Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade, stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted. Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one’s skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring doves. He was a bit early.
The opening of Chapter 2 in Part 2 of 1984 shows Orwell at his most lyrical and evocative, painting an idyll of bliss, as Winston and Julia meet for their secret rendezvous.
The lengths the lovers take to conceal their meeting reflect their extreme justified paranoia of a world where Big Brother is watching you, with the absurd danger of concealed microphones. This theme of the surveillance society, evolving from Bentham’s panopticon to make the whole world a jail, includes arbitrary official questioning of travellers, but luckily Winston and Julia evade such unwelcome attention. On the train, proles freely explain their interest in obtaining black market butter, a thoughtcrime inconceivable for a Party member.
The tension of their meeting reflects Winston’s extreme state of anxiety, produced by the totalitarian context. He hears Julia walk up behind him and his first assumption is that he will be arrested. She parts the bushes to lead him on to the secret place, like the Batmobile entering the bat cave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5xt2z07ebk
This beautiful paradise, this grassy knoll shut in by tall saplings, has an air of unreality, a sense that this love is impossible and cannot last. After they kiss, with Winston feeling incredulity and pride, he explains his fear that she was in the Thought Police, which Julia takes as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise. Her black-market chocolate stirs powerful troubling memories. As they discuss the need to conform to be safe, she tells Winston she could see he was against the Party.
Standing in the shade of hazel bushes, the sunlight filtering through innumerable leaves, Winston has a shock of recognition, his dream of the Golden Country. A thrush pours forth a torrent of song before them, making obeisance to the sun. As they make love in the hidden grove, Julia flings away her overalls in a gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.
Winston’s sense that animal instinct is the force that will tear the Party to pieces leads him to see their embrace as a political act. When a pair of overalls symbolises civilization, representing the themes of austerity, production, conformity and shapelessness, 1984 draws us into the vast trauma of human life in the mid twentieth century. The confused puritanical ideologies and incompatible messianic visions of political progress have inevitably clashed in the great wars from which the world is still recoiling today.
Orwell himself observed this trauma at first hand, seeing British colonialism in Burma as a policeman’s son, studying with England’s social elite at the aristocratic Eton College, demanding a sense of reality through his studies of the down and out in Paris and London and the suffering of the poor on the road to Wigan pier, and most definitively, seeing the incoherence of progressive ideology as he fought with the Trotskyites in the Spanish Civil War, documented in his Homage to Catalonia.
Orwell’s greatest novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, are cautionary fables of the hypocrisy of communism. Yet they both retain a sense that communist ideals could be worthwhile if only some way of approaching them could be found that was compatible with human culture, without the appalling Procrustean twists. The awful incompatibility between totalizing Stalinist autocracy and human values generates the trauma of 1984, seen most vividly in this chapter in the great relief felt from a brief escape from the suffocating grip of the anonymous mass society of the modern world.