Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he would write, “The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.” The totalitarian society in that novel attempts to dominate and wither away private and personal life, so independence of thought, the pursuit of privacy, desire, passion, and pleasure are dangerous acts of resistance. And desire is subjective, personal, unpredictable, corruptible, but not entirely controllable, either by individuals or their societies. Desire and its fulfillment are not happiness, when happiness means a steady-state emotion, a placated heart and mind; they are closer to joy, which erupts and subsides unpredictably and can appear amid danger and difficulty. Permanence—the idea of stabilizing something, which is usually predicated on controlling a lot of other things—is part of what he objects to. He also objects to the gutting of privacy. A society seeking to reinvent human nature wants to reach down into every psyche and rearrange it. Bread can be managed by authoritarian regimes, but roses are something individuals must be free to find for themselves, discovered and cultivated rather than prescribed. “We know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” Orwell declares at the end of “The Prevention of Literature,” and the roses in “bread and roses” mean a kind of freedom that flourishes with privacy and independence. His version of socialism doesn’t involve captivity. He writes, “The real object...