Modernist authors - James, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Forster, Ford, Lawrence, Orwell, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Modernist authors - James, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Forster, Ford, Lawrence, Orwell e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Henry James Henry James, (15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was an American author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was probably the novelist who contributed most to the formal development of the novel. American by birth, he was European by choice, in fact he spent most of his life in Europe, especially in England and in Italy, where he set several of his novels and short stories. One of the major themes of his works is the impact of European culture on American characters, and he is interested in the exploration of human character. For instance, The Ambassadors, the wings of the Dove, or the Portrait of a Lady (1881) which is described as a psychological novel, is the story of an intelligent and attractive American heiress whose visit to Europe change her life and personality. It is also a work of social science, exploring the differences between European and Americans. From the innocent and curious girl, she was at the beginning, she grows to maturity through the painful experience of an unhappy marriage set in an Italian background. Henry James was interested in a technique able to represent human consciousness. The earlier Victorians had tried to solve the problem by the first person narrator or by using the omniscient narrator entering different characters minds and explaining their behaviour and their motives. James went further by reducing the role of the omniscient narrator and shifting the point of view to the perception of thoughts of the characters themselves. Two artists may be regarded as the pioneers of the modernist novel, James and Conrad. His style is at times elaborated to the point of tortuosity, for their unique ambiguity his late works have been compared to impressionist painting. He once wrote that “the only reason for the existence of the novel is that it should attempt to represent life” and that is exactly what he tried to do he was an observer of the social scene but also a greater explorer of the inner life of man. Conrad described him as “the historian of fine consciences”. James contributed to the spread of Maupassant and Flaubert works, he highlighted the importance of the artistic and harmonious representation of the truth. James was not a prolific writer of prose fiction, he wrote 21 novels and nearly a hundred short stories, he was an outstanding critic and a man deeply interested in the technical problem of his craft. There are a lot of writings on the art of the novel, his favourite method was the dramatic method, that is the direct presentation of events and the minds of the characters without comment or explanations. “Dramatize, only dramatize” is the constant reminder in his notebooks, a novel bien fait. “All dramatic, all scenic” in his novel, and centred on the inner lives of the characters rather than on the external events of the plot. This was the supreme lesson to the generation of writers that were to follow. In his intense focus on stream of consciousness he influenced many stream-of-consciousness writers, such as Virginia Woolf. The novel bien fait follows the rational development of the self, in other words the Hegelian model. James talks about a centre of consciousness, a limited point of view, through which we can follow the story. We do not have a sort of omniscient narrator but a centre of consciousness Less popular novels are The Princess Casamassima, published serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885– 1886, and The Bostonians, published serially in The Century Magazine during the same period. Beyond his fiction, James was one of the more important literary critics in the history of the novel, where we find the theory of the new form of the novel. In his classic essay The Art of Fiction (1884), he argued against rigid prescriptions on the novelist's choice of subject and method of treatment. He maintained that the widest possible freedom in content and approach would help ensure narrative fiction's continued vitality. The Art of Fiction was a response to comments by English critic Walter Besant, who wrote an article that literally attempted to lay down the "laws of fiction." For instance, Besant insisted that novelists should confine themselves to their own experience, James argued that a sufficiently attentive novelist could catch knowledge from everywhere and use it to good purpose. James continually argues for the fullest freedom in the novelist's choice of subject and method of treatment. James introduces the technique of the multiplicity of point of views which took the place of the first-person narrator. He is an omniscient narrator, he uses different point of views to narrate, giving not a clear idea of what happens, he dos not follow a straight-line narration, this is the best way to express realty. Reflecting how the events happen actually. It will develop in stream of consciousness in Joyce and in interior monologue in Virginia Woolf. William James had a remarkable influence on his brother Henry James. James's description of the mind- world connection, which he described in terms of a "stream of consciousness", had a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art, notably in the case of James Joyce. The Principles of Psychology (1890) covered a large number of topics, but some topics stand out as being more useful and applicable than others, particularly the stream of consciousness. The openings of The Principles of Psychology presented what was known at the time of writing about the localization of functions in the brain: how each sense seemed to have a specific neural centre. Stream of consciousness is James' most famous psychological metaphor. He argued that human thought can be characterized as a flowing stream, which was an innovative concept at the time. He also believed that humans can never experience exactly the same thought or idea more than once. In addition to this, he viewed consciousness as completely continuous. Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 in the Russian dominated Ukraine, his polish parents died when he was quite young. After studying at the university of Cracow, for about twenty years he sailed all over the word joining the French Merchant Navy and then The British Merchant Marine. His important teachers were Flaubert and Maupassant, later Henry James. He had a deep and constant concern for the problem of technique and form in the novel. His friendship with ford Maddox Ford was very relevant for the renewal of the English novel. After some uncertain years of apprenticeship, he wrote some immature works dealing mainly with life at sea. His first novel was published in 1900, Lord Jim. The well-known story of a young English officer who in a moment of panic deserts his ship, which he believes to be sinking and finally find redemption in an honourable death. Lord Jim was followed by Conrad’s great trio of political novels: Nostromo (1904) often regarded as his masterpiece, the secret agent (1907) and Under western eyes (1911) in which he depicted the gloomy word of revolutionaries with his sinister aspects of assassination and betrayal. Conrad narrative technique was very original, he was influenced by Henry James ‘s preoccupation with the working of the human mind, in some of his novels as Youth and Heart of darkness (both 1902) he abandoned the third person narrator in favour of the first-person narrator, Marlow, a middle-aged seaman, who tells a story and comments on it. Conrad shares with James a central position in the development of the modern novel. He too was an innovator as regards technique. To express his deep sense of the complexity of experience (reality) he made use of multiplicity of points of view, so that one and the same event is seen from different angles. A design of a story is put together though the intervention of several witnesses, each of whom knows only a fragment of the whole. Conrad life at sea provided him with much of the subject matter of his fiction which often deals with adventures in exotic countries. In the heart of darkness, Marlow, in his journey up to Congo, he has to face difficulties connected with the wild nature of the environment and the hostility both of the white and black The plot is nothing but the casual encounter between Leopold Bloom a canvasser of Jewish origin, Stephan Dedalus a young Latin teacher and prospective writer (already present in A portrait of the Artist), and Mary Bloom a sensual and unfaithful wife. The plot of the novel has been interpreted as illustrating the main theme of a father looking for a son and a son in search of a father. We know that Bloom had a son, but he died after his birth and Stephan had an alcoholic, irascible father. Bloom was in search of his fatherhood and Stephan of a father. They are both loveless. These characters rich in humanity are the average modern men, the anti-heroes. Time is limited, all happens in one day. In Ulysses we have almost the total disappearance of the narrator’s presence. The most striking element of style was the use of the stream of consciousness in its basic form of interior monologue. The first one is the casual association of thoughts, emotions and impressions of a person who is not thinking intentionally but is letting his mind flow freely. It had already appeared in works of the French writer Dujardin. Joyce employed it to understand human mind and explain how it works. This new technique allows the reader to have an insight into the mind of characters and to liberate the novel from the presence of the narrator. By the ned of the 19th century Henry James had theorised the necessity for the narrator to abandon his absolute authority over the novel and in his last novel he had applied the technique of the multiple point of view – the absence of a central mind organising the narration. Joyce went further than that he opened a new ground for the exploration of the human mind. As a young student Joyce was an admirer of Walter Pater the theoretician of aestheticism. It was from aestheticism that he derived his interest in form, which is central to approach to novel writing. Even if he does not share their belief “art for art’s sake” because for him literature was a means to promote awareness. The job of the artist was not to convince but to make people see in the most impersonal style as possible. The writer was no longer a speaker but a maker. He had to produce a work self-explanatory. The formal aspect of the fiction was very important for him. Particularly important was the problem of the point of view. In order to assure that his works do not carry messages from himself he adopted different narrative voices, different point of views and different linguistic styles. Perhaps Joyce’s remarkable talent was in his linguistic resourcefulness. The main theme in all his works is the human condition and the subjectivity of experience and they also have an autobiographical dimension. The interior monologue – which is carried to its extreme as a sequence of random association – is the natural development of Joyce’s method of telling the story in the characters’ own words. This innovation serves as a substitute for plot. Joyce worked for sixteen years on Finnegans Wake, published in 1939. Here the action is compressed into a single night. The scene is again in Dublin, but while Ulysses deals mainly with conscious life, Finnegans Wake is about the unconscious life and the sleeping mind of a pubkeeper and his wife. The book has been interpreted as “a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind”. In Ulysses there are Biblical parallels as well, that give to the story much deeper meanings (Stephen might be identified with Christ). Finnegans Wake has a circular structure based on a cyclic vision of history (implying perpetual recurring events). The development of Stephen's consciousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is particularly interesting because, insofar as Stephen is a portrait of Joyce himself, Stephen's development gives us insight into the development of a literary genius. Stephen's experiences hint at the influences that transformed Joyce himself into the great writer he is considered today: Stephen's obsession with language; his strained relations with religion, family, and culture. As a teenager, this belief leads him to two opposite extremes, both of which are harmful. At first, he falls into the extreme of sin, repeatedly sleeping with prostitutes and deliberately turning his back on religion. when Father Arnall's speech prompts him to return to Catholicism, he bounces to the other extreme, becoming a perfect, near fanatical model of religious devotion and obedience. However, Stephen realizes that both of these lifestyles—the completely sinful and the completely devout— are extremes that have been false and harmful. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man explores what it means to become an artist. Stephen's decision at the end of the novel—to leave his family and friends behind and go into exile in order to become an artist—suggests that Joyce sees the artist as a necessarily isolated figure. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf marks an important step in the development of the novel as she developed a new way of expressing a different perception of reality. Her approach to the art was certainly influenced by her childhood and her family background, she lived in a highly intellectual atmosphere at home. Her father was friendly with the main literary figures of that period, among them Henry James. She was born in London in 1882, her mother died when she was thirteen and this event affected her all her life, she suffered of nervous breakdowns. When her father died, in 1904, she decided to move to a new area of London, Bloomsbury, where she found a close circle of intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury’s group. They shared common values such as: subjectivity, aesthetic enjoyment, intellectual honesty, they were, on the whole, hostile to the dominant social values of the period. In 1913, after completing her first novel, The Voyage Out, she attempted suicide following another of her mental breakdowns. Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), Between the Acts (1941) are her most famous novels and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". Her love affair with Vita Sackville-West inspired her to write a fantasy Orlando (1928), the story of a noble man who lives though different centuries changing sex several times. Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England. The novel is about Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host that evening. With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in June 1923. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy. The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way, but the majority of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimius Smith. Feminism Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism, and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism". Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies sexual and economic repression and the narcissism of bourgeois women who have never known the hunger and insecurity of working women. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a patrician politician, but she is still able to express herself and find distinction in the parties she throws. Her old friend Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman. She smoked cigars and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in the present day, Sally turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a self-made rich man and given birth to five sons. Bisexuality Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally Seton at Bourton. Thirty-four years later, Clarissa still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about Sally "as men feel," but she does not recognise these feelings as signs of bisexuality. Woolf laid out some of her literary goals with the characters of Mrs Dalloway while still working on the novel. A year before its publication, she gave a talk at Cambridge University called "Character in Fiction," revised and retitled later that year as "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Besides being a novelist, she was an essayist, journalist and art critic. The common reader contains her best critical work. She committed suicide by drowning in 1941. Virginia Woolf is of a great importance in the history of the novel, because of her experiments with narration, characterisation and style. She rejected what for many readers was the main aim of the novel, mainly the telling of a story. For her, the events, were not important in themselves. What was important was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. What she defined “the proper stuff of fiction”. There was a revolution in narrative technique, she valued the subjectivity of experience higher than the objectivity of events, she could not rely on the traditional omniscient narrator, the innovation was the shift to the point of view inside her character’s mind, so revealing them though their thoughts, feelings and sensations. This led to the abandonment of another traditional convention of the novel, that of the chronological order of the events. In following the process of the character’s minds, her novels involve constant shifting backwards and forwards. She focuses on internal thoughts, feelings and reactions. Her novels are mostly made up of soliloquies that reveal the consciousness of characters. “Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”, she refuses the idea that life could be perceived as a series as implying a chronological or logical organization of the data of life. Life is a luminous halo, men are not in a position to observe life from the outside as they are immersed in it. David Herbert Lawrence D. H. Lawrence was the first important English working-class novelist. He was a very prolific writer, he wrote novels, short stories, poems, travel books and other non-fictional works. He was born in 1885 at Eastwood, His father was a miner and his mother an ex school teacher. He went to the grammar school until he was fifteen then he left school to start working as a clerk in a surgical good factory. It was in this period that he met Jessie Chambers, The Miriam of Son and lovers. Of his early novels the best known and the most successful is Sons and Lovers (1913) a clearly autobiographical book whose central theme is the story of his relation to his mother and to the girl who was his first love, seen in the light of the Oedipus complex of Freudian psychology. The main theme of the novel is the psychological and emotional relationship between an unhappily married mother and her sons. Paul and his brother William are to some extent bound to their mother by that complex, as suggested by the title. ‘Only Connect! That was that whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die’. Margaret has a general project throughout the novel to unify the unseen with the seen, and therefore create balance. Several ideas in the book are shaped under a Romantic belief that internal order can occur through love, thus attempting to represent the notion of a reconciliation of opposites, through Romantic tendencies. Ford Madox Ford There are important writers who begun their career in the second decade of the century and made a remarkable contribution to the renewal of the novel. Particularly interesting among them for his deep concern with the problems of narrative technique is Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), a writer of German origin and a central figure in the international movement of Modernism. Novelist, essayist and writer of memoirs, he published no less than 78 books in the course of his life, but his masterpieces are: The Good Soldier (1915), Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A man could stand up (1926) and Last post (1925), later collected in Parade’s end (1950). Set just before World War I, The Good Soldier chronicles the tragic expatriate lives of two "perfect couples", one British and one American, using intricate flashbacks. The story is about the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, the soldier to whom the title refers, and his own seemingly perfect marriage and that of two American friends. The novel is told using a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order, a literary technique that formed part of Ford's revolutionary view of literary impressionism. Ford employs the device of the unreliable narrator to great effect as the main character gradually reveals a version of events that is quite different from what the introduction leads the reader to believe. The novel was loosely based on two incidents of adultery and on Ford's messy personal life. The book is a study on the conflict between appearance and reality, which show a pessimistic and even tragic view of life and personal relations (it contains two suicides, two ruined lives, a death, and a girl driven insane). The book is generally regarded as the most perfect novels of the century, a masterpiece of modern narrative technique. The new poetry The Imagist Movement In 1913 The Imagists published a manifesto in which they determined: - To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the merely decorative word - To create new rhythms as the expression of new moods - To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject - To present an image, poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal with vague generalities. - To produce poetry that is hard and clear. The Imagist movement represented a reaction against all that was facile and generic, both emotionally and stylistically, in late Victorian and Georgian poetry. The two major theorists of the movement were T.E. Hulme (1886-1917) and the American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885-1972) who were both antiromantics. There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else than expression of unsatisfied. It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things. - Hulme Much the same ideas are to be found in Pound, for instance in an essay published in 1913, The Serious Artist, conceived as a kind of modern counterpart of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: “Good writing is writing that is perfectly controlled, the writer says just what he means. He says it with complete clarity and simplicity. – Ezra Pound The imagist movement did not produce any great poetry, but did contribute to the renewal. But the real revolution in poetry is made by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Thomas Stearns Eliot. Thomas Stearns Eliot was the most influential figure of the modern movement in poetry. He studied at Harvard, where he took a degree in philosophy, he finally settled down in London, where he took the British citizenship and became converted to the church of England. The main influences of his poetry were French symbolism, particularly in its last phase with Laforgue, and later on also Dante, to whom he devoted a critical essay. Eliot’s early poems, written between 1904-1910, were in part published in periodical and after his death collected in a slim volume entitled Poems Written in Early Youth (1967). The are clearly apprentice work, but some of them are interesting also as they show the influence of Laforgue: Prufrock and other observations (1917). In these poems, as in those of Laforgue, a deep sense of frustration and disillusionment is expressed with cold, ironic detachment. The first and best of them is the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which consists of the dramatic monologue of a sophisticated young man. Prufrock is the opposite of the conventional romantic hero, also the style is the opposite of the gran manners of the Romantics. “Every Revolution in poetry is apt to be a return to common speech”, he stated in The Music of Poetry and that is exactly the revolution he has accomplished. The style of is the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock is plan and colloquial, the tone is of the speaking voice. The influence of Laforgue is a starting point, he soon matured a personal style. Dissimilar ideas are unexpectedly yoked together: I have measured my life with coffee spoons. Images such as these produce a shock though the sudden juxtaposition of elements not usually related. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the most typical poem of Eliot in his early manner. But both the collections contain other important pieces such as Portrait of a Lady, another poem on spiritual emptiness. The first phase of Eliot’s poetic development ends with the publication of the Waste Land (1922), a pome in five parts, consisting of four hundred lines is Eliot vision of the modern world – a nightmarish land where spiritual aridity and lack of faith have deprived life of all meaning. this is the basic theme of his poem. The inhabitants of the waste land are spiritually dead, and their life is no more than a shadow of life or death in life. Their actions appear to be mechanical and meaningless, in the waste land. Even love is meaningless, it is no more a life-giving act but a sterile burning of the sexual urge. The poem has a complex structure and it is not a narrative poem in the traditional sense, it rather consists of a series of scenes or episodes which do not follow one another according to any logical sequence. A technique which has been compared to that of film director. After the waste land Eliot found in a return to faith and traditional values of religion the answer to his own questioning about the despair of the modern world. In 1927he professed himself to be an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a monarchist in politics and a classicist in literature. In 1930 with Ash- Wednesday, a poem on the theme of the search for peace in the submission to God’s will he made a new start as a religious poet; but Eliot’s greatest religious poetry is to be found in Four Quartets, his last poetical work. During the second part of his life, after 1930, he devoted most of his energy to writing for the stage, becoming the chief exponent of the revival of poetic drama. His first two plays were Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, but he soon saw in them too much poetry, becoming very dissatisfied. In the later plays he avoided poetry and wrote witty and brilliant dialogues: The Cocktail Party, The Elder Statesman. Eliot was also an influential critic and he wrote many critical essays on modern and ancient authors. George Orwell George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India, during the time of the British colonial rule. Young Orwell was brought to England by his mother and educated in Henley and Sussex at schools. The Orwell family was not wealthy, and, in reading Orwell's personal essays about his childhood, readers can easily see that his formative years were less than satisfying. However, the young Orwell had a gift for writing, which he recognized at the age of just five or six. Orwell attended Eton College. Because literature was not an accepted subject for boys at the time, Orwell studied the master writers and began to develop his own writing style. At Eton, he came into contact with liberalist and socialist ideals, and it was here that his initial political views were formed. Adult Years Orwell moved to Burma in 1922, where he served as an Assistant Superintendent of Police for five years before he resigned because of his growing dislike for British Imperialism. In 1928, Orwell moved to Paris and began a series of low paying jobs. In 1929, he moved to London, again living in what he termed "fairly severe poverty." He and Eileen who he married in 1936, shortly before he moved to Spain to write newspaper articles about the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, Orwell found what he had been searching for — a true socialist state. He joined the struggle against the Fascist party but had to run away when the group with which he was associated was falsely accused of secretly helping the Fascists. Ironically, although Orwell didn't consider himself a novelist, he wrote two of the most important literary masterpieces of the 20th century: Animal Farm and 1984. While these are the most famous novels of his career, his memoirs, other novels, and essential work as an essayist all contribute to the body of work that makes up important twentieth century literature. In Orwell's writing, he sought truth. Even his fiction has elements of the world around him, of the wars and struggles that he witnessed, of the terrible nature of politics, and the terrible toll that totalitarianism takes on the human spirit. Among the literary traditions that Orwell uses is the concept of utopia, which he distorts effectively for his own purposes. Utopia, or Nowhere Land, is an ideal place or society in which human beings realize a perfect existence, a place without suffering or human malady. Orwell did not originate this genre. In fact, the word utopia is taken from Sir Thomas More's Utopia, written in 1516. The word is now used to describe any place considered to be perfect. 1984 - In 1984, Orwell creates a technologically advanced world in which fear is used as a tool for manipulating and controlling individuals who do not conform to the prevailing political orthodoxy. In his attempt to Winston begins a diary — an act punishable by death. Winston is determined to remain human under inhuman circumstances. Yet telescreens are placed everywhere — in his home, in his cubicle at work, in the cafeteria where he eats, even in the bathroom stalls. His every move is watched. No place is safe. One day, while at the mandatory Two Minutes Hate, Winston catches the eye of an Inner Party Member, O'Brien, whom he believes to be an ally. He also catches the eye of a dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department, whom he believes is his enemy and wants him destroyed. A few days later, Julia, the dark- haired girl whom Winston believes to be against him, secretly hands him a note that reads, "I love you." Winston takes pains to meet her, and when they finally do, Julia draws up a complicated plan whereby they can be alone. Alone in the countryside, Winston and Julia make love and begin their allegiance against the Party and Big Brother. Winston is able to secure a room above a shop where he and Julia can go for their romantic trysts. Winston and Julia fall in love, and, while they know that they will someday be caught, they believe that the love and loyalty they feel for each other can never be taken from them, even under the worst circumstances. Eventually, Winston and Julia confess to O'Brien, whom they believe to be a member of the Brotherhood (an underground organization aimed at bringing down the Party), their hatred of the Party. O'Brien welcomes them into the Brotherhood with an array of questions and arranges for Winston to be given a copy of "the book," the underground's treasonous volume written by their leader, Emmanuel Goldstein, former ally of Big Brother turned enemy. Winston gets the book at a war rally and takes it to the secure room where he reads it with Julia napping by his side. The two are disturbed by a noise behind a painting in the room and discover a telescreen. They are dragged away and separated. Winston finds himself deep inside the Ministry of Love, a kind of prison with no windows, where he sits for days alone. Finally, O'Brien comes. Initially Winston believes that O'Brien has also been caught, but he soon realizes that O'Brien is there to torture him and break his spirit. The Party had been aware of Winston's "crimes" all along; in fact, O'Brien has been watching Winston for the past seven years. O'Brien spends the next few months torturing Winston in order to change his way of thinking — to employ the concept of doublethink, or the ability to simultaneously hold two opposing ideas in one's mind and believe in them both. Winston believes that the human mind must be free, and to remain free, one must be allowed to believe in an objective truth, such as 2 + 2 = 4. O'Brien wants Winston to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, but Winston is resistant. Finally, O'Brien takes Winston to Room 101, the most dreaded room of all in the Ministry of Love, the place where prisoners meet their greatest fear. Winston's greatest fear is rats. O'Brien places over Winston's head a mask made of wire mesh and threatens to open the door to release rats on Winston's face. When Winston screams, "Do it to Julia!" he relinquishes his last vestige of humanity. Winston is a changed man. He sits in the Chestnut Tree Café, watching the telescreens and agonizing over the results of daily battles on the front lines. He has seen Julia again. She, too, is changed, seeming older and less attractive. She admits that she also betrayed him. In the end, there is no doubt, Winston loves Big Brother. War is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength These words are the official slogans of the Party, and are inscribed in massive letters on the white pyramid of the Ministry of Truth, as Winston observes in Book One, Chapter I. the Party is able to force its subjects to accept anything it decrees, even if it is entirely illogical. In theory, the Party is able to maintain that “War Is Peace” because having a common enemy keeps the people of Oceania united. “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want. “Ignorance Is Strength” because the inability of the people to recognize these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime. themes· The psychological, technological, physical, and social dangers of totalitarianism and political authority; the importance of language in shaping human thought motifs· Urban decay (London is falling apart under the Party’s leadership); the idea of doublethink (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time and believe them both to be true) Animal Farm Animal Farm is an allegory, which is a story in which concrete and specific characters and situations stand for other characters and situations so as to make a point about them. The main action of Animal Farm stands for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the early years of the Soviet Union. Animalism is really communism. Manor Farm is allegorical of Russia, and the farmer Mr. Jones is the Russian Czar. Old Major stands for either Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin, and the pig named Snowball represents the intellectual revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Napoleon stands for Stalin, while the dogs are his secret police. The horse Boxer stands in for the proletariat, or working class. The setting of Animal Farm is a dystopia, which is an imagined world that is far worse than our own, as opposed to a utopia, which is an ideal place or state. Other dystopian novels include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Orwell's own 1984. The most famous line from the book is "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." This line is emblematic of the changes that George Orwell believed followed the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia. Rather than eliminating the capitalist class system it was intended to overthrow, the revolution merely replaced it with another hierarchy. The line is also typical of Orwell's belief that those in power usually manipulate language to their own benefit. Plot One night, all the animals at Mr. Jones' Manor Farm assemble in a barn to hear old Major, a pig, describe a dream he had about a world where all animals live free from the tyranny of their human masters. old Major dies soon after the meeting, but the animals — inspired by his philosophy of Animalism — plot a rebellion against Jones. Two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, prove themselves important figures and planners of this dangerous enterprise. When Jones forgets to feed the animals, the revolution occurs, and Jones and his men are chased off the farm. Manor Farm is renamed Animal Farm, and the Seven Commandments of Animalism are painted on the barn wall. Initially, the rebellion is a success: The animals complete the harvest and meet every Sunday to debate farm policy. The pigs, because of their intelligence, become the supervisors of the farm. Napoleon, however, proves to be a power-hungry leader who steals the cows' milk and a number of apples to feed himself and the other pigs. He also enlists the services of Squealer, a pig with the ability to persuade the other animals that the pigs are always moral and correct in their decisions. Later that fall, Jones and his men return to Animal Farm and attempt to retake it. Thanks to the tactics of Snowball, the animals defeat Jones in what thereafter becomes known as The Battle of the Cowshed. Winter arrives, and Mollie, a vain horse concerned only with ribbons and sugar, is lured off the farm by another human. Snowball begins drawing plans for a windmill, which will provide electricity and thereby give the animals more leisure time, but Napoleon vehemently opposes such a plan on the grounds that building the windmill will allow them less time for producing food. On the Sunday that the pigs offer the windmill to the animals for a vote, Napoleon summons a pack of ferocious dogs, who chase Snowball off the farm forever. Napoleon announces that there will be no further debates; he also tells them that the windmill will be built after all and lies that it was his own idea, stolen by Snowball. For the rest of the novel, Napoleon uses Snowball as a scapegoat on whom he blames all of the animals' hardships. Much of the next year is spent building the windmill. Boxer, an incredibly strong horse, proves himself to be the most valuable animal in this endeavor. Jones, meanwhile, forsakes the farm and moves to another part of the county. Contrary to the principles of Animalism, Napoleon hires a solicitor and begins trading with neighboring farms. When a storm topples the half-finished windmill, Napoleon predictably blames Snowball and orders the animals to begin rebuilding it. Napoleon's lust for power increases to the point where he becomes a totalitarian dictator, forcing "confessions" from innocent animals and having the dogs kill them in front of the entire farm. He and the pigs move into Jones' house and begin sleeping in beds (which Squealer excuses with his brand of twisted logic). The animals receive less and less food, while the pigs grow fatter. After the windmill is completed in August, Napoleon sells a pile of timber to Jones; Frederick, a neighboring farmer who pays for it with forged banknotes. Frederick and his men attack the farm and explode the windmill but are eventually defeated. As more of the Seven Commandments of Animalism are broken by the pigs, the language of the Commandments is revised: For example, after the pigs become drunk one night, the Commandment, "No animals shall drink alcohol" is changed to, "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess." Boxer again offers his strength to help build a new windmill, but when he collapses, exhausted, Napoleon sells the devoted horse to a knacker (a glue-boiler). Squealer tells the indignant animals that Boxer was actually taken to a veterinarian and died a peaceful death in a hospital — a tale the animals believe. Years pass and Animal Farm expands its boundaries after Napoleon purchases two fields from another neighboring farmer, Pilkington. Life for all the animals (except the pigs) is harsh. Eventually, the pigs begin walking on their hind legs and take on many other qualities of their former human oppressors. The Seven Commandments are reduced to a single law: "All Animals Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others." The novel ends with Pilkington sharing drinks with the pigs in Jones' house. Napoleon changes the name of the farm back to Manor Farm and quarrels with Pilkington during a card game in which both of them try to play the ace of spades. As other animals watch the scene from outside the window, they cannot tell the pigs from the humans.