauchery”, as long as it is “furtive and joyless”, secret and with a lower class prole.
The Party’s sustained agenda to “dirty” and “distort” the natural instincts of the party members towards each other understandably hinders Winston’s relationships with the opposite sex. With all this in mind, Winston moves to the conclusion that “desire was thoughtcrime”. The earlier reflection that “thoughtcrime is death” means that we can summarise that, to the people of Air Strip One, desire is death. All of which brings us to Winston desires and the creature with whom he simultaneously has the relationship that makes his miserable, isolated life worthwhile and the “opeless fancy” that sentences him to death: Julia.
In a world where who you trust is the difference between life and death, being a good judge of character is the ultimate personality asset. Winston is not a good judge of character. He assumes Julia is a thought policewoman wrongly and he assumes O’Brien is on his side through one “flash of the eyes”, a move that later is shown to be pure folly. Winston seems to be searching for someone to share his life with throughout the first few chapters. He begins by “confessing” to the diary, next is the hope he places in O’Brien, but neither satisfies him. Julia is the unexpected saviour who goes from a suspicious woman in a corridor to the love of Winston’s life in about 4 chapters. The problem as far as Julia is concerned, does not start until her and Winston are captured and sent to the Ministry of Love. Up until then their inability to really honestly believe they are in danger has done them well. They do talk allot about what will happen when they are caught, but the feeling is that they are as safe as the coral in the paperweight while they are still together. Blindly in love has never been so apt a phrase. They are so involved with what is going on in their glass-enshrouded world that they fail to realise Mr Charrington must be a fake and that the bedroom is a set up all designed to trap them. It is the outer circle of the downward spiral they didn’t even realise they were on until it was too late. By the time they realised what was about to happen, they had already lost.
The loss of Julia is preceded by the loss of another woman, Winston’s mother, is mentioned often in connection with betrayal and most of all guilt. The constant drowning imagery and Winston’s fear of rats both stem from his mothers death. The drowning of an innocent woman in a film reel at the cinema and the feeling Winston gets in Room 101 of “swimming up” both echo the dream he has of watching his mother and sister drown in an early part of the book. The feelings of guilt triggered by the smell of chocolate also proves that even though Winston has grown up, the past and his guilt have never left him. Smell seems to be the thing that triggers off Winston’s well checked emotions most frequently, from the disgusting “cabbage” smells in the squalid “Victory Mansions”, to the chocolate to the smell of “real coffee” while he is in the room with Julia. The warm feelings and smells contained in that room are fantastically built up in this sensory way in order for there to be a stark contrast between all that love and all the despair to come.
The splitting up of Winston and Julia is possibly the books main tragedy. The defeat of their love is the last thing on O’Brien’s ‘to do’ list when he finally gets Winston into Room 101. Its here that O’Brien does show his true colours and betrays all the trust and hope that was invested in him by the doomed lovers. It’s the prophesised last circle in the spiral that leads to Winston’s demise.
The fact that the betrayal of Julia is left to last could be of great significance. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the inner most circle in another great book concerned with circles of hell, Dante Alighieri’s ‘Inferno’. The fourth ring of the ninth, most terrible circle is Lucifer’s three mouths, reserved for Judas, Brutus and Cassius, the greatest traitors. They are the traitors to their ‘benefactors’, something that Julia undoubtedly was to Winston in the short time they were together. Could it also be coincidence that two out of those three betrayed Julius, the masculine version of Julia?
The torture Winston endures, both mentally and physically, can only be described as extreme. The imagery in the final few chapters is at once gruesome and breathe taking. Winston is told he needs to learn, understand and then accept the Party and Big Brother. O’Brien then describes the Party’s idea of the perfect future society to Winston: “a boot stamping on a humans face - forever”. Its now we realise that despite Winston’s death, this will happen in that world if things carried on as they were. It’s at this point that nearly all hope is lost. Next is the betrayal of Julia, the one last thing keeping Winston going. It is a certainty by now that there will be no happy end and that Winston will die and life outside in Air Strip One will remain the same. Winston’s predicament is not then to do with love and loss, it’s to do with futility. For all he did, for all the rules he broke, for all the rebellion he thought and wrote, nothing changed. The Party remains in power and no future generations were saved. Despite all his good intentions Winston dies broken, hopeless and loveless, a “non-person” who as good as never existed.
