Finding Julia

Sandra Newman reflects on her feminist 'retelling' of 1984

A few years ago, I was invited by the estate of George Orwell to write a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point of view of Julia, the lover of the protagonist, Winston Smith. The estate itself wouldn't be paying me to do this, but their endorsement more or less ensured that it would be published and find a readership.

I'm one of those people who feels that they were formed by Orwell politically, and I took on the job with unalloyed joy. I now realize this was a bit naive. The texture of Nineteen Eighty-Four is entirely bleak: its food revolting, its smells nauseating, its people physically grotesque and morally warped by hate and cowardice. The hero has an ulcer on his leg, a nasty cough, varicose veins and five false teeth, and resents and despises everyone around him. The plot narrows to a point of absolute horror, and refuses the reader any glimmer of hope. While I was writing my book, I also researched the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, and by the time I was finished, not only I, but everyone close to me, was exhausted by it. I would be talking to my husband and see the look of resignation on his face, and realize that, yet again, I was on the subject of Stalin's Terror, the rise of Hitler, or the Cultural Revolution. But, while my friends and family may have gotten very sick of me by the end of this process, and I certainly got sick of authoritarianism, I never really tired of Orwell. There's something inexhaustible about his clear-sightedness. Every time I read certain passages, they seemed more startling and more true.

Some elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, became more frustrating with each reading. The most important of these is the figure of Julia.

In some ways, the Julia of Nineteen Eighty-Four should be a feminist icon. She is honest and fearlessly dismissive of Party dogma. Her ability to outwit the regime—having multiple affairs, trading on the black market, laughing at the Party instead of being paralyzed by fear—make her far more traditionally heroic than Winston Smith. In her frank sensuality and matter-of-fact way of bossing Winston around, she feels as if she is based on a real woman Orwell knew, and one who was worth knowing.

But this is only half the picture. In the other half, Julia feels like a projection of male fantasy, and a version of male fantasy that's exceptionally unpleasant. Of living with thirty other women in a hostel, all Julia has to say is: "Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!" She breezily approves of Winston's notion of murdering his wife, and even chides him for not having really done it. At their first tryst, she asks Winston what he previously thought of her, and laughs in delight when he replies, "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago, I thought of smashing your head in with a cobblestone."

Misogyny runs through the book, both as a theme and as a nasty background smell. We're told Winston "disliked nearly all women," and that "it was always the women, and especially the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." Any hint of feminism is seen as totalitarian: women having short hair, not wearing make-up, working with machines, are all framed as an unnatural oppression imposed by the Party. Freedom for Winston is speaking the truth; freedom for Julia is putting on scent and showing herself to her boyfriend in a pretty frock. As their affair progresses, Julia loses her independence and moulds herself to Winston's desires until she is agreeing to die and kill for his political beliefs, even though they are meaningless to her: whenever he talks about politics, she falls asleep. Meanwhile, we're told Winston loves Julia, even as he constantly expresses contempt for her mental capacities and character, and doesn't even feel any concern for her safety. He drags her along to his meeting with O'Brien although there's no reason to take that risk; in his cell at Love, he suffers not at all from the knowledge that his great love is being tortured. In the climactic betrayal of the book, he saves himself from the rats by crying, "Do it to Julia, not to me!" but neither Winston nor Orwell spares a thought for what happens to Julia next.

As their affair progresses, Julia […] moulds herself to Winston's desires until she is agreeing to die and kill for his political beliefs, even though they are meaningless to her: whenever he talks about politics, she falls asleep.

This is all the more troubling to a reader who admires Orwell as much as I do. Here is a man who spent his life in the fight against oppression, against the silencing of individual conscience, against the subjection of the weak to the violence of the strong, and who did so with unique brilliance and clarity. But in Nineteen Eighty-Four's treatment of women, he betrays these principles. Apparently, depressingly, some animals are more equal than others even to Orwell. In the stark implausibility of Julia's character, there's even a whiff of 2 + 2 = 5.

As soon as I started work on my book, though, I found that Nineteen Eighty-Four offered me a way out of this. In Julia's scenes, there's that lingering sense of a real and very interesting woman Orwell might have known, or wanted to know, a woman he thought about deeply enough to bring her to vibrant life in fiction. And the character of Julia is only contradictory and implausible if we take her at face value, as she presents herself to Winston. True, that's how Orwell presents her to us, but it's not the only way she can be seen. If we assume she loves Winston utterly selflessly, that Winston's obsession with murdering women delights her, that her only sentiments toward other women are disgust and hate, she is jarringly implausible: a projection of unpleasant male desires. The same things are all too credible, though, if they're a role she plays to please a man.

There is a kind of woman who performs all the time to manage men's reactions: to attract him, to appease him, to avoid an argument or elicit praise. The more sexist a society is, the more women engage in this behaviour, and the more normalized it is. Until recently, this kind of play-acting was taught to girls as the only way to win a man and keep him happy in marriage. It was interesting to consider this in the context of Airstrip One, where everyone is required to lie and dissemble all the time. Out of view of the telescreens, Winston is able to be himself with Julia; this perhaps is what love means for him. But Julia is a woman, and one who has never known a world without Big Brother. Being honest with another person—being known—has no place in her experiences or her desires.

Once I started to see Julia through this lens, she became entirely real and consistent to me. From here, my novel was easy to write. Indeed, it was as if Orwell had deliberately left me tools and building materials, scattered through his book. There were brilliant inventions like the Junior Anti-Sex League and Pornosec, which Orwell mentions but never lets us see. I was able to follow Julia to the women's hostel where she lives, to imagine her visiting an artsem clinic. Orwell gives Julia a history of past lovers, but never tells us anything about them; he has her trading on the black-market, but never says what that is like. All that material was now mine. I could devise a childhood for her that showed something of the history of Airstrip One; the revolution that brought the Party to power and the fate of the idealists who fought in it. I could take her into the homes of proles (taking advantage of her barely developed role as a black-market trader again), and put her on terms of intimacy with them, and let her hear their stories and their opinions.

Orwell gives Julia a history of past lovers, but never tells us anything about them; he has her trading on the black-market, but never says what that is like. All that material was now mine.

I could also go into her inner life and answer questions generations of readers have wondered about. Why was she attracted to Winston in the first place, when he's described as puny, fearful, tubercular, middle-aged, losing his teeth? Why does she express it with a note that declares I LOVE YOU, when, in their first meetings, she seems less enamoured than matter-of-fact, and the subject of love does not come up? Why does she bring Winston black-market goods for weeks, running all the danger for them both, when he never even offers to help her pay? Why does she go with Winston to see O'Brien, when it amounts to confessing sexcrime to an Inner Party member, and there's no need for her to go? Why does O'Brien, when pretending to recruit them both into the Brotherhood, address himself only to Winston? Why does she sit in docile silence through OBrien's catechism about which atrocities they're willing to commit, allowing Winston to answer for her?

While I was at it, I could answer all the questions I'd always had about other characters. Does the Party stalwart Parsons really shout "Down with Big Brother!" in his sleep, or is it a slander brought against him by his brutal children? What is it like for him to live with those children, and to love them, as he seems to love them? How did Ampleforth feel about disfiguring great poetry with Newspeak and Party dogma? As a person sensitive enough to do this work, did it not chafe at him? How would O'Brien appear to someone who wasn't infatuated with him, as Winston is—to Julia, for instance, or to his co-workers at the Ministry of Love? It often felt as if Orwell had intended someone to write the novel I was writing, and had deliberately, generously, left some of the best bits for them to fill in.

To make a long story short, despite all the bleakness of the material (and the degree to which I depressed my friends and family with stories about the Holodomor), working on this book was an inexhaustible pleasure.

And while the experience only deepened my view that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work with misogyny built into it, I'm also more firmly convinced of the genius of its writer. I was once inclined to the common view that, while Orwell was a great writer of nonfiction, he wasn't a natural fiction writer, and Nineteen Eighty-Four was really an essay masquerading as a novel. But again and again, I was amazed by the deftness of Orwell's plot or the incisiveness of his characterization. In a satire, however serious, most characters tend to be a little two-dimensional, written as they are to demonstrate a point. But Orwell manages to show us the ugliest features of types like Ampleforth and Parsons while also making us feel their pain and terror and humiliation and loneliness.

In conclusion, I would love to be able to say it's not true that Orwell was a misogynist; that I've seen through it all, and there's nothing in it. But that is wishful thinking. Sexism, both his and his time's, permeates Nineteen Eighty-Four. Failing that, I'd like to be able to say it doesn't really matter. But I can't say that, and neither, I think, would Orwell. If he believed in anything, it was in the power of art as propaganda; to him, it always mattered what art said. And I've met too many woman this year who remember their reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four as an insult or an ordeal, as a time when a great man told them they belonged in a servant role, that their dreams were unnatural delusions, and their pain and ideas had no importance. Great writing makes us believe in it completely; when it treats some people as less than fully human, it can do real harm. So Nineteen Eighty-Four is both gravely flawed and desperately important. In offering another view of Julia, and how women fit into Orwell's vision, I'm hoping my novel can do something to bridge that gap.

Sandra Newman

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Julia is published by Granta in the UK and Harper Collins in the US