AS 91475: Writing Portfolio – 6 Credits

PREPARATION

Feminism:

• How women were represented in Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Marxist view – how it showed the way women were treated in the 1940s
• How it is not the same for women now
• George Orwell issued an warning but not purposefully
• This warning was incorrect even though many think his warnings are very much relevant today

Use “look here, this is interesting” voice, almost sarcastic

PLAN

Quotes:

• “He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”
• “It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor”
• “He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.“
• “girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years’ time,”
• “He had imagined her a fool like all the rest them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him!”
• In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
• There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
• The thing about women working for the Pornosec department
• Male coworkers interpreted the completion of physically demanding and skilled tasks by women as encroachment on “their” work, and some men responded with harassment and resistance towards their female counterparts. Employers attempted to preserve a measure of the prewar gender order by separating male and female workers and paying women less wages. Many Americans were also troubled by women who earned their own wages and spent time away from the supervision of family. Especially for white, middle-class families, these working women threatened to uproot the prevailing ideal of male providers and female homemakers and caretakers. (https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/gender-home-front).

https://medium.com/@Meia/it-was-always-the-women-misogyny-in-1984-5bb9228545da

https://studydriver.com/role-of-woman-in-1984/

Structure:

1. Introduction: Talk about the fact that although most people think his warnings were accurate and relevant today, he was incorrect in the sense that women are not how they are represented in Nineteen Eighty-four. And how this warning was unintentional (or maybe that could be another paragraph – linking to Marxist thing)
2. Talk about the ways women were represented in the novel
3. Talk about the Marxist view: how it reflects the way women were treated in the 1940s
4. How it is different for women in 2020
5. Conclusion
6. + maybe the fact that no one has really mentioned this could also reflect some things of our society today

PRACTICE PARAGRAPH

What are women other than tools to the continuity of humankind? In the backdrop of George Orwell’s totalitarian state, where humanity has been stripped to nothing but a skeleton of what it once was, the bones of the role of women are unearthed. It’s interesting to see that when society has been shrunk to its fundamental components, women are recognised only for the potential of their wombs and the desirability of their sexuality.