Orwell, sex and money. Does George Orwell portary his female characters in a sexist way in his novels?

Question

Hello, I'm writing a dissertation on George Orwell and I was wondering what the general consenus was concerning Orwell's portrayal of women. Do you think he's sexist, are his female characters strong, would you want to be or, be with any of his females characters? Any answers would be much obliged. Ta.

Answer 1

I wish I'd written this - but its an extract from a Christopher Hitchens book.................this should be of help to you.

Trouble with girls

George Orwell portrayed women as devious, fatuous or frumpish. But he was no misogynist, argues Christopher Hitchens in an exclusive extract from his new book

Saturday May 18, 2002
The Guardian

George Orwell's relationship with the female sex was in general a distraught one, and he had a tendency to let it show. In his last notebook is either the sketch of a short story or, more probably, an autobiographical fragment: "The conversations he overheard as a small boy, between his mother, his aunt, his elder sister (?) & their feminist friends. The way in which... he derived a firm impression that women did not like men, that they looked upon them as a sort of large, ugly, smelly and ridiculous animal, who maltreated women in every way, above all by forcing their attentions upon them. It was pressed deep into his consciousness, to remain there till he was about 20, that sexual intercourse gives pleasure only to the man... and the picture of it in his mind was of a man pursuing a woman, forcing her down, & jumping on top of her, as he had often seen a **** do to a hen."

The narrator of Keep the Aspidistra Flying opens chapter six in the following way: "This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals - minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a **** pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hens' backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind."

There is an obvious element of tongue-in-cheek here, but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Orwell wrote for a male audience. Moreover, in neither his fiction nor his journalism is the word "feminist" ever used except with, or as, a sneer. He included it in his famous taxonomy of weird and ludicrous beliefs, along with the fruit-juice drinkers, escaped Quakers, sandal-wearers and other cranks, in The Road to Wigan Pier. Thus, to the extent that there was a balance of power between the sexes, he seems to have felt that, if anything, it already favoured the female quite enough.

Biographers have not improved much upon his own writings in locating the source or sources of these woes. His mother was somewhat forbidding, perhaps (though less so than his father). He always felt himself unappetising to the opposite sex. At his infamous prep school, made imperishable in his essay Such, Such Were the Joys, it was the headmaster's wife, the cruel and somehow knowing and devious "Flip", who could find out his weak spots and subject him to humiliation. There is an especially powerful scene where this dreadful woman manages to combine the ignominy of bedwetting, the threat of corporal punishment and the agony of sexual shame into one excruciating episode.

Orwell was compelled to confront the idea of obscenity and indecency long before he had any concept of love or sex, let alone of the relation between the two. Many young Englishmen, damaged in precisely that way, went off to the colonies and made themselves a nuisance to the "native" women. Orwell never gave a reason for his sudden resignation from the Burma police, in which he served for five years in the 1920s, but I am morally certain that it was this latent element, as well as a more generalised revulsion against imperialism, that caused him to make up his mind. The system of exploitation in Burma depended, in its social aspect, on a double indecency.

Even the most educated Burmese or Indian man would and could be refused entry to the English Club. But even the least educated Burmese girl could be admitted to the white man's bungalow - for cash, and via the back door. Moreover, in the repression of the Burmese as a people there is an undeniable thrill of domination; it takes only a few phrases from the lips of Ellis, the clubroom sadist, to tell us what kind of filth is permanently flickering in his mind, and how adept Orwell was at detecting it.

The latter point may be the crucial one, since insights of that sort are more available to those who may have a guilty share in them. Orwell could be tongue-in-cheek about this, too, as when he wrote to his friend Brenda Salkeld in 1934: "I had lunch yesterday with Mr Ede. He is a bit of a feminist and thinks that if a woman was brought up exactly like a man she would be able to throw a stone, construct a syllogism, keep a secret etc. He tells me that my antifeminist views are probably due to Sadism! I have never read the Marquis de Sade's novels - they are unfortunately very hard to get hold of."

Salkeld was later to take the view, on the BBC Third Programme in 1960, that "he didn't really like women". This unfalsifiable charge has been made since by a number of "left" feminists, notably Beatrix Campbell in her 1984 book Wigan Pier Revisited.

Campbell was quick to notice Orwell's emphasis on the physique of Wigan's coal miners; his discovery that: "It is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realise what splendid men they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere."

Certainly class is involved - words like splendid and noble are applied by the officer corps to unusually good "specimens" among the other ranks, and indeed Orwell found himself employing what Campbell describes as an Etonian accolade when he said that miners had figures "fit for a guardsman". Is there a hint of the homoerotic? It is difficult to argue confidently that there is not. We know that Orwell was teased heartlessly by the writer and editor Cyril Connolly while at Eton for being "gone" on another boy; his friend and colleague Rayner Heppenstall claimed that he was the object of an adult homosexual "crush" on Orwell's part.

The only really alluring girl in his fiction, the minx Elizabeth Lackersteen in Burmese Days, is depicted as extremely boyish in physique. Perhaps it isn't wise to press this too far, but the second-most alluring girl, Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, is praised specifically for the charm of her "behind". Come to think of it, his second wife, Sonia Brownell, was known as "Buttocks Brownell".

But then, DH Lawrence evinced a certain interest in buttocks as well, and wrote tellingly about the beautiful bodies of coal miners, without coming in for the same suspicion of being closeted. More suggestive in the pop-psychology sense is the very evident fact that Orwell seemed unable to stay off the subject. He went well out of his way to take a stick to "nancy-boys", "pansies" and "sodomy" and this, as we have come to know, can be a bad sign. One isn't altogether sure, even so, that it licenses Campbell's view that men are practitioners of "mass narcissism" whereas women, "because they are a subordinate sex are not". For one thing, there seems to be a potential non sequitur here. Might narcissism not be a consolation to the subordinate?

The industrial areas visited by Orwell as he researched The Road to Wigan Pier were dominated by cotton as well as coal, and Campbell rightly points out that by neglecting the former in favour of the latter in his researches, he overlooked the industrialisation of female labour. He overlooked it in the case of coal as well, being either unaware of or indifferent to the long history of women's work "on the pit brow".

Women are by no means invisible in Orwell's travelogue, but they occur as wives or daughters or young persons caught in domestic drudgery. If he had known of women working in mining it seems likely that he would have been appalled; most educated people imagined that women and children had been spared such arduous work since at least the time of Lord Shaftesbury. Another feminist critic, Deirdre Beddoe, complains of the women in Orwell's novels, who are either shrews or geese, vamps or frumps, or else (Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four excepted) grasping and conformist.

This, as it happens, is true. It is even true of Mollie, "the foolish, pretty white mare", of Animal Farm, who sells herself out for a handful of ribbons and a couple of sugarlumps. Not that the men in these novels - moth-eaten, either scrawny or bloated, selfish, resentful and repressed - are exactly paragons. However, Beddoe is right about one thing. Every one of the female characters is practically devoid of the least trace of intellectual or reflective capacity.

Elizabeth Lackersteen in Burmese Days is mindlessly lowbrow to an extent that shocks even the besotted Flory. Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter operates on blind and simple Christian faith, can't keep her end up in an elementary argument with the village atheist, and collapses at the same time as her beliefs. Hilda, in Coming Up for Air, attends the Left Book Club only because admittance is free. The sweet-natured Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying never even pretends to have the smallest idea what Gordon is talking about. When Winston Smith begins to read the excitingly dangerous forbidden manuscript of Emmanuel Goldstein aloud in Nineteen Eighty-Four, his supposed co-conspirator Julia promptly falls fast asleep.

What can be said in Orwell's defence here? Part of his novelistic enterprise was to represent the dead-endishness of much English life. Few images can emphasise this more tellingly than that of a woman wasting away. In one of the best passages of A Clergyman's Daughter, Dorothy finds herself trapped as a teacher in a hideous school whose precise purpose is the deliberate stultification of young girls. George Bowling recoils from the sight of a female shop-assistant being bullied and tormented by a nasty male overseer. Though Campbell and Beddoe don't notice it, accusing him of ignoring the vast submerged workforce of female domestic servants, his novels and columns make frequent reference to the abysmal existence led by precisely this "skivvy" class.

We know that Orwell married one very tough-minded and intelligent woman, Elleen O'Shaughnessy, whose life was lost to a botched hospital operation. He later admitted to having treated her poorly on occasion, but all witnesses are agreed that he was devoted to her and was made almost wordless by her death.

He fell in love with Celia Kirwan, one of the most brilliant as well as one of the most beautiful of her generation, and proposed marriage to her without success. In his near-death agony he proposed successfully to Sonia Brownell who, difficult as she was, could not be described as shallow or vapid. This deserves to be entered on the credit side of the account even if, as we have learned, the dying Orwell sometimes suggested to women that they might be tempted by the lifetime sinecure of "writer's widow".

Even with its indignity and pathos, this is not an offer he would have made to anyone he suspected of being mindless. "Women in Orwell's fiction," observes Beddoe rather tritely, "are not capable of happiness without men." It would be equally acute to say that they - Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter, for instance - are incapable of happiness, or are made unhappy by men. And it would certainly be true to say that men in Orwell's fiction are utterly incapable of happiness without women. Yes, they resent the need of women, as many men do, and as Orwell himself obviously did. Yes, they distrust the marriage bond as a "trap" set by a hypocritical and acquisitive society. But to write about male-female relations in any decade and to omit these elements would have been to abandon verisimilitude.

Viewed with discrimination, Orwell's actual prejudice turns out to be against the sexless woman, or the woman who has lost her sex and become shrivelled and/or mannish. This is an old male trope; it appears to conform in his case with a wider dislike or suspicion of anything "unnatural". The big surprise, in reviewing feminist criticism of him, is the failure to notice his revulsion for birth control and abortion. He never treated either subject to a full-length review, but shied away with disgust whenever it was forced on his attention.

During the second world war, he noticed that goods requiring scarce rubber had become shoddy and hard to find, whereas male contraceptives were of good quality and easy to come by. Whenever he did a word-portrait of a future mindless caretaker state, the list of its sub-Utopian features was certain to include a contemptuous reference to a birth-control clinic or an abortion centre. And, whenever he wrote about population, he took the view that it was failing to reproduce itself with enough speed or vigour. It does seem from certain letters and memoirs that he believed himself to be sterile; this added to the larger burden under which he toiled in his relations with women.

Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is the grand exception here. Even when pregnant as a result of her very first (and very disappointing) sexual encounter, she refuses to employ any moral blackmail against the unlovable Gordon Comstock. It is therefore on his own initiative that he decides to consider the responsibility of choosing between the sin of abortion and the "trap" of marriage. We know Comstock's silly and self-pitying voice well enough by this stage, so it is fairly obviously Orwell speaking when a suddenly mature Gordon has his epiphany: "For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about. The words 'a baby' took on a new significance. They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of flesh, a bit of himself, down there in her belly, alive and growing. His eyes met hers. They had a strange moment of sympathy such as they had never had before. For a moment he did feel that in some mysterious way they were one flesh. Though they were feet apart he felt as though they were joined together - as though some invisible living cord stretched from her entrails to his. He knew then that it was a dreadful thing they were contemplating blasphemy, if that word had any meaning."

One could hardly wish, in a few sentences, for a clearer proof of the way in which Orwell relied upon the instinctual. The impalpable umbilicus unites the couple as well as the mother and child; to sever it prematurely, for any selfish motive, is to commit an un-nameable but none the less intelligible offence against humanity. Of course, no sooner does Gordon go to the library to consult some volumes on embryology and pregnancy than he is confronted by another foe: "The woman at the desk was a 'university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable... Gordon knew her type at a glance' ."

There are limits to plain old decency and common sense, we may be sure. Orwell was the cause of a domestic dispute in one of the Yorkshire slum homes in which he lodged, as a consequence of doing what any well-bred middle-class guest would do, and helping Mrs Searle with the washing- up. Her husband and another male guest were very much put out. Mrs Searle herself remained neutral in the dispute. And Orwell noticed that it was the women quite as much as the men who expected domestic chores to be performed on the distaff side: "I believe that they, as well as the men, feel that a man would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he developed into a 'Mary Ann.'"

He also wrote that this distinguished the proletarian home from the middle-class one, where the boss of the house was quite likely to be the woman, or even the baby. Taking this as her starting point, Janet Montefiore interrogates Orwell's subjectivity about females. Her book, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History, is by some distance the most acute feminist reading of the period. However, she employs a somewhat standard vocabulary in approaching Orwell's well-known narration in The Road to Wigan Pier of the wretched young woman glimpsed from the relatively lordly perspective of a passing train, suggesting that "Orwell's documentary image of the inarticulate slum girl whose sordid physical suffering represents the general misery of the working class, use[s] the image of a woman's body as a class signifier."

True enough, but the vision of a young girl deprived of her prime and reduced to drudgery and shame is a "trope" which one would not have wished, as a campaigner against needless poverty and ignorance, to be without. And had Orwell omitted this figure, and others like her, there would certainly have been other feminists to say that he rendered the female form "invisible".

One conclusion might be that Orwell liked and desired the feminine but was somewhat put on his guard by the female. And he really didn't like, and may even have feared, either feminine men or masculine women. With a reserved part of himself, he suspected that the war between the sexes was an unalterable feature of the natural order. In his better moments, he did not give credit to the natural order for such things as the sexual division of labour, or the tyranny of domestic relations. Victim of a narrow-minded patriarch himself, he would like to have been a firm but gentle father. But benevolent patriarchy is, quite rightly, the very assumption that feminism exists to challenge. We are still witnesses to, and participants in, the battle over what is and what is not, in human and sexual relations, "natural". At least it can be said for Orwell that he registered his participation in this unending conflict with a decent minimum of hypocrisy.

This is an edited extract from Orwell's Victory by Christopher Hitchens, published by Allen Lane on June 6.

Answer 2

I don't think the love interest in 1984 is a particularly strong character. I also got the impression from having read that, the George Orwell would have been the worst type of alpha male bore to sit next to at dinner.

Answer 3

Not sexist, no. For the potential to be there for it to be sexist, the author would have to put a lot of thought into the question "what is the role of women, vs men, in society." I don't think Orwell ever did that. He wasn't concerned with contemplating or examining or challenging the roles of women. He was an unconventional thinker, within limits, a maverick. But his were primarily the received attitudes of his time when it comes to women. Today, some might label these attitudes sexist. But I don't think they were, because, as I say, they weren't the result of heavy reflection. Nothing doctrinaire about them.

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Answer 5

I don't think he was sexist, I think he was keenly aware of the constraints under which most women of his time operated. If you think about A Clergyman's Daughter, which is the most female-centred of his works that I can remember, the portrait is depressing but sympathetic and not condescending. In general, Orwell tends not to write about strong, confident, appealing characters of either sex, but I think it would be a mistake to focus on this as evidence of sexism.

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Answer 8

Animal Farm

Answer 9

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Answer 10

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