1984 Chapter Three (Part Two) Summary and Analysis
Brief Summary of Chapter Three (1984 Part Two)
Since his first meeting with Julia, Winston's life has changed a lot. It is following a very different trail now, and Julia is leading the way. They have finished their first detailed meeting in the woods and part having decided to not to get back to this spot for at least two more months. For some evenings, they kept meeting in the streets, however, quite cautiously to avoid catching any attention. In the Month of May, they successfully made love at a different location. It was a ruined church in a deserted countryside. However, reaching the new rendezvous point was almost too dangerous for both of them. It was a dirty place filled with the smell of pigeon dung. At other times, they met in the streets and talked only in installments. They managed to exchange one kiss during one of their short meetings in the streets. A bomb fell and both were covered with debris. Winston rose and thought Julia was dead. He kissed her and found she was alive.
Julia was twenty six years old and lived in a women's hostel, surrounded all the time by women which bored her like nothing else. Her job at the fiction department was to operate a tricky electric motor. While she was not so great at it, she still loved her job. Julia knew well about how the novels were published but was never interested in reading them since they were the same as the other commodities that sold in the market. she was a smart girl who did a lot of voluntary work. However, it was just a camouflage to hide her true self. Upon her advise, Winston also started doing voluntary work. She had also worked at Pornosec ( the section of fiction department that churned cheap pornography for sale among the proles). It was a sign of her excellent reputation. Her first sexual affair was with a sixty year old party member, who had committed suicide to escape being arrested by the thought police.
She thought life was simple and breaking rules was not bad if you could mange it without taking big risks. Any organized effort to bring down the party was futile according to Julia. She hated the party but did not generally criticize it. They never talked of getting married since they knew it was not possible. As Winston tried to tell her about his marriage and his wife, it appeared she already knew well about it. She talked well about sex and sexuality and with keen interest. Winston told her about an incident that happened when he and his wife were together and lost on a community hike. Winston had a chance to push her into a pit but he did not.
Winston and Julia have very different views of life in Oceania and there are several things that matter for Winston but Julia considers them trifle. However, despite their different views the two love each other deeply. Julia is just as optimistic as Winston is pessimistic. The two decide to meet again at the woods in their last meeting at the church. However, Julia tells Winston to follow a different route to reach there than the previous one.
There are many contradictory traits in Winston and Julia but still they complement each other beautifully. The trust between them keeps growing and so does the love with each meeting. However, this could also bring them to the verge of extinction. The party kept a close watch on party members and one wrong step could mean death for both Julia and Winston.
Chapter 3 1984 (Book Two) Detailed Summary and Analysis
Julia tells Winston that they can safely use the same hideout once more. However, they should meet there at least one or two months later. Julia’s demeanor had changed as she woke up. Ready to get back to business, Julia started fixing her dress. She was ready to depart and started planning their way back home. Winston thought he should leave the route planning to Julia since, she was obviously smarter than him at it. The numerous community hikes in the countryside around London had given her an inexhaustible knowledge of the area. She showed him a different route than the one he had reached here through. It opened at a different railway station. Julia had advised Winston to not take the same route back home ever because it was unsafe. She would leave first and then Winston will follow half an hour later.
They fixed a meeting four evenings later and Julia told him of another location where they could meet. It was a street in one of the prole areas with a crowded and noisy market. Julia would be hanging at the stalls pretending to be searching for shoelaces or sewing thread. If she thought everything was alright, she would blow her nose to signal Winston, who would otherwise not approach her or pass by without noticing or recognizing her. If they were lucky, they could talk in the middle of the crowd for forty five minutes or so.
Soon, after she had instructed Winston, she was ready to go. She was due to attend a workshop for the Junior anti sex league at seven thirty in the evening. Julia asked Winston to brush her down and remove any twigs in her hair. After that, she flung herself into his arms and kissed Winston violently. Having bid him goodbye, she departed from there. Julia moved through the woods noiselessly and was soon out of sight. Even now, Winston did not know her surname or her address. However, that made very little difference because he knew they would never meet indoors or write letters to each other.
Winston and Julia never went back to the woods. In May, they succeeded at making love just once more. It was inside a ruined church’s tower in a deserted countryside where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years ago. While it was a good hiding place, getting there was almost too dangerous. At other times, they met only in the streets in the evenings and that too for no more than half an hour. Usually, it was possible to talk in the streets after a bit of trying and that too without looking at each other. While walking down the pavements they would talk intermittently like the flicking lights of a lighthouse. Once a party member approached or they were in the proximity of a telescreen, they would stop and then start again when they were away from the telescreen. They would pause abruptly in the middle of a sentence and pick up where they dropped. The same happened when they had reached the agreed parting spot. When they would meet the next day, they started again from right where they had left without any form of introduction. Julia was quite well versed at this kind of conversation, which she called talking in installments. She talked skillfully without moving her lips.
They had managed to exchange just one kiss in almost one month of nightly meetings. They were walking silently down a side street. Julia remained quiet when they were away from the main streets. While the two were walking down the side street, there was a deafening roar and the earth shook. Winston was lying down terrified and bruised. A rocket bomb must have dropped somewhere nearby. Julia’s white face was there a few centimeters away from his. Her face and lips were white as chalk. Winston thought she was dead. He clasped her against himself and kissed her. To his surprise Julia was alive. The faces of the two were coated with plaster.
Several times, it happened that they reached their rendezvous but walked past each other without recognizing because there was a patrol around or a helicopter was hovering above their heads. Even if it had been less dangerous for the two to see each other, they could find time to meet, which was because of their long working hours. Winston worked sixty hours a week and Julia for even longer. Apart from that based on work pressure their free days varied and never coincided. In Julia’s case, she could never find an evening free. She spent a lot of time doing party work like attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior anti sex league, preparing banners for the Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaigns and similar more activities. She told Winston that she did all that to acquire the camouflage she needed. Julia suggested Winston should enroll himself for part time munition work that zealous party members did voluntarily. Winston agreed and now he was spending one evening each week doing voluntary work, assembling bits of metals and parts of bomb fuses, in an ill lit workshop where the constant hammering got mixed with the sound of the telescreen. It was intensely boring but Winston did as Julia suggested.
They used to talk in installments. The gaps in their conversation filled when they met at the church tower. It was a very hot afternoon and the square chamber above the church bells was filled with hot and stagnant air. The powerful smell of pigeon dung was also making it difficult to be there but they did not have a safer hideout. So, they sat there together for hours talking on the dirty, twig littered floor. From time to time one or the other would peep through the arrow slits to find if someone was coming.
Julia was twenty six years old and lived in a women’s hostel. She had to bear the stink of women all the time which she hated. Just as Winston had guessed, she worked on the novel writing machines of the fiction department. She liked her work that mainly included operating a tricky electric motor. She was not really clever at it, but liked using her hands to operate the machinery. She knew very well about the entire process of composing novels from the general directive of the planning committee to the final touch up by the rewrite squad. However, Julia did not care much about the novels or reading. She thought these books were just commodities like the other ones which sold in the market like the bootlaces and jam.
Julia did not remember anything before the early sixties. The only person she remembered that would talk a lot of the period before the revolution was a great grandfather. He had vanished when Julia was just eight years old. She was the captain of the hockey team in her school. Julia had remained a troop leader in the spies and before she joined the junior anti sex league she was a branch secretary in the youth league. The party had picked her to work in the Pornosec which was a mark of her excellent reputation. It was a subsection of the fiction department that turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. Julia told Winston that the people who worked in the department called it the Muck House. She worked there for a year. It produced booklets in sealed covers for distribution among the proles. These booklets bore titles like ‘Spanking Stories’ or ‘One Night in a Girls’ School’. The proles bought these titles furtively under the impression that they were buying something illegal. Winston was curious about the books. Julia thought they were rubbish and absolutely boring. There were just six plots that the department swapped a bit. Since she did not have the literary skills, she worked only on the kaleidoscopes and not in the rewrite squad. Winston was surprised to learn that all the staff in the pornosec were girls except the department heads. The party believed that girls were less likely to be corrupted by the pronography they handled compared to the men. Even married women were not allowed to work in this section. The girls were believed to be pure. However, Julia’s example showed the party was in fact blind.
Julia had her first love affair with a sixty years old party member who committed suicide to avoid arrest by the thought police. She felt lucky since if he was arrested by the thought police, they would have forced him to name her. Since then, Julia had erotic affairs with several more. Life for her was quite simple. People wanted to have a good time but the party would not let them have it. So, you could try to break the rules as best as possible. Just as the party wanted to rob people of all the pleasures, it was natural for her to break rules and avoid getting caught. She would speak of the party and her hatred for it in the crudest words. However, in general she did not criticize the party. She was not interested in the party doctrine either except where it influenced her life. Julia hardly used any Newspeak words except the ones used commonly. She did not believe in the existence of any brotherhood either. Any organized effort to bring down the party that was deemed to be a failure was pure nonsense for her. According to her, any clever person would break the rules but without risking his life. Winston wondered how many others in the younger generation thought like her who had grown up in the world of revolution, taking the party as unchangeable and accepting its authority over everything under the sky and instead of challenging the party’s authority they just evaded it like rabbits evade the hounds.
They never talked of marriage since they were certain it was nothing more than a day dream. No committee would ever sanction their marriage even if they managed to get rid of Katherine (Winston’s wife). Julia wanted to know about her. Winston told her there was a word in Newspeak called GoodThinkful which meant a natural orthodox who would not deviate from the party lines or think against the norm. Julia did not know the word or its meaning, but quite well understood the trait. When Winston started telling her about his married life, she seemed to know several important bits already. She described it to Winston like she had seen or felt it; the stiffening of Katherine’s body when Winston was trying to make love to her or how she was pushing him away when holding him tightly. Winston talked with Julia about personal things confidently. Katherine was no more a painful memory but just a bitter one. He could bear her if it had not been for one thing. It was that ceremonial event that Katherine forced Winston to go through the same night every week. She hated it but there was nothing to stop her from doing it. She would call it.. Winston stopped there. However, Julia had guessed it right. It was ‘Our duty to the party’. Winston was surprised. Julia told him, they were taught at the school and she had also attended those sex talks for the over sixteens that happened once every month. They fed the women the same lessons for years in the youth movement. In many cases it worked, but it was always difficult to tell since people could be such hypocrites according to Julia.
Julia started talking in detail about the subject. Everything used to return to her own sexuality. Whenever Winston even briefly touched upon the subject, she was capable of demonstrating such great sharpness. While Winston was still a learner in this area, Julia had very well learnt about the party’s sexual puritanism. Not just because sex gave rise to unique needs and made it challenging for the party to control the people and therefore somehow it needed to be eliminated but also because depriving people of sex gave rise to a type of hysteria that could be transformed into war fever and leader worship and proved useful during the war.
This is how Julia put it before Winston. When someone had sex he was using energy and felt a kind of happiness and satisfaction that made people care less for the other things. The party does not want people to feel like that. It wanted people to be bursting with energy all the time. All that marching up and down, cheering, waving flags and other things were simply sex gone sour. If people were happy and satisfied inside, they would not care about things like Big Brother, the Hate week, the three year plans and all the rest of the rubbish the party carried out.
Winston thought that was very true. Chastity and political orthodoxy had a direct intimate connection. Party used these bottled emotions to drive its party members. In this way, it was also able to maintain the right levels of fear, hatred, and lunatic credulity among the party members. The sex impulse in the people was dangerous for the party and therefore the party needed to manage it. However, it was not just about the sexual instinct, but the party had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. It was actually difficult to eliminate families and therefore the party encouraged them to be fond of their children in the traditional way. The party instead trained the kids to spy on their parents and report any deviations. In this way, the family just became an extension of the thought police. This was also the easiest way to keep an eye on people day and night since they will stay surrounded by informers who knew them intimately.
The next moment, Winston was again thinking of Katherine. He suspected that she would have denounced him to the thought police had she not been just too stupid to know about his unorthodox thinking. However, the thing that brought Katherine back to his mind was the enormous temperature. He started telling Julia of an event that had happened or rather failed to happen some eleven years ago. It was also a summer afternoon with stifling heat.
Three or four months had passed since their marriage and the two were lost on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They were just two or three minutes behind the others but then they took a wrong turn and found themselves on the edge of a chalk quarry. The pit was just ten or twenty minutes deep and there were boulders at its bottom. There was nobody to tell them the way and Katherine had grown very uncomfortable to know that they were lost. She felt like being involved in some wrongdoing for being away from the group of noisy hikers. Katherine was eager to go back the way they had come and start searching in the other direction. Right then something caught Winston’s attention and he asked Katherine to come and see. It was a tuft of loosestrife with two colors of flowers growing on the same root including magenta and brick red. He called Katherine to come and see. She was worried but still she came. Katherine leant over the cliff to see what it was. He was behind her and holding her waist to keep her steady. Suddenly, he realized that they were absolutely alone and no human was around to see what was happening there. The danger of a microphone being hidden was also too low. If anything happened, the microphone could only pick its sound. It was the sleepiest hour of a very hot afternoon. A thought struck him right then. Julia asked him why he did not give her a nice shove. Winston would have done it had he been the same man he was now but to his great dissatisfaction he was not so then and now he felt sorry about it.
Winston and Julia were still sitting on the dusty floor side by side. Winston pulled her closer and she rested her head on his shoulders. The sweet smell of her hair eased the smell of pigeon dung. Winston was thinking, Julia was still young and expected something from life, Winston had grown aged and experienced and knew that shoving a person from a cliff would not solve anything. He told it to Julia and she sarcastically asked why he still felt sorry at not having done it. Winston said that he preferred a positive to a negative. In a game where he could never win, some failures were better than the other types of failures. It might have only made him feel smaller in his own eyes but since there were no wins, the death of Katherine would have failed to solve the problem. There would have been a double burden on his conscience - one of killing a helpless woman and the other of deceiving himself. Winston felt that Julia's shoulders wriggled in dissent. She would always contradict him when said things like this. It was impossible for her to accept that it was naturally impossible for a man to win like Winston thought was the case in Oceania. In a way, she was conscious that she was also doomed and that the thought police would soon find out and kill her. However, a part of her mind was not ready to believe it and thought of a secret world where she could live safely. She felt that clever and bold people could win with some luck. She failed to understand that there was nothing like happiness and that the only victory lay in the far future long after you were dead and that once you had declared war on the party you could consider yourself dead.
Winston told Julia that they were dead but she contradicted in a dull voice that they were not. They were physically not dead yet but might be they were going to be in six months or five years. Winston was conscious that they could put it off for a little more time but then it was bound to happen sooner or later. It made very little difference and probably Julia was more afraid of death than him because she was younger. As long as human beings stayed human, life and death were the same things. However, Julia was not willing to agree. She was not yet a skeleton and she would soon sleep with Winston. She was sitting before him, rock solid and alive. Julia asked him if he did not like all that. He was thinking negatively and she did not want him to waste his time when she was around. She pressed her bosom against him and Winston felt her firm and ripe breasts in her overalls. It seemed her touch transferred some of the youth and vigor to his body. He felt good and told Julia that he liked it all. She asked him to stop talking about dying and to start planning the spot for the next meeting. They could once again go back to the woods since it had been a long time since they had visited the spot. However, Winston needed to take a different route this time. She had planned it all. Julia took a twig and started drawing a map on the dusty floor for Winston.