George Orwell, in his novel, 1984, has created a bleak totalitarian society in which The Party has become all powerful and their goal is to control all thoughts, all actions and to suppress all individuality. Love of family, romantic love and sexual love are all key to a person's individuality and are, therefore, completely forbidden within Orwell's fictional society. The tensions that this creates amongst the main characters in 1984, as the state believes that love of Big Brother is the only acceptable love, is symbolic of the struggle to survive as human beings in this totalitarian state. Winston Smith, the protagonist is this story, spends much of his life thinking about what is lost ...view middle of the document...
Parsons is arrested, turned in by his daughter. He tells Winston, "Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit" (Orwell 233).Winston, in his search for his own humanity, sees and understands this but, in his mind, compares it to the faint memories that he still has of his mother and sister. He recalls how, while in hiding, his mother gives away most of the chocolate that she finds to her two children even though she, herself, is starving. He also knows that his mother and sister, in some way, died so he could live, in an act of loyalty that was no longer possible. He remembered a time "when there were still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason" (Orwell 30). Although Winston still has faint memories of a time when family love and loyalty were important we see through his eyes how the bonds between parents and children have been completely severed.Just as the Party has affected love between parents and children they have also poisoned the relationships between men and women. They created Junior Spies to undermine the relationship between children and their parents and they created the Junior Anti-Sex League as a propaganda organization used to teach sexual orthodoxy and control desire. Sex is only allowed for conceiving children and sex for any other reason is considered a crime punishable by death. If the Party could do away with sex and family all together they would do it in order to eliminate the risk of attachments other than those to Big Brother but, of course, they need more loyal and faithful party members. Winston's own marriage was terrible for him because there was no pleasure in the relationship, only his wife, Katherine, "doing her duty for the party." When Wins...
