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p.228-230.
George Orwell and Modernism: Reflections from A Clergyman’s Daughter
Hakan YILMAZ
Hacettepe University, Turkey, hknylmzz@gmail.com
1.
Introduction
George Orwell, scarcely known as Eric Arthur Blair, is one of the most prominent twentieth-
century writers among whom he gained quite a distinct place. In the first half of the twentieth-
century, modernist authors and their highly experimental oeuvre dominated the scene and
became immensely influential on much of the literary output of the time. The condition and
plight of the modern man and humanity on the whole were among the prevalent subject
matters explored by modernists in their works. George Orwell also partook in the examination
of such themes in his novels like modernists, albeit with quite a different style. Orwell, for
instance, makes use of fabulation and deploys a fabulative style in his
Animal Farm (1945)
while he chooses to situate his criticism of the subjugation of the individual by the
surveillance of the state within a dystopian atmosphere in
1984 (1949). Orwell, unlike
modernists, does not employ modernist devices such as stream-of-consciousness or
fragmented narration in his novels, but rather writes in realist conventions in all his novels
except for part 1, chapter 3 of
A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) in which he uses a dramatic
sequence. This part is Orwell’s one and only experimental attempt in all his novels which is
akin to that of the modernists, especially to James Joyce’s in
Ulysses. This study aims at
assaying Orwell as a modern(ist) novelist, or rather a novelist of the modern age, and
evaluating his
A Clergyman’s Daughter with regard to modernist themes such as pessimism,
loss of faith, frustration and disillusionment as well as the modernist formal experiment
attempted in the novel, and at discussing in what ways Orwell differs from his contemporary
peers and also to what extent he is in line with modernist novelists.
George Orwell was born as Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903 as the son of a colonial
official Richard Blair. After staying for a year in India, his mother, Ida, took Orwell to
England where he attended an Anglican parish school, and then he won a scholarship for one
of the best preparatory schools of the time, St. Cyprian’s School in Sussex, England. Though
he went to St. Cyprian’s on a scholarship, his parents had to pay half the tuition fees. After
spending for about five years at St. Cyprian, he won other scholarships first for Wellington
College and then for Eton which he left in 1921 so as to join the Burma Police (Hope, 1971,
p.10). Orwell was experiencing financial problems and thus had to go to Burma to make a
living. He stayed in Burma from 1922 to 1927 and “worked hard in a series of provincial
postings as Assistant Superintendent of Police” (Meyers, 1991, p. 7). His stay in Burma
formed the bulk of his first novel
Burmese Days (1933) in which he explored the emotional
isolation he lived through in Burma. In 1927, he decided to leave Burma and returned to
England.
A year later, he went to Paris to embark on his writing career and tried his hand at
stories and novels though he did not publish many of them. In 1929, he was taken ill with
pneumonia and had to go back to England to live with his family in Southwold. His teaching,
hoppicking and tramping experiences there provided him with the material necessary for the
writing of
A Clergyman’s. In the meantime, he began to publish reviews and articles though
these were limited in number. As he set out to publish, he “wanted to hide his authorship,
because he feared failure . . . [and also] found
the pseudonym useful, especially when replying
to readers and engaging in controversy” (Meyers, 1991, p. 9). After a while, he took up
lodging in London so as to concentrate upon his literary career. With the outbreak of the
125
George Orwell and Modernism: Reflections from A Clergyman’s
Daughter
Spanish Civil War in 1936, however, he decided to join the extreme leftist POUM (Workers’
Party of Marxist Unification) in order to fight on the side of the Republicans against Fascist
groups (Carr, 1971, p. 66). Later, during the Second World War, he worked for the BBC as “a
full-time talks assistant and later producer, broadcasting cultural and political programmes to
India” (Meyers, 1991, p. 17). However, he resigned from his job at the BBC in 1943 and
became the literary editor of
Tribune. Yet, he also continued at the same time to write many
articles, reviews, essays for
Observer. During that time, he began to write one of his most
celebrated novels, that is,
Animal Farm, a satiric fable. It is a satire on the Russian revolution
under the leadership
of Stalin because Orwell, a democratic socialist himself,
was very critical
of Stalinism and its authoritarian policies. Therefore, Orwell’s work, as Valerie Meyers
(1991) points out, “attacks the injustice of the Soviet regime and seeks to correct Western
misconceptions about Soviet Communism” and tried to “destroy the ‘Soviet myth’ that Russia
was a truly socialist society” (p. 102). Orwell, in this novel, questions whether it is possible
for people to live equally in a harmonious way. In 1949, he published perhaps his best work
1984 in which he wrote about the experiences of those who suffered under the totalitarian
regimes of Eastern Europe at the time. In this novel, Orwell severely denounces the state’s
control and surveillance over every aspect of the lives of the individuals, which strips them of
their freedom and subjugates them into obedience. Many phrases, words and concepts used in
the novel were also interpolated into the standard daily English such as Big Brother,
Newspeak, thoughtcrime, etc. which conspicuously evidences to what extent the novel has
been influential. These two novels mentioned brought a great literary as well as financial
success to Orwell which he lacked previously.
2.
Discussion
Considering the age he lived in, however, George Orwell is – surprisingly enough – hardly a
modernist writer in the sense other influential modernist writers and poets like Virginia
Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and many others are. In his novels, Orwell employs (social)
realism and most of the time avoids deliberately modernist devices such as stream-of-
consciousness, fragmented narration, long dramatic monologues or soliloquies because, as
Anthony Steward (2003) puts it, “those devices of modernism which, to his way of thinking,
had begun to make the modern novel inaccessible to the common man – books by
intellectuals for intellectuals, needing a university degree in English Literature to be
understood” (p. 15). Therefore, it can be argued that Orwell’s target audience in his works
was neither intelligentsia nor the ones with university degrees. Rather, he meant his works to
be read by lower-middle class with hardly or at most secondary education. He simply wanted
to reach to those audiences who are underprivileged in terms of their educational background
since the literary scene was taken by the storm of high intellectual modernist writers’ works.
In this sense, Orwell’s deliberate choice for writing in realist conventions, instead of
writing in stylistically difficult modernist form, corresponds to his understanding of what
realism is. To Orwell, realism, as Michael Levenson (2007) argues, “is understood as the
representation of the ‘ordinary,’ a term whose meanings Orwell considers self-evident; it is
not one literary method among others but the only acceptable aesthetic in an epoch of self-
delusion” (p. 60). Orwell was born into the
folie de grandeur of the Edwardian era in which
people tried to maintain the Victorian values and ideals and felt nostalgia for the previous
Victorian era. Hence, Orwell’s personality, ideas, attitudes towards society and institutions
had all been imbued with and also shaped by the prevailing Victorian ideals, and accordingly,
as Gordon Beadle (1975) points out, “[h]is attitude toward the great issues of . . . political
reform, economic justice, individual freedom, and the decline of traditional belief is almost