1984 (1,3) The Golden Country

[monk222]

In his second dream of the very early morning, Winston is in his paradise, and guess who saunters into his happy dream?

Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot track wondering across it and a molehole here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees.

The girl with dark hair was coming toward him across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed, he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.

I cannot honestly accept that our very lonely protagonist is less excited by the dark-haired girl’s naked white body than by the political significance of her flinging off her clothes. I have to believe that Orwell is sacrificing verisimilitude in favor of bringing out into starker relief the heavy oppression of totalitarian rule, the way it crowds out even our most basic humanity. Though, I suppose anything is possible in a dream.

At least we are allowed to enjoy the glorious sight in the movie version starring John Hurt, in which as I recall they took this scene from the dream and made it real in the movie, when the ill-fated couple meet and enjoy a little time in their realized Golden Country before their own fall from paradise. Orwell was obviously a bit of the romantic even in an otherwise very anti-romantic novel.