1984
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Does Winston Hate Julia
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Tom
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Jun 24, 2020 07:14AM
New to goodreads and just come across the function to start discussions. Noticed a Question, Does Winston Love Julia? To which i think, no. Think it`s a fairly easy one, though i accept that given Orwell`s mystery one can never say for sure. A comment on that question said, `I think he hates her`. That`s a very interesting question. I would lean to hate being a strong word, but resentful and disappointed in her. He is resentful that she is more free than him, as her freedom comes from defying the party, with little thought for what the party are doing. He is disappointed also as he he had expected Julia to not only be a rebel to the system but want to overthrow the system.
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It depends on what love is for you! love isn't a mathematical concept to be singular with proof, it varies on the person experiencing it- sometimes people confuse it with the feeling of attachment or validation or just overflow of oxytocin in your brain, coming back to the question, I think Winston realized in the end that he puts up the confrontation of his greatest fear over Julia and realized that he is selfish enough to not surrender himself in the name of love and that is the reason he did not try to get in touch with her again or even bother gathering information about her, classic George orwell style!
Jay wrote: "It depends on what love is for you! love isn't a mathematical concept to be singular with proof, it varies on the person experiencing it- sometimes people confuse it with the feeling of attachment ..."I love this! Love is not something that can be easily understood. Everyone perceives it in a different way and acts upon it in different ways. Love makes us do stupid things sometimes.
I honestly don't think Winston hated Julia but I don't feel as though he loved her either.
Arianna wrote: "Jay wrote: "It depends on what love is for you! love isn't a mathematical concept to be singular with proof, it varies on the person experiencing it- sometimes people confuse it with the feeling of..."yes, exactly Arianna, we do a lot of stupid things depending on our perception, you never really live to actually test your love to the extremity that the author took, yes you do take vows and promise the world to your lover but never actually put it to test!
Arianna wrote: "Jay wrote: "It depends on what love is for you! love isn't a mathematical concept to be singular with proof, it varies on the person experiencing it- sometimes people confuse it with the feeling of..."Jay wrote: "It depends on what love is for you! love isn't a mathematical concept to be singular with proof, it varies on the person experiencing it- sometimes people confuse it with the feeling of attachment ..."
For me love is dropping a knee and doing some trollop from behind against the bins. I hate all this namby pamby, toxic masculinity. ' its ok to cry'.
Winston and Julia are a product of the Party, they aren't proles so they have received more Party indoctrination, and that means they haven't been allowed to fall in love in the same way. You see examples of proles in the book who have identifiable human feelings, they protect their families etc. so you can imagine them having normal, but not very refined, soap opera style romances and using phrases like 'going steady' or whatever. They may not talk about the word love, but they have been left to feel love, if that makes sense, and because they still use the expressions that the working classes have always used for it, they do still get it. The 'intellectuals' like Winston and Julia on the other hand seem to be encouraged to look down on that sort of emotional behaviour by the Party because it is actually a threat to them, in that Winston tries to put Julia before Big Brother, and by extension that makes him bold enough to try and join the Brotherhood. They don't have the words to express how they feel, and at some point that starts to weaken the strength of their bond. The question is can you feel something if you have lost the word for something; I would say yes, you can, because love is such a basic across all cultures it is biological as well as social, but you may not understand what is happening to you in the same way if all the cultural stuff societies produce to help us navigate these feelings is suppressed.
The Ministry of Love, for example, is really all about fear, not love. What WInston and Julia have been fed from the Party structure is how to respond to torture, not love, so everything is bound up in some way with the inevitability of painful punishment from the Party, not the usual cultural markers to help us deal with the individual experience of attraction, breaking up, eventual death of a partner, etc. They are doing something forbidden, they are inviting the 'love' of the Party (which is actually cruelty and torture) because they know that something is wrong, they know their society is missing love and they don't feel complete in themselves, so although in theory they try and find love in each other, they are actually doing it to get the attention of the Party, to protest the Party but to also receive the love of Room 101. That is why the Party is represented by a 'Big Brother' figure, someone who is loving, who you can look up to etc., who knows more than you do. You want a big brothre figure in life to show you love and attention. Newspeak means there is no ideological space to call these things wrong or bad, or explain the difference between love and hate; they are the one thing in this book. There is just no ideological space for personal experience outwith the collective experience of the Party as family in 1984; love comes from O'Brian as the representative of Big Brother, as much if not more than Julia in this sense.
No I don't not think that he hates her. At first, he hated the idea of her because he thought she was a thought police. And then, when he found out that she hates the party and thinks like him, he started to love the idea of her, love her for making him less lonely and feeling more sane. I don't think Winston ever hated or loved Julia, he just hated and then loved the idea of her.
I think it's hard to understand whether or not Winston and Julia loved or hated each other. Orwell makes it pretty clear that their relationship is a political act rather than one genuinely based on a deep emotional connection. Also, the world of 1984 is one where humanity and the idea of identity and individuality is rapidly being destroyed. The use of Big Brother, and Party, the Ministry of Truth where Winston works literally erasing and fabricating history, the Thought Police and Room 101 ensures that no one in Oceania can control their lives or their own emotions. So Winston and Julia's relationship is born out of necessity --> not for love or hate, but a need to express themselves genuinely in some part of their life. The question isn't for them about love or hate, it's about survival, both physically, emotionally and mentally.
So for us as readers, it is difficult to understand this because we aren't subjected to the world of 1984. For us the questions are "Do they love each other?" and "Do they hate each other?" because we simply do not understand the complexity of their innate need for cognitive liberation. Their attraction (or distain) to/of one another is an allegory used by Orwell to explore a world where humanity's desires are ripped away. He isn't trying to comment on whether Winston manifested love or hate for Julia, he's trying to comment on what happens when human emotions can't manifest authentically.
The way I see it, they were merely products of their environment, they neither loved nor hated each other, rather, reacted according to how the current forces of the party's power allowed them to. When they saw themselves as just cogs in the party's machine, they saw sex and intimacy as a way of escaping their reality, therefore, "loved it"; after their time in the Ministry of Love, they saw each other as the embodiment of the party's power and the lengths it could go to hurt its subjects, and, therefore, were conditioned to "hate it", like dogs barking at brooms after getting smacked.
