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Orwell, Masculinity, and Feminist Criticism
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11244 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1986 |
5,167 Words |
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Arthur Eckstein
Arthur Eckstein is a assistant professor of history at the
University of Maryland and has recently published essays on
George Orwell in Modern Age and Chronicles of Culture |
THE ORWELL MYSTIQUE
A Study in Male Ideology
Daphne Patai
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press
1984
I once showed an essay of mine on George Orwell's political ideas to an Orwellian scholar who responded, "Yes, fine--but now let's talk about the real man." There followed a long dialogue not about socialism in the 1930s and 1940s, but on loneliness, community and family, autonomy, intimacy and despair, sexuality and sadomasochism. This remains the single most illuminating conversation on Orwell I have ever had.
George Orwell's political attitudes had their origins in an eccentric, complicated, and conflict-idden personality. It is all the more important to realize this because Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was not by any means a systematic thinker. Rather, he generally wrote in hot emotional reaction to his immediate perceptions of events--and these fierce emotional reactions (which are, after all, one source of his writing's enormous power) came out of his difficult personality. One simply cannot write about Orwell's politics, then, without at lest attempting to come to grips with that personality. Yet the evolution of Orwell's political attitudes is often presented as if it had taken place in a calm, Platonic vacuum, one idea firmly linked to its predecessor. Perhaps this is because most of us who write about Orwell are academics, for whom the coherent evolution of ideas is very important. But Orwell was not an academic (he hated most academics); I suppose he would have called himself a political journalist. The recent "authorized"
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