1984 Summary

'1984' Summary There are few novels as influential as George Orwell’s 1984, which permeated pop culture with concepts like Big Brother and doublethink, while exploring the bleak future Orwell saw in totalitarianism. Part One 1984 begins with Winston Smith coming home to his small, run-down flat. At 39, Winston is old beyond his years and takes his time walking up the stairs, greeted at each landing by a poster stating BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. In his small flat he can dim the wall-sized telescreen and lower the volume but cannot turn it off. He keeps his back to it because it is a two-way screen. Winston lives in what is known as Airstrip One, formerly Britain, a province of a large nation-state known as Oceania. He looks out his window at the Ministry of Truth where he works revising historical records to conform with the new versions of history the government is always producing. Winston works hard to appear a dutiful and fervent member of the Party, but privately despises it and the world he lives in. He knows this makes him what is known as a thoughtcriminal and assumes he will inevitably be exposed and punished. Winston has purchased a diary from a shop in a proletariat (the lower class of people referred to as proles) neighborhood, and has discovered that the placement of the telescreen in his apartment allows for a small area where he cannot be observed. He skips lunch at the canteen in order to come home and write his forbidden thoughts in this diary out of the telescreen’s range. It is a small act of rebellion. Winston admits to a sexual attraction to a woman at the Ministry of Truth, Julia. He has not acted on his attraction because he thinks she might be spying on him, and suspects she would inform on him. He is also paranoid about his superior, a man named O’Brien whom he suspects is part of the Brotherhood, a resistance movement led by the famous terrorist Emmanuel Goldstein. Part Two When Winston goes to work the next day, he sees Julia with her arm in a sling. When she stumbles, he helps her, and she passes him a note that reads I Love You. He and Julia begin a sexual affair, which is forbidden by the Party; Julia is even a member of the Anti-Sex League. Their first encounter is in a rural area. Later they begin renting a room above the shop where Winston purchased his diary. It becomes clear to Winston that Julia despises the Party as much as he does. The affair sparks memories in Winston of the civil war and his ex-wife, Katharine. At work, Winston meets a colleague named Syme who tells him about the dictionary he is working on for the new official language, Newspeak. Syme tells Winston that Newspeak is designed to make it more difficult for people to think in complex ways. Winston expects that this sentiment will cause Syme to disappear, and a few days later Syme is gone. Winston and Julia create a private sanctuary in the rented room, and tell each other that they are already dead. They believe that the Party will discover their crimes and execute them, but that it cannot take away their feelings for each other. O’Brien contacts Winston, confirms his involvement with the Brotherhood, and invites him to be a part of the resistance. Winston and Julia go to O’Brien’s large, well-appointed home and take an oath to join the Brotherhood. O’Brien gives Winston a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book. Winston and Julia spend their time together reading it, learning the truth behind how the Party maintains its hold on society. They also learn about the use of a technique called doublethink, which allows Party members to believe contradictory concepts with ease, and how history has been changed to support perpetual warfare, which is used to keep a permanent state of emergency in place for crowd control purposes. Goldstein also argues that a revolution would be possible if the proles rose up en masse to oppose the government. While in their rented room, Winston and Julia are denounced by the shop owner, a member of the Thought Police, and arrested. Part Three Winston and Julia are taken to the Ministry of Love for punishment, and learn that O’Brien is actually a loyal party member who poses as a supporter of The Brotherhood in order to expose the disloyal. O’Brien begins torturing Winston. O’Brien is very open about the Party’s desire for power, and tells Winston openly that once he is broken and forced to change his thoughts in support of the Party, he will be placed back into the world for a time as an example, and then killed when his usefulness in that capacity is exhausted. Winston endures horrific pain and psychological stress as he is forced to adopt obviously untrue positions, such as stating that 2 2 5. The goal of the torture is to force Winston to abandon logic in favor of absorbing and repeating whatever the Party tells him. Winston confesses to a lengthy list of imaginary crimes. Winston breaks, but O’Brien is not satisfied, as Winston defiantly tells him that he still loves Julia and O’Brien cannot take that away from him. O’Brien tells him he will betray Julia in Room 101. Winston is taken there, and O’Brien reveals that they know everything there is to know about Winston- including his greatest irrational fear, rats. A wire cage is fitted over his face, and rats are placed in the cage. O’Brien tells Winston that the rats will gouge out his eyes and Winston loses the last bits of his sanity in terror, and just as the rats are coming for him he tells O’Brien to substitute Julia. Having betrayed Julia completely, Winston is truly broken. He is re-educated and released. He spends his days drinking heavily at a cafe. A few days later he meets Julia in a park, and they discuss their torture. Julia admits that she broke as well, and betrayed him. They both realize that their love for one another has been destroyed. They no longer care for each other as they once did. Winston goes to a cafe and sits there alone as the telescreens report an important victory for Oceania in the war against Eurasia. Winston is happy and has no more thoughts of rebellion, thinking that he loves Big Brother, and cannot wait to finally be executed.

Definition and Examples of Bowdlerisms

Definition and Examples of Bowdlerisms Definition Bowdlerism is the practice of of removing or restating any material in a text that might be considered offensive to some readers. Verb: bowdlerize. The term bowdlerism is an eponym derived from Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who in 1807 published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeares playsa version in which words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. Examples and Observations Long before the British physician Thomas W. Bowdler (1754-1825) and his sister, Henrietta Bowdler (1754-1830), took it upon themselves to make the plays of William Shakespeare safe for innocent eyes, the wholesale editing of another authors writing so that it might be more palatable to prudish tastes was known as castration to some, winnowing by others. But with the publication of the first edition of the Family Shakespeare in 1807, the world of letters got a new verbbowdlerizeto identify the process of literary expurgation. . . . Immensely popular in their time, these sanitized versions of the plays were the principal text by which Englands national poet reached thousands of impressionable readers for close to a century, the dialogue discreetly pruned of any reference to God or Jesus, with every hint of sexual pleasure or misconduct snipped out. . . .Some discriminating readers were outraged, to be sure. A writer for the British Critic railed that the Bowdlers had purged and castrat ed Shakespeare, tattooed and beplaistered him, and cauterized and phlebotomized him. But bowdlerism was far from being abandoned, and was adopted by numerous successors, Noah Webster and his heavily expurgated American dictionaries and William Michael Rossettis watered-down British edition of Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass among the more egregious examples.(Nicholas A. Basbanes, Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World. HarperCollins, 2005) Perhaps there is no greater tribute to the supposed power of literacy and no greater literary testament to unresolved infantile conflicts than 19th-century bowdlerism.More than words were changed. Double entendres and sexual allusions of various sorts were cut out or restated. In King Lear, the Fools codpiece song was eliminated, as was Gonerils lament about the knights brothel activities. Pepyss faithful and literate recording of his sexual experiences, and fanciful pictures, such as the voyeuristic Lilliputian army that subdued Gulliver or Swifts classically nonerotic detailing of the Brobdignagian breast, fared no better.(Richard S. Randall, Freedom and Taboo: Pornography and the Politics of a Self Divided. University of California Press, 1989)Before and After the Bowdlers[T]he practice of bowdlerism was already well established before the Bowdler family started to wield the blue pencil. Charles Wesley in 1744 published his Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems, From the Most Celeb rated Authors, in which about 100 poems have lines missing or substituted. Subsequent decades saw pruned or purged collections of poets as diverse as the Earl of Rochester, Abraham Cowley, and Matthew Prior. . . .Although bowdlerism is regarded as something of a joke from a contemporary liberated viewpoint, it has proved far more tenacious and widespread than is generally realized. Many works lacking any tincture of obscenity, some at the heart of the English literary tradition, are bowdlerized. It is only fairly recently that school editions of Shakespeare have become unexpurgated. An American study by James Lynch and Bertrand Evans, High School English Textbooks: A Critical Examination (1963) showed that all of the eleven prescribed editions of Macbeth were bowdlerized. Most editions of Gullivers Travels still excise the grosser physical details. In the United States hardly a year passes without some protest over prescribed school texts regarded as blasphemous or profane in some w ay.(Geoffrey Hughes, An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. M.E. Sharpe, 2006) Bowdlerism and CensorshipIn Dr. Bowdlers Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (1992), Noel Perrin distinguishes between censorship and what he calls bowdlerism. While the former is generally done by governments for political reasons, bowdlerism is done by individuals for moral ones. While censorship is usually imposed on books before they are published, and leads to their being withdrawn, bowdlerism comes afterwards, and is a form of editing. The book in question still appears, but in a form judged suitable to what is seen as an audience needing protection.(Philip Thody, Dont Do It!: A Dictionary of the Forbidden. St. Martins Press, 1997)Contemporary Bowdlerism . . . and FoodBowdlerism targeted profanity and sexual explicitness and [Thomas] Bowdlers activities led to the progressive sanitising (or bowdlerising) of a range of workseven the Bible was a targeted text. Clearly, these days the definition of dirt has shifted considerably and the goals of modern-day bowdlerites are very different. Texts are now likely to be cleansed of references to things like race, ethnicity, and religion.The US has seen a lot of these kinds of cleaning-up activities in recent years. They might even extend to the food superstitions of todaycalories, carbohydrates, cholesterol, sugar, caffeine, and salt. Apparently, US publishers are now expected to omit references to, and illustrations of, foods that are high in these shocking substances. . . . In her account of the rampant sanitizing of textbooks and state education testing services in the US, Diane Ravitch includes a substantial hit list of foods . . ..The banned substances include things like bacon, butter, margarine, cakes, sweets, coffee, condiments, corn chips, cream, cream cheese, doughnuts, French fries, fruit punches, gravy, honey, jam, jelly, preserves, ketchup, juice drinks, pickles, pies, potato chips, pretzels, salad dressings, mayonnaise, salad oil, shortening, salt, fizzy drinks, sour cream, su gar (of all kinds), tea, whipped cream. The list goes on.(Kate Burridge, Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History. HarperCollins Australia, 2011) Pronunciation: BODE-ler-iz-em