Speaker 1: Section six of nineteen eighty four by George Orwell. This
legamous recording may be distributed and adapted freely for any purpose.
Part one, Chapter six. Winston was writing in his diary.
It was three years ago. It was on a dark
evening in a narrow side street near one of the
big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in
the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light.
She had a young face painted very thick. It was
really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of
it like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party
women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in
the street, and no telescreens. She said, two dollars I
For the moment, it was too difficult to go on.
He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them,
trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He
had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of
filthy words at the top of his voice, or to
bang his head against the wall, to kick over the
table and hurled the ink pot through the window, to
do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might
black out the memory that was tormenting him. Your worst enemy,
he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment,
the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into
some visible symptom. He thought of a man whom he
had passed in the street a few weeks back, a
quite ordinary looking man, a party member, aged thirty five
to forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief case. There
were a few meters apart when the left side of
the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm.
It happened again just as they were passing one another.
It was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the
clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered
thinking at the time that poor devil is done for.
And what was frightening was that the action was quite
possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking
in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that,
so far as he could see. He drew his breath
and went on writing. I went with her through the
doorway and across a back yard into a basement kitchen.
There was a bed against the wall and a lamp
on the table turned down very low. She His teeth
was set on edge. He would have liked to spit
simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen. He thought
of Catherine, his wife. Winston was married, had been married
at any rate, probably he still was married, so far
as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed
to breathe again the warm, stuffy odor of the basement kitchen,
an odor compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous,
cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the
party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so.
Only the proles used scent. In his mind, the smell
of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication. When he
had gone with that woman, it had been his first
lapse in two years or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden,
of course, but it was one of those rules that
you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was dangerous,
but it was not a life and death matter. To
be caught with the prostitute might mean five years in
a forced labor camp, not more if you had committed
no other offense, and it was easy enough provided that
you could avoid being caught in the act, the poorer
courts swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves.
Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin,
which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly, the
Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution as an outlet
for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery
did not matter very much, so long as it was
furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a
submerged and despised class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between
party members, but though this was one of the crimes
that the accused in the Great Purges invariably confessed to,
it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
The aim of the Party was not merely to event
men and women from forming loyalties which it might not
be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to
remove all pleasure from the sexual act, not love so
much as eroticism was the enemy inside marriage as well
as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to
be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and
though the principle was never clearly stated, permission was always
refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being
physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of
marriage was to beget children for the service of the party.
Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly
disgusting minor operation, like having an enemy. This again was
never put into plain words, but in an indirect way,
it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards.
There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti Sex League,
which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were
to be begotten by artificial insemination artsem, it was called
in New speak, and brought up in public institution. This,
Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow
it fitted in with the general ideology of the party.
The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or
if it could not be killed, then to distort it
and dirty it. He did not know why this was so,
but it seemed natural that it should be so, and
as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts
were largely successful. He thought again of Catherine. It must
be nine ten, nearly eleven years since they had parted.
It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For
days at a time, he was capable of forgetting that
he had ever been married. They had only been together
for about fifteen months. The party did not permit divorce,
but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there were
no children. Catherine was a tall, fair haired girl, very straight,
with splendid movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a
face that one might have called a noble until one
discovered that there was, as nearly as possible, nothing but
behind it. Very early in her married life, he had decided,
though perhaps it was only that he knew her more
intimately than he knew most people, that she had, without exception,
the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered.
She had not a thought in her head that was
not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none
that she was not capable of swallowing if the party
handed it out to her. The human sound track he
nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have
endured living with her if it had not been for
just one thing. Sex. As soon as he touched her,
she seemed to WinCE and stiffen to embrace her was
like embracing a jointed, wooden image. And what was strange
was that, even when she was clasping him against her,
he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him
away with all her strength. The rigidity of her muscles
managed to convey that impression. She would lie there with
shut eyes, neither resisting nor co operating, but submitting. It
was extraordinarily embarrassing, and after for a while, horrible. But
even then he could have borne living with her if
it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But
curiously enough, it was Catherine who refused this. They must,
she said, produce a child if they could. So. The
performance continued to happen once a week, quite regularly, whenever
it was not impossible. She even used to remind him
of it in the morning, as something which had to
be done that evening and which must not be forgotten.
She had two names for it. One was making a baby,
and the other was our duty to the party. Yes,
she had actually used that phrase. Quite soon he grew
to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed
day came round, But luckily no child appeared, and in
the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon
afterwards they parted. Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his
pen again and wrote, She threw herself down on the bed,
and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the
most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. Ay.
He saw himsel elf standing there in the dim lamp light,
with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils,
and in his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment,
which even at that moment was mixed up with the
thought of Catherine's white body, frozen forever by the hypnotic
power of the party. Why did it always have to
be like this? Why could he not have a woman
of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals
of years. But a real love affair was an almost
unthinkable event. The women of the party were all alike.
Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as party loyalty,
by careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by
the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and
in the spies and the youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans,
and martial music. The natural feeling had been driven out
of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions,
but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable,
as the party intended that they should be. And what
he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to
break down that wall of virtue, even if it were
only once in his whole life. The sexual act successfully
performed was rebellion. Desire was thought crime. Even to have
awakened Catherine. If he could have achieved it would have
been like a seduction, although she was his wife. But
the rest of the story had got to be written down.
He wrote, I turned up the lamp when I saw
her in the light. After the darkness, the feeble light
of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the
first time he could see the woman properly. He had
taken a step towards her, and then halted, full of
lust and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk
he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly possible
that the patrols would catch him on the way out.
For that matter, they might be waiting outside the door
at this moment. If he went away without even doing
what he had come here to do. It had got
to be written down, It had got to be confessed.
What he had suddenly seen in the lamp light was
that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so
thick on her face that it looked as though it
might crack, like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of
white in her hair. But the truly dreadful detail was
that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing
except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all,
he wrote hurriedly in scrabbling handwriting. When I saw her
in the light. She was quite an old woman, fifty
years old at least. But I went ahead and did
it just the same. He pressed his fingers against his
eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but
it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The
urge to shout filthy words at the top of his
voice was as strong as ever. End of Section six