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George Orwell's 1984: Methods of Suppression in 1984. A study of ways people were oppressed in the book.

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George Orwell's 1984: Methods of Suppression in 1984. A study of ways people were oppressed in the book.
Methods of Suppression in 1984

George Orwell's anti-utopian novel 1984 paints a picture of a society in which the individual has no freedom, hope, or feeling. Three super states called Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, divide and ravage the earth with perpetual war between them. The story takes place in Oceania, which consists of the Americas as well as Great Brittan. Nineteen-eighty Four chronicles Winston Smith's struggle to fight against the forever-reining, oppressive social system called the Party. Throughout 1984 several central themes through which the Party controls its members unfold - the first theme is dehumanization, the second theme is encroachment of privacy, and third theme is subtle erosions of freedom.

Dehumanization, which clearly presides as the foremost theme in Orwell's novel, occurs as the first theme. The ways in which the Party dehumanizes the people are the perversion of sex, the destruction of the family, and the deletion of human emotions. Big Brother despises sex. The Inner Party and Big Brother fear sex because sex causes extreme emotion. To destroy sex is to destroy emotions harmful to their rule. To complete this objective the Party conditions the women to hate sex: they completely pervert the natural emotion of sensual desire to something disgusting in nature. Orwell wrote, "The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it" (66). Starting when the girls are adolescents, they place them in classes such as the Junior Anti-Sex League and bombard them with lectures about the horrible implications of sex. The girls learn that sex is their duty to the party to produce children. Winston's wife Katharine or "the human soundtrack" as Winston nicknames her, completely falls for all Party dogma (Orwell 66). She shudders at the thought of sexual relations, swallows all of Party's propaganda, and has her only loyalty lying blindly in the hands of Big Brother. Julia, Winston's adulteress,


Cited: Duclos, Denis. "Dehumanization or the Disappearance of Pluralism?" Diogenes 49.195 (2002): 34-39. Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. Maize High School Library, KS. 27 October 2004 . Huber, Peter. "Bye-bye, Big Brother." National Review. 15 August 1994: 48-51. Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. Maize High School Library, KS. 27 October 2004 . Orwell, George. 1984. 1949. New York: Penguin, 1971.
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