1984 & THT Critics Flashcards
Strachey
Orwell’s aims - nightmare
“Orwell leant his… imagination to the task of describing a nightmare, in order, if possible, to avert it”
Pritchett
Orwell’s mindset
“Hope has died in Mr Orwell’s wintry mind, and only pain is known”
Adolf Hitler
1925 ‘Mein Kampf’
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”
Howe 1957
Winston and Julia
“Winston Smith and Julia come through as rudimentary figures because they are slowly learning… what it means to be human”
Strachey 1962
Love
“The innate subversiveness of love is well displayed”
Strachey 1962
Julia
“Julia turns out to be by no means a romantic revolutionary… she just wants some hearty sex”
Read 1950
Enemies to totalitarianism
“The greatest enemies of the totalitarian state are not ideas… but aesthetic and erotic sensations”
Orwell ‘Politics and the English Language’
Political language
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”
McCarthy
Women in THT
“It is a woman’s world, even though governed and policed by men”
Kika
children 1984
“In 1984, children are essentially used to break up the family unit”
Berkes
Language
“Language becomes a method of mind control”
Atwood
THT desires
“All prohibitions are founded upon a denial of our desires”
Atwood
THT content
“I would not put into this book anything that humankind has not already done”
Hammer
THT Gilead
Gilead “strikes us, not as a techno-dystopia, but as a reactionary step backwards in time”
Orwell ‘Politics and the English Language’
Language and thought
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”
Orwell
What he was writing
“every… serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism”
Atwood ‘Orwell and Me’
What Orwell was writing
“Orwell was writing a satire about Stalin’s Soviet Union”
Ball
Women in dystopia
“women are at the margins… existing mainly as a source of frustration, irritation or temptation”
Kellner
Society in 1984
“a totally oppressive society“
Atwood ‘Orwell and Me’:
Totalitarianism
“Hitler was bad but dead”
Atwood ‘Orwell and Me’
Orwell’s impact on Atwood
“Orwell alert[ed] me early to the danger flags I’ve tried to watch out for since”
Gray
Utopia
“a project is utopian if there are no circumstances under which it can be realised”
Reshmi
Women’s rights in Gilead
“In the Gileadean patriarchy a woman is denied the right to possess or to have control over her own body”
