1984: Interpretations (OCR A Level English Literature)

Interpretations

AO5 assesses your ability to understand different ways of reading and interpreting texts. Those different readings can take different forms, from interpretations by critics to watching and analysing different productions of a text.

There are numerous ways to explore different interpretations in order to meet the AO5 assessment criteria, and you must explore a range of secondary reading and perspectives to supplement your understanding of the text. These can include:

• Exploring critics

• Interpretations over time

• Dramatisations

Exploring critics

Different critics will offеr variеd insights and intеrprеtations of 1984, and citations will lеnd crеdibility and authority to your analysis. Rеfеrеncing well-known critics demonstrates that your interpretation is groundеd in literary criticism. It will also еnhance thе validity of your argumеnt. By citing multiple critics, you can prеsеnt a morе comprehensive and balanced analysis and demonstrate the different range of perspectives and interpretations surrounding the novel.

Below you will find a summary of Jem Berkes’s main points about Orwell’s use of language as a weapon, as well as a summary of key feminist interpretations of 1984:

Jem Berkes: “Language as the ‘Ultimate Weapon’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four” (2000)

Jem Berkes’s essay on language as a weapon in Orwell’s 1984 is an often-cited critical source.

• Berkes writes about how language can be a powerful tool to manipulate and control large numbers of people

• He states that “language has the power in politics to mask the truth and mislead the public”:

  • This is evident in 1984 via the use of Newspeak and propaganda

  • He argues that Orwell wanted to increase public awareness of the power of language to manipulate and control

• In 1984, Berkes believes that “language becomes a mind-control tool, with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination”:

  • Despite Winston’s attempts to find out information about the past, and to write down his thoughts, his will is ultimately destroyed as he accepts the inevitable and declares his love for Big Brother

• Berkes suggests that the role of Newspeak in 1984 is to “restrict understanding of the real world”:

  • Where the means to self-expression and information are limited, then a person’s world compresses and gets smaller

• The Party wishes to impose their version of reality on its people, narrowing the range of thought and therefore shortening people’s memories:

  • When words that describe a particular thought are completely absent from a language, that thought becomes more difficult to think of and communicate

  • After O’Brien forces Winston to fully embrace the Party’s ideologies, Winston’s imagination deteriorates and he can no longer fix his mind clearly on anything for longer than a few moments

• Berkes believes that Orwell has created a perfect totalitarian system, in which the government relies on a “passive public which lacks independent thought and which has a great tolerance for mistakes, both past and present”:

  • This means that the population is much less likely to threaten the government’s control as they do not question or criticise the status quo

• Berkes queries why the population of Oceania accept the restriction of thought and language without resistance:

  • Given their aim is to completely replace the English language with Newspeak, one would expect some form of collective opposition to such a plan

  • However, the Party does not overtly “force” people to use Newspeak by law (as there are no laws)

  • Instead, the people are just fully immersed in the new language, so by default people have to use it in order to communicate

• Berkes argues that control of the people of Oceania goes beyond merely using language as a weapon, but is more fundamentally about “psychological control of the public”:

  • While the Party does use physical punishment as a tool, it primarily applies psychological tactics, such as the manipulation of people through language, on a continuous basis

• 1984 also employs the media as a powerful tool for manipulation because “the public is widely exposed to it, and also because the public trusts it”:

  • The characters are “slaves of the media” as they follow it and its instructions and misinformation without question

  • Via the media in 1984, the Party is further able to present their distorted version of reality

  • “Orwell is making a point about how the media can use language to mask the truth”

• Berkes believes that the media in Oceania is “relying on the principle that a piece of information that is repeated often enough becomes accepted as truth”:

  • Winston constantly wonders at how his colleagues can accept the misinformation that the media dispenses

  • This also applies to history, which again is manipulated by the Party so that centres of opposition cannot develop

  • Even Winston, who knows what is going on with the altering of documents, has trouble recalling who Oceania is meant to be at war with

  • It is this constant element of doubt that contributes to Winston eventually accepting the Party’s reality

• The introduction of Newspeak is also designed to further break the link with the real past by introducing a language barrier:

  • Therefore, “the manipulation of language and text not only affects the present, but also the past and the future in more than one way”

• Berkes believes that the warnings carried in the novel are equally relevant today, as is the “fear that politicians and the media abuse language to hide truth”

Feminism and 1984

Feminist critics have often denounced Orwell as a misogynist due to his portrayal of women in the novel.

• In 1984, Beatrix Campbell, in her work “Orwell – Paterfamilias or Big Brother?”, believed that Orwell “only holds women to the filter of his own desire, or distaste”:

  • She believes that women in the novel are presented primarily as sexual objects

• Jennifer O’Dee (2013) stated that “Orwell characterises his women under a misogynistic lens”:

  • They are classed as mother, wife and sexual being, and women are depicted as belonging in the home, producing and nurturing children

  • The only woman represented as a “true” woman is Winston’s mother, who dies prior to the novel beginning

• Her overall critique is that “Orwell allows his misogynistic beliefs that women belong in the home to dictate his female characters”:

  • She believes that he pities these women as losing their femininity

• According to Deirdre Beddoe (1984), Orwell was not only anti-feminist, but “he was totally blind to the role women were and are forced to play in the order of things”

• Daphne Patai, in “The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology” (1984), believed that Orwell positioned human beings “according to sex roles and gender identity and legitimises male displays of dominance and aggression”

• John Newsinger, in 2018, thought that Orwell was “unfortunately one of those male socialists who were opposed to every oppression, except that of women”

Interpretations over time

Orwell published 1984 in 1949, and society and thinking has changed greatly in the years since publication. Below are some examples of critical reactions that have evolved in relation to the key themes and ideas in 1984.

Reactions on publication

• The critical reception to the book on publication was largely positive, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Great Britain and the USA

• A review for The New Statesman stated that the reviewer did not think he had “ever read a novel more frightening and depressing”

• The novel was also praised by Orwell’s contemporaries Bertrand Russell, E.M. Forster and Harold Nicolson

• Time magazine said that “How Winston and Julia rebelled, fell in love and paid the penalty in the terroristic world of tomorrow is the thread on which Britain’s George Orwell has spun his latest and finest work of fiction”

• However, C.S. Lewis was critical, claiming that Winston and Julia’s relationship and the Party’s views on sex lacked credibility

• One of Orwell’s major influences, Aldous Huxley, wrote a letter to Orwell after the book’s publication, in which he started off praising the novel as “profoundly important”:

  • However, he also argued that his version of the future, in his novel Brave New World, was more likely to come to pass

  • “My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World”

  • He believed that “the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons”

Reactions by the author

• In the run up to publication, Orwell expressed some disappointment with the book, thinking it would have been improved had he not been so ill whilst writing on the Scottish island of Jura

• He clarified that the novel was not an attack on any particular government, but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals

• He also stated that the novel was not intended as an attack on socialism or the British Labour Party, of which he was a supporter:

  • He set the book in a fictionalised future version of Britain in order to emphasise the fact that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere

• Orwell died in 1950

More recent reactions

• In 2019, Oliver Munday in The Atlantic declared that “no novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984”:

  • Much of the novel has entered the English language as instantly recognisable signs of a nightmarish future, such as the idea of Big Brother watching you

• Also in 2019, the BBC named 1984 on its list of the 100 most influential novels

• News articles often cite the links between 1984 and recent political turmoil and its relevance in the age of fake news

• Dorian Lynskey, writing in The Guardian in 2019, said that 1984 “remains the book we turn to when truth is mutilated, when language is distorted, when power is abused, when we want to know how bad things can get”:

  • He says that it was the first dystopian novel to be written in the knowledge that dystopia was real, referring to Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union

  • He cites President Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, who first used the phrase “alternative facts” in 2017, although he does acknowledge that Trump was not a dictator

Dramatisations

Examining various productions on stage and screen of 1984 will enable you to appreciate different interpretations of the characters and themes, and also how they may have evolved over time, reflecting shifts in society and culture.

Michael Radford’s 1984 film (released in 1984)

The 1984 film version of the novel featured John Hurt as Winston Smith and Richard Burton as O’Brien, and it received positive reviews from critics. It is the best-known film adaptation of the book.

• The film was shot in and around London during the period April-June 1984, during the exact time and setting imagined by the author

• The colour of the film was deliberately washed out, although it was restored to normal levels of saturation in the 2003 DVD release:

  • The original process drained much of the colour from the film to give it a stark and depressing appearance

• The choice of Hurt as the character of Winston embodied his physical frailty and guarded optimism

• The film retains the book’s narrative, and Radford envisions a convincing dystopian world:

  • Oceania in the film feels like a very lived-in and run-down place with details of everyday life that make it seem more plausible

• However, there are some differences between the novel and the film:

  • In the film version, only Winston goes to visit O’Brien at his home

  • The film ends with Winston saying “I love you” rather than “Big Brother”, leaving the ending ambiguous - does he love Big Brother or Julia?

  • There is also an implicit suggestion that Julia might actually be a spy in the film

• One of the biggest themes in the novel is the inner workings of Winston’s mind, until this finally also succumbs to the Party’s doctrines:

  • As a movie without a dominant inner monologue via voice-over, it is difficult to portray this style of storytelling

  • In addition, the film does not emphasise the truly terrifying nature of Room 101 that features in the novel

• The musical score of the film features The Eurythmics, although this was involved in some controversy as the original score was an orchestral composition:

  • The director was not happy with this choice, so he only used the music in the film sporadically when he had no other choice