1984 Similarities Between George Orwell And 1984

George Orwell’s novel, 1984, creates a disturbing background of how every action is monitored and controlled. Orwell takes aspects of totalitarianism from Stalin and Hitler that influenced his novel. The book follows Winston, a 35-year old with an ulcer who changes his life with four written words: “Down With Big Brother”. Like Orwell took methods from Hitler and Stalin, Margret Atwood takes those same themes from 1984. Throughout both books people are controlled through language and war. By maintaining limiting aspects of revolutionary thoughts the Party remains in control.
In 1984, the main form of control is through a party controlled language: Newspeak. In the Appendix an unknown author, who writes in Old English, writes how the language

The main theme of the Party is to destroy thoughtcrime before it can even happen. If you start at the root of language, words, it creates a trickle down effect on thoughts where people who may feel distaste for the Party can’t express it. The Party controls people by removing any words that go against the Party. But they take it a step further. When discussing the language they speak about the bluntness at which they manipulated it. They were able to make it where “‘All men are equal’ was a possible newspeak sentence but only in the same sense in which all men are red haired”

Words that can have many different meanings, like equal, but are necessary to form thoughts, Igsnoc removed them. They controlled the way people thought by taking away words that can have an undertone meaning. During slavery in America, slaves would communicate to each other by singing songs that had different meanings. Like the song “Let Us Break Bread Together” was a way for slaves to openly communicate to one another that they are planning an escape. These undertones of meanings through song was able to give rise to rebellion across plantations and allow them to escape. Ignsoc wanted to prevent this. When they took away or changed the meaning of words that were radical they could control people. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood uses the same control of language to represent the oppression of the women in Gilead. Gilead created words that objectified and dehumanized the women. Women who were no longer worthy to be in Gilead were called “unwoman”, which just saying aloud creates a disgusting taste to say. They classified them as no longer people. The other way they decentralized the women was by calling them handmaids. The etymology of handmaid comes from the 1300s of which it means “close to the hand”. The hand being of God, or a speaker of