Now right-wing, anti-‘woke’ doublethink has come for George Orwell
Have you heard that the writer who invented the Thought Police has fallen victim to modern-day thought-policing? Perhaps not, if you don’t follow anti-“woke,” right-wing media, but in their telling, George Orwell is headed for the memory hole.
Anna Funder, a biographer of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, recently called Orwell “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” at a literary festival in Cheltenham, England. This comment was received by the Daily Mail, the Gateway Pundit and the Daily Caller, among others, as heralding Orwell’s imminent demise — “The Left Is Seriously Trying to Cancel George Orwell Now,” as the Daily Caller put it.
On social media, people went further, putting the cancellation in the past tense. One tweet — “They cancelled George Orwell lol” — garnered an “Uh what” response from Elon Musk.
A similar furor resulted when my recent novel was announced in 2021, described by the publisher as a “feminist” retelling of Orwell’s classic “1984.” The very idea of such a book was called “Orwellian” and compared to the erasure and falsification of history in “1984.”
The tone of these reactions was invariably knowing: Of course, the woke were always coming for Orwell; we predicted it all along. They marvel at the irony. As the Daily Caller concluded in its piece on Funder’s remark, “If only someone had written a book warning about this sort of thing.”
Except Orwell isn’t being canceled by the left. He has come under modern scrutiny for such personal failings as his shabby treatment of his wife, his alleged attempt to rape a childhood friend, his homophobic remarks and his colonial service. But to discuss unpleasant biographical facts is not to argue that everyone who behaves badly should be excised from history.
And it’s natural to talk about the darker sides of Orwell, since his worst attitudes do creep into his work. “1984” is a case in point. The evil Party in the book imposes a cartoonish version of feminism on its members, forbidding perfume and makeup, and forcing women to wear gender-neutral overalls and short hair. When Julia and Winston find a hideaway where they can safely express themselves, for him it means voicing his political opinions; for her it means putting on pretty dresses and making cups of tea for him.
More startling, Winston imagines murdering women on several occasions. Before he ever speaks to Julia, he has fantasized about raping and killing her. Julia says of the women’s hostel where she lives, “Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” and chides Winston for not following through on his idea of killing his wife.
So why not cancel a writer who (arguably) minimizes femicide and rape? Because, despite the recent scaremongering about cancel culture, the overwhelming majority of readers still understand that authors are imperfect, that most books contain both good and bad, and that this is not a crisis that calls for radical solutions. If they mention Charles Dickens’s cruelty toward his wife, they trust people to know they aren’t calling for all copies of “A Christmas Carol” to be burned. Usually, that trust is justified. But it serves the ideological purposes of the right to imagine a left-wing campaign against a writer it has long claimed, selectively, as its own.
For decades, conservatives have used Orwell’s opposition to totalitarianism to justify the Cold War he explicitly denounced and attack the socialist principles he risked his life defending. They claim his support when they condemn the removal of statues of Confederate generals — though Orwell abhorred slavery and might well have approved of such removals, much as he would have been likely to approve the perestroika-era removal of statues of Stalin. Right-wingers quote Orwell out of context to smear their enemies as fascists, and in the next breath laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. There has always been a fair bit of doublethink involved.
However bad Orwell’s attitudes toward women were, the warning he gave us in “1984” was not that society might someday become so twisted that women would criticize him. His novel was a warning against the kind of leaders who call their opponents “vermin,” leaders who want to punish people for having the “wrong” opinions or being of the “wrong” ethnicity. It was written about leaders who become cult figures, whose idealized image is plastered everywhere as a symbol of belonging, who hold rallies at which their followers join to scream in ecstatic hatred. It was written about a world in which such leaders could avail themselves of advanced technology, in which propaganda and surveillance were unavoidable and ubiquitous.
Recognizing that Orwell was flawed doesn’t cancel him. It doesn’t suggest an impulse to cancel him, and there’s nothing Orwellian about it. What’s Orwellian is using his work to defend the people who are moving us toward the political horror he most feared.
The Washington Post
Written by Sandra Newman, a novelist, is the author of “Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ ”
