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not knowing who or where or what she is. When he admitted ‘an inherent fault of structure’
that he could find no way to address, Orwell was surely thinking of this awkward device” (p.
63). Ironically. Dorothy is Orwell’s one and only attempt to delineate a female protagonist
and, as Daphne Patai (as cited in Quinn, 2009) argues, Orwell does not know what to do with
her (p. 107). Firstly, Orwell has Dorothy experience a memory loss and then causes her to
lose her faith without any valid reason: Dorothy unbelievably ceases to believe all of a
sudden. After suffering from amnesia, Dorothy cannot recover her memory for a while. Yet
still, even though her mind is turned into a sort of blank sheet, or rather
tabula rasa, Dorothy
is interestingly enough able to notice that she has no longer any urge to pray – which is quite
contradictory since she cannot even remember what a clergyman is, as is revealed later in her
conversations with the homeless people she met in London.
The issue of religious faith or crisis is totally forsaken and put aside in this second
chapter taking place in London. Instead, the theme of poverty and its dehumanizing effects
along with the terrible conditions of the homeless people effected by the economic system are
taken up. Orwell’s preoccupation with the subject of poverty is possibly the result of his
unhappy days as a poor child among the rich at the preparatory school St. Cyprian’s since he
attended this school on a scholarship, as mentioned earlier. His unhappiness at St. Cyprian’s
was etched on his mind to such an extent that Orwell years later observed that “probably the
greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than
itself” (as cited in Beadle, 1978, p.189). This unpleasant memory of his childhood also
explicates his preference for the novels of Charles Dickens, Samuel Butler, George Gissing,
Mark Rutherford and Jack London, because, as Beadle (1978) puts it, “the literary range of
this rather heterogeneous collection of writers went beyond the subject of poverty, but it was
the poverty novel, or the poverty period of their work, that attracted Orwell’s interest and
critical attention” (p. 190). Apart from Orwell’s personal reasons, we also have to take into
consideration the fact that the Great Depression of the late 1920s in the USA affected the
economic situation of the Continent
in a very negative way, as a consequence of which people
were stricken with extreme poverty and destitution. Orwell, therefore, directs his critique of
poverty explicitly at the economic system in the novel. For example, when the group Dorothy
joins upon arriving London decides to leave for Kent to find hoppicking jobs, we learn that
the wages paid to the workers are lowered through the end of the hoppicking season:
It was also common knowledge that
towards the end of the season, when
all the pickers had a fair sum owing to them and would not want to
sacrifice it by throwing up their jobs, the farmer would reduce the
rate of payment from twopence a bushel to a penny halfpenny. (Orwell,
1997, p. 97)
The system works as such and is relentlessly based on making most of the labor of the
workers and on paying the least possible wage to them. On the other hand, the exploration of
the poverty-stricken people is pushed to its limits when these poor homeless people, including
Dorothy, are gathered at night, trying to sleep on the benches of Trafalgar Square. They try to
remain close to each other so as to warm themselves in the freezing night. However, as they
are drawn into each other owing to the cold weather, they are stripped of their individuality
and “pile themselves, in a monstrous shapeless clot, men and women clinging
indiscriminately together, like a bunch of toads at spawning time” (Orwell, 1997, p.143). This
dehumanizing effect of poverty which is one of the significant ills of the modern age, creates
a stark contrast to the efforts of the modernist literature to emphasize the subjectivity and
individuality. These figures in the Square being reduced to voices that simply utter sentences
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Daughter
are unable to communicate with each other and thus their individuality is blurred in the
experimental third chapter.
This third chapter, in which the subject of poverty is examined powerfully, is of great
significance in terms of its experimental form. The Trafalgar Square scene is presented in the
form of dramatic sequence with stage directions including information about the setting. Most
of the critics agree upon that this part was chiefly inspired by the Nighttown episode in James
Joyce’s
Ulysses which also follows a dramatic sequence (Fowler, 2007, p. 23). As Edward
Quinn (2009) puts it, “written as if it were the script of a play or film in the expressionist
style, the scene can be taken as a semidream, semihallucination, semirealistic montage, the
three styles colliding with and collapsing on one another – rendered through the
consciousness of Dorothy” (p. 108):
[SCENE: Trafalgar Square. Dimly visible through the mist, a dozen
people, Dorothy among them, are grouped about one of the benches near
the north parapet.]
CHARLIE [singing]: ‘Ail Mary, ‘ail Mary, ‘a-il Ma-ary – [Big Ben
strikes ten.]
SNOUTER [mimicking the noise]: Ding dong, ding dong! Shut your –
noise, can’t you? Seven more hours of it on this – square before we
get the chance of a setdown and a bit of sleep! Cripes!
. . .
GINGER: Come on, ‘oo’s for that drum of riddleme-ree? We got the
milk and we got the tea.
Question is, ‘oo’s got any bleeding sugar?
DOROTHY: This cold, this cold! It seems to go right through you!
Surely it won’t be like this all night?
MRS BENDIGO: Oh, cheese it! I ‘ate these snivelling tarts. (Orwell,
1997, pp.123, 125)
In this sequence, Dorothy’s individual voice mixes in with others’ voices and is lost among
them like everyone else’s. Douglas Kerr (2003) points out that “[t]hese are the last people in
London, and for a while Dorothy is an indistinguishable component of this human heap. They
have no possessions at all except their voice, and to tell their story Orwell recognizes that he
has to allow them to speak for themselves” (p. 27). In this regard, this dehumanization turns
the individuals into, in Michael Sayers’ (1935) words – a contemporary reviewer of the novel
at the time of its publication, “a mere undifferentiated mass of human sufferings” (p. 62) and
thus blurs the individual voices because each voice is immediately chased down and undercut
by another’s voice.
However, Roger Fowler (as cited in Quinn, 2009) argues that the voices are intended
to be speaking simultaneously, not in a linear way – though the reader has no other option –
because the linearity in the sequence diminishes the effect it would normally produce: “The