Context and Authorial Purpose (HSC SSCE English Standard): Revision Notes

Context and Authorial Purpose

Understanding context in Nineteen Eighty-Four

Context refers to the circumstances surrounding the creation and reception of a literary text. When studying George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, understanding context helps illuminate the author's intentions and the novel's enduring significance. Context should inform your reading of the text, but never dominate your analysis. Your comments on context must consider how the circumstances in which the text was written and received influenced its meaning and impact.

Literary context

Literary context encompasses the form, genre, and conventions within which a work is written. Orwell's novel operates within several overlapping genres, each contributing to its power and meaning.

Dystopian fiction

Nineteen Eighty-Four exemplifies dystopian fiction, a genre that imagines nightmarish future societies to critique present-day trends. Understanding the conventions of dystopian fiction helps readers recognise how Orwell subverts and extends these expectations.

What is dystopian fiction?

Writers create dystopias (the opposite of utopias) to comment on distinctive features and trends in their own societies. In a dystopian society, the conditions of human life are bleak, characterised by deprivation, oppression, terror, or all three. These imagined worlds function as allegories—stories that comment on and criticise contemporary society to serve as warnings about potential futures.

Key features of dystopian fiction:

• Patriarchal, totalitarian rule by an all-powerful government or leader
• An imagined near-future setting that feels plausible
• Systematic oppression and social control leading to loss of individual identity
• Pervasive surveillance creating an atmosphere of mistrust
• Extensive use of censorship, propaganda, and indoctrination to control thoughts
• Desensitisation to violence and cruelty

How Nineteen Eighty-Four uses dystopian conventions:

Orwell drew inspiration from two notable examples of dystopian fiction written between the World Wars: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. However, Orwell extended these conventions in significant ways.

The novel envisions a future where society is oppressed and ruled absolutely by a totalitarian, patriarchal entity known as the Party. This functions as a stark warning against the dangers of allowing totalitarian governments to seize control and operate without checks on their power.

Atmosphere of fear and oppression:

The citizens of Oceania inhabit a constant state of fear from multiple sources:

• Fear of external enemies through the continuous state of supposed war with either Eurasia or Eastasia
• Fear of the Thought Police and the consequences of any action or thought that might result in imprisonment, torture, or vaporisation

The Party functions as an all-powerful force of oppression and control, systematically destroying individual identity whilst ensuring the population lives in poverty, exhaustion, and misery.

Psychological impact:

Dystopian fiction frequently explores how oppressive societies affect the individual mind. Winston's difficulty retrieving and trusting his memories, combined with his struggles to determine reality from imagination, emphasises how the oppressive regime influences not only physical surroundings but also mental states. This highlights the importance of memory in creating a sense of self. Winston cannot reliably remember whether life was better, or if he was happier, before the Revolution—the Party has corrupted even his inner world.

Science fiction

Science fiction as a genre typically contains speculation about humanity's future and the impact of science and technology on society. It is set in an alternate time and place, often featuring advanced or speculative technologies.

Orwell's approach to technology:

Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a future civilisation based on technologies and scientific advancements that were underdeveloped at the time of writing. However, the novel deliberately avoids the more fantastical elements commonly found in science fiction, such as space travel or highly advanced societies set hundreds of years in the future.

Instead, Orwell's vision of the future resembles wartime London, with technology and science that do not represent a huge leap from the technology of his time. For example:

• Typewriters have been replaced by dictation machines
• Orwell predicted the rise in popularity of televisions through the medium of telescreens, even imagining them as wall-mounted flatscreens—something that would have seemed very futuristic in the 1940s

Communication and control:

Despite these limitations, Orwell effectively explored the role communication plays in society and the impact it can have on the quality of human life. He examines the implications of manipulating humanity's most basic communication technology—language itself—and speculates on how technological advancements would further alter this and serve as instruments of oppression.

Satire

Nineteen Eighty-Four can also be understood as political satire, though it differs from traditional satirical works in significant ways.

What is political satire?

Political satire is a piece of fiction in which the inconsistencies and dangers of political issues or figures are exposed, criticised, or ridiculed. Most obviously, Orwell's novel satirises totalitarianism, largely modelled on Soviet communism at the time.

Satirical techniques:

Orwell takes typical features of an authoritarian state and imagines them developed to extremes:

• Big Brother is not merely a dictator; he is an omnipresent, immortal entity
• The Party does not merely spy on its citizens and enforce obedience; it brainwashes them into actively betraying each other

This exaggeration enables readers to more clearly perceive the effects of totalitarianism and its associated absurdities on society.

Distinctive features:

However, the novel notably lacks the humour typically associated with satire. Instead, Orwell constructs his fictional world to offer a contrast to, or an exaggeration of, present society, with the aim of critiquing political and social trends.

Orwell's intentions:

Orwell himself considered the book a warning in the form of satire. He did not believe that this kind of society would inevitably arrive, but that something resembling it could arrive if people failed to remain vigilant.

To create this warning, he drew on events that had already happened. For example, the slogan "2+2=5" was a real political slogan from the Soviet Union, promising to complete the industrialising Five Year Plan in four years. Orwell satirised this as an example of how totalitarian regimes suspend reality and create their own distorted versions of truth.

Social context

A novel's social context encompasses the social and political environment in which it was written and the environment in which it is understood. Orwell's main influences were political and rooted in the period from 1914 to 1945—a time spanning two world wars and a major economic recession.

Social and political influences

Nineteen Eighty-Four emerged from an era that encompassed an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism. This struggle shaped much of the novel's content and concerns.

Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Nazi Germany:

Orwell drew extensively on Stalin's authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union, as well as Hitler's Nazi Germany and the persecution of Jewish people, to imagine a society that extended already horrific regimes to an exaggerated degree:

• Big Brother is widely interpreted to have been modelled on Stalin
• The choice of a Jewish name for Emmanuel Goldstein reflects the Nazi party's antisemitic rhetoric and ethnic cleansing policies
• The rise of Hitler and the scapegoating of Jewish people and other 'undesirables' had a profound effect on Orwell

Leon Trotsky and Emmanuel Goldstein:

Goldstein is also modelled on the exiled Soviet Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was an influential politician during the beginning of the Soviet Union but was expelled from the Communist Party after a power struggle with Stalin. This mirrors Goldstein's character in the book, as he is rumoured to be one of the founders of Oceania alongside Big Brother, but left to found the Brotherhood resistance movement.

Orwell's political position:

Orwell positioned himself firmly against communism and considered himself a democratic socialist. He wished to see ordinary people in control and was uncomfortable with the communist idea of an intellectual elite taking power on the workers' behalf.

The dangers of this elite control are reflected in the fact that members of the Inner Party have more freedoms than average citizens, such as being able to turn off their telescreens and live in relative wealth rather than poverty.

The Proles:

The Proles make up 85% of the population of this so-called perfect totalitarian state of Oceania. Interestingly, they are not controlled through propaganda, surveillance, fear, and threats. Instead, they are controlled by deliberate corruption and the turning of a blind eye to vice. They are allowed to commit crimes, use drugs, read pornography and tabloid newspapers, gamble, drink, and engage in prostitution.

This seems to suggest a bleakly caricatured view of the working classes and their inability to rise up and take charge—a view that may reflect Orwell's complicated relationship with class politics.

Contemporary relevance:

Today's readers may view the social context of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a prophetic exploration of the rise of social media and the internet to collect every gesture, purchase, or comment we make online. Media plays a vital role in the way we respond to modern issues in society, making Orwell's warnings about surveillance and information control particularly resonant.

Historical context

Historical context refers to the specific events, circumstances, and atmosphere of the time when a text was written and received. Understanding this context illuminates Orwell's choices and the novel's original impact.

Post-war Britain and Orwell's life

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, and Airstrip One (formerly London) resembles a mixture of post-war London and a communist state:

• Examples of post-war austerity in Britain are evident throughout the novel, such as the poor-quality Victory products and the rationing of chocolate
• The bombed-out buildings and general atmosphere of deprivation would have been immediately recognisable to Orwell's original readers

Orwell's influences:

Orwell himself was born in 1903 and was heavily influenced by the science fiction writing of H.G. Wells, as well as Aldous Huxley and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are political statements presented as dystopian fiction.

He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four to serve as an unequivocal warning to his readers that the kind of future presented in the novel should never become reality. He used his writing to express his powerful political feelings, including the principles of democratic socialism, and deliberately created a society that resembled societies that existed or had existed during his lifetime.

Historical precedents in the novel

Many of the ideas in Nineteen Eighty-Four are based on historic precedent, making the novel's warnings all the more chilling:

Soviet practices:

• The idea of thoughtcrime was similar to the USSR's attempts to silence and discredit political dissidents by committing them to psychiatric hospitals and 'treating' them with psychoactive drugs
• Stalin encouraged a secret police force to spy on citizens, and encouraged citizens to spy on each other
• The Great Purge was a major period of assassinations of anyone who disagreed with Stalin and the Communist Party, similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four's vaporisation

The post-war world:

The novel's perpetually warring superstates are reminiscent of the constant threat of nuclear conflict following the Second World War. The atmosphere of fear and instability in the novel reflects real anxieties of Orwell's time.