Sunday, October 4, 2009

Why is Julia against the party and Big Brother?

In 1984, Julia is Winston's girlfriend and his co-conspirator against Big Brother and the party. While Winston is an idealist and thinker who seeks to bring down the party for the sake of humanity, Julia is quite the opposite. She is a person who lives for the moment, who expresses herself through her sexuality. As such, she rebels against the party because it seeks to control her sexuality and determine her relationships with others. 


While Julia works for the Junior Anti-Sex League, which promotes celibacy, she mocks and ridicules its aims and propaganda at every opportunity. As she says to Winston in the woods, for example: "Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway." She then explains to Winston that she had her first love affair with another party member at the age of 16 and has, since then, slept with hundreds of men. By doing this, Julia is deliberately flouting party rules and creating loyalties to others, not to Big Brother. There is another reason, too, why Big Brother fear these sexual liaisons, as Julia explains in Part 3, Chapter 3:



'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time."



Julia is able to successfully rebel against Big Brother for much of her adult life. It is only when she meets O'Brien that her thoughtcrimes are uncovered and her life is put into serious peril. 

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