The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and
women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to
control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all
pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was
the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages
between Party members had to be approved by a committee
appointed for the purpose, and -- though the principle was
never clearly stated -- permission was always refused if the
couple concerned gave the impression of being physically
attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of
marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.
Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting
minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put
into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into
every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even
organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which
advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were
to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it
was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.
This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously,
but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the
Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it
could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did
not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should
be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's
efforts were largely successful.
He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten --
nearly eleven years since they had parted. It was curious how
seldom he thought of her. For days at a time he was capable of
forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been
together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit
divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where
there were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight,
with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face
that one might have called noble until one discovered that
there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early
in her married life he had decided -- though perhaps it was
only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people
-- that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar,
empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought
in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility,
absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the
Party handed it out to her. 'The human sound-track' he
nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living
with her if it had not been for just one thing -- sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen.
To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And
what was strange was that even when she was clasping him
against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously
pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidlty of her
muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there
with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but
submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and,
after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne
living with her if it had been agreed that they should remain
celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused
this. They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So
the performance continued to happen, once a week quite
regulariy, whenever it was not impossible. She even used to
remind him of it in the morning, as something which had to be
done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had two
names for it. One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our
duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase).
Quite soon he grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the
appointed day came round. But luckily no child appeared, and in
the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon afterwards they
parted.
Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and
wrote:
She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without
any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you
can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with
the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his
heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that
moment was mixed up with the thought of Katharine's white body,
frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party. Why did it
always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of
his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years?
But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The
women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deep
ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful early
conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was
dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth
League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial
music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them. His
reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart
did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the Party
intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even
than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even
if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act,
successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.
Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it,
would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He
wrote:
I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light
After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp
had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the
woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then
halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of
the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible
that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that
matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment.
If he went away without even doing what he had come here to do
-- !
It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed.
What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman
was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face
that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask.
There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful
detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing
nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman,
fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the
same.
He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had
written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy
had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of
his voice was as strong as ever.
x x x
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the
proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles,
because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per
cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy
the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown
from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of
coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the
legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it
was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in
larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in
the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional
whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow
become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to
conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like
a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the
Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it
must occur to them to do it? And yet-!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded
street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's
voices -- had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It
was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud
'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a
bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A
riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had
reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred
women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces
as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a
sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down
into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one
of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were
wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were
always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given
out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were
trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others
clamoured round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of
favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of
them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same
saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands.
For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came
off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a
moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry
from only a few hundred throats ! Why was it that they could
never shout like that about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and
until after they have rebelled they cannot become
conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription
from one of the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course,
to have liberated the proles from bondage. Before the
Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by the
capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been
forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the
coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into
the factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to
the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles
were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like
animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality
very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to
know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their
other activities were without importance. Left to themselves,
like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had
reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to
them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up
in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming- period of beauty and sexual desire,
they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they
died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the
care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours,
films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the
horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not
difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always
among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and
eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of
becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate
them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that
the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was
required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be
appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept
longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they
became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent
led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could
only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils
invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles
did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil
police interfered with them very little. There was a vast
amount of criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world
of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers
of every description; but since it all happened among the
proles themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of
morals they were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The
sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them.
Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that
matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the
proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were
beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and
animals are free.'
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