Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

Margaret Atwood has made a different case for why Nineteen Eighty-Four is not quite the dystopia it is often taken for. “Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism—of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and where the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face, for ever,” she wrote in The Guardian in 2003. She rests her case on the final section of the book, the appendix on Newspeak cast as a historical document, noting that “the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it’s my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he’s usually been given credit for.” She borrowed this device to suggest in the mock-scholarly afterword to her novel The Handmaid’s Tale that the regime at the heart of it would likewise perish.