Love, Lust, and Politics In George Orwell’s 1984, the Party of Oceania makes it impossible for any two people to love one another enough to sacrifice themselves for another. The existence of love would make it impossible for the Party to have full control over its citizens and so it deprives them of human desires such as love and sex, the Party controlling not only the physical bodies of Winston and Julia, but also their emotions and minds. Julia and Winston are never truly in love; they live an illusion of love, the result of the Party’s control over their bodies and minds. The emotions they call love are actually the intense emotion they feel as a result of finally finding someone who believes in something similar to what they are believing. …show more content…
Winston tells O’Brien, “I have not betrayed Julia”(273). The definition of betrayal is unclear to the reader, but somehow, Winston does not believe he has betrayed her yet, despite all that he revealed whilst being tortured. The narrator goes on: “He had not stopped loving her; his feeling toward her had remained the same”(274). However, none of this feeling has been love to begin with; even whilst on the way to his defeat, Winston struggled to hold on to the idea of Julia: the idea that there was hope for the future, and people may not have to live on in an emotionless world like Oceania. When Julia tells him she enjoys participating in acts of corruption, he feels “that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces”(126). To Winston, Julia is not only someone who he can bond with: she represents the future. Julia is young, and against the Party, which instills hope in Winston. He still ‘loved’ Julia because he still believed that the Party could be defeated, that the proles would rise up eventually. Whilst walking in the corridors of the Ministry of Love, he has an emotional breakdown during which he shouts Julia’s name. The narrator claims, “In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free”(280). After being physically separated from Julia for years, his ‘love’ for her increased dramatically. As their love is simply a manifestation of his desire to go against the party, this signifies Winston’s love with the idea of the Party’s defeat had never been stronger. The narrator then says, “He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party,”(280) and plans his final act of thoughtcrime before his death. Winston believed that he could outsmart the Party with his emotions. He thought that the party would be unable to access his personal emotions, completely oblivious to the fact that they have complete access to his