“Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else to who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself.” (Orwell 137) It would seem as if George Orwell echoes the plea in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. In chapter three of her work, Woolf explains why she did not believe that a woman living in Shakespeare’s time could have written his plays; she outlines her argument based on the social conventions imposed upon women in the Elizabethan Era. However, the deprivations of privacy that she bases her assertion on as well as the consequences of such a deprivation did not only exist in Elizabethan England; these injustices also played a very prominent role in the world of Orwell’s 1984.
The phrase “a room of one’s own” means privacy in the most basic sense. It means getting dressed in the morning without someone watching, sleeping alone without another’s snores to interrupt one’s dreams. It means having space to breathe—both literally and figuratively. Of course, having “a room of one’s own” also means much more. For with these four walls, ceiling, floor, a door, a window (if one is lucky), also comes the walk-away-factor: the ability to yell out no! and slam the door. With one’s own bed and chair comes the allowance to sit and think or lie down and weep. And if one is so privileged to own a table or desk, then a room of one’s own means the sudden endless possibilities of self-expression.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf outlined a bleak existence of woman—one colored by servitude first to one’s family and then to one’s husband, of illiteracy or, at best, clandestine scribbling in the attic. Such an existence was no doubt characteristic of 16th-century English society. However, an even bleaker existence appears in Orwell’s novel. For in the dystopia laid out, no man or woman can hope for even a closet of their own, much less a room. “The Party,” the ominous political organization which controls every facet of public and private life, takes the place of the domineering parents and husband. The secretive, Gestapo-esque “thought police” make anything above basic literacy not only impossible but suicidal. Where women could see and interact with the Elizabethan oppressive forces, the oppressive force in 1984 only partially interacted with the Party members. It would even appear as if they only interacted with individuals such as the main character, Winston Smith, on the occasion of the individual’s arrest and then indirectly through various means of surveillance.
Rather than knowing the rules of existence, and finding way to function within them or live outside of them, the inhabitants of Winston’s London functioned with the hope that they did indeed do no wrong along with the fear that inevitably festers when life-or-death guidelines remain unclear. The uncertainty regarding the “do’s and don’ts” of surviving in such a totalitarian state only became worse when combined with the even more acute uncertainty of when they watch and scrutinize. As James Tyner explains, “[D]espite the extensive surveillance and police resources of the state, arrests appear to occur capriciously, thereby generating some uncertainty about the completeness of surveillance at any specific place or time. Particularly noteworthy is the seemingly randomness of surveillance in Orwell's world and, consequently, the induced paranoia of not knowing when one is being watched” (137).
Where a woman in the 16th century need only worry about hovering family members, those living in 1984 must worry about every facial expression, every word said aloud, every action. In every Party member’s home resides the ominous telescreen—a sort of two-way television situated in such a manner as to remain visible from every corner of the apartment. But, as Winston points out,
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, the habit became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. (Orwell 2)
Such an invasion of privacy makes developing personal views and “preparing for social and civil life” near impossible (Ramsay 290). Of course, in a totalitarian state such as that of 1984, this is exactly what those in power aim for—complete control over the individual.
The Party’s control extended beyond mere scrutiny; just as women suffered arranged marriages, so too did the inhabitants of Orwell’s 1984. Though the Party members did not exist in the hopeless state that Elizabethan women existed in—slavery to “a boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger” (Woolf 2114)—they nevertheless existed in a sort of despairing situation. As Winston recalled, “All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and—thought the principle was never clearly stated—permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another.” (Orwell 65) Of course, with the defilement of marriage came the perversion of sex, with all enjoyment and privacy taken out of the act by the constant presence of the telescreen. Marriage in Shakespeare’s time meant gaining money and status; in the dystopian London, “the only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party” (65). These children then grew up to spy on their parents, and almost inevitably turned their terrified mothers and fathers over to the Thought Police.
Without privacy in the home and no freedom within one’s family, both the conditions of Orwell’s dystopia and of Elizabethan society allow for no other freedom than that of one’s own thoughts. Without privacy, they could not even fully form their ways of viewing the world. Without solitude, both Orwell’s characters and Elizabethan women did not fully grow into their humanity; how could they have ever written a work as complex as Macbeth if they did not even fully understand themselves? No, no woman in Elizabethan England could have written Romeo and Juliet and no Party member could have written Julius Caesar, though not through any fault or inability of their own. They just happened to be so unlucky as to live in unforgiving times.
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Signet Classics, 1977. Print.
Ramsay, Hayden. “Privacy, Privacies and Basic Needs.” The Heythrop Journal 51.2 (2010): 288-297. Web. 26 Apr. 2011.
Tyner, James A. “Self and Space, Resistance and Discipline: A Foucauldian Reading of George Orwell’s 1984.” Social & Cultural Geography 5.1 (2004): 130-137. Web. 26 Apr. 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006. 2113-2122. Print.
