Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was employed by Orwell as an everyman character.

Winston Smith
Nineteen Eighty-Four character
Winston Smith portrayed by John Hurt in the 1984 film Nineteen Eighty-Four
First appearance	Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Created by	George Orwell
Portrayed by	Richard Widmark (1953) Peter Cushing (1954) Edmond O'Brien (1956) John Hurt (1984)
In-universe information
Affiliation	Outer Party The Brotherhood
Spouse	Katharine
Significant other	Julia
Nationality	British/Oceanic (in film)

Weak and unattractive, Winston exists under a brutal, oppressive regime in Oceania, a totalitarian state. He works in the Ministry of Truth, rewriting historical documents for the Party, which is led by Big Brother. In defiance of the Party's directives, he begins to have revolutionary ideas, making him guilty of thoughtcrime. He takes further risk by beginning a forbidden secret affair with Julia, a fellow worker. The affair is eventually discovered and they are arrested by the Thought Police.

As a flawed hero, Winston has been described by critics as one of the most unconventional and compelling protagonists. He has been portrayed in numerous adaptations of the novel in film, television, radio and theatre, including Peter Cushing in the 1954 television adaptation and John Hurt in the 1984 film.

Character overview

Character's Constellation

Winston Smith works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the continually shifting party line. He revises newspaper articles and doctors photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons", people who have fallen afoul of the party. Because of his proximity to the mechanics of rewriting history, Winston Smith nurses doubts about the Party and its monopoly on truth.

Winston meets a mysterious woman named Julia, a fellow member of the Outer Party who also bears resentment toward the party's ways; the two become lovers. Winston encounters O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party who Winston believes is secretly a member of The Brotherhood, a resistance organisation dedicated to overthrowing the Party's dictatorship. Believing they have met a kindred spirit, Winston and Julia meet him privately and are given a book written by Emmanuel Goldstein – the leader of the Brotherhood and principal enemy of the state of Oceania – under the requirement that only after they have read it will they be full-fledged members of the Brotherhood.

O'Brien is really an agent of the Thought Police, which had Winston under surveillance. Winston and Julia are captured, but Winston remains defiant and endures several months of extreme torture at O'Brien's hands. His spirit finally breaks when he is taken into Room 101 and confronted by his worst fear: the horror of being eaten alive by rats. He denounces Julia and pledges his loyalty to the Party. Any possibility of resistance or independent thought is destroyed when he is forced to accept that 2 + 2 = 5. By the end of the novel, Winston has been converted to an obedient, unquestioning party member who loves Big Brother.

Character analysis

Winston is an unconventional and flawed hero. He is 39 years old and has various health conditions including varicose veins and false teeth.^[1] He has a violent recurring cough that leaves him gasping for air.^[2] He is tortured by the possibility that he killed his mother. Winston also has misogynist views about women. After noticing Julia, he imagines beating her with a rubber truncheon in a moment of hatred.^[1] He is thoughtful and intellectual; he secretly despises the Party and, while working at the Ministry of Truth, he regularly commits thoughtcrime by having revolutionary ideas. His defiance leads him to further rebel against its directives by engaging in a clandestine affair with Julia.^[3] Rob Hastings wrote in The Guardian that Winston's characterisation is compelling. He is small and frail, unattractive and self-pitying. His response to Julia's interest in him is self-aware: "I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth." He later asks, "What could you see to attract you in a man like me?" Hastings noted that this characterisation was necessary for the purposes of expressing repression within Orwell's political writing.^[4]

Winston exists under a brutal regime that demands complete loyalty to its leader Big Brother and controls its population by promoting fear and hatred. He lives under the threat of constant surveillance, language distortion and the rewriting of historical fact. When he begins a love affair with Julia, he finds a kindred spirit. Winston's love for Julia is finally broken when he is tortured in Room 101.^[5] Winston's deep fear of rats is exploited by his tormentor O'Brien, when he threatens to release a cage of ravenous rats on Winston to devour his face. D. J. Taylor wrote that this scene was characteristic of Orwell, by presenting Winston as a vulnerable human faced with vicious animal intelligence. Orwell studied rats throughout his life and his preoccupation with them recurs throughout his writing. Taylor noted that he would have gained knowledge of the ancient Chinese torture method of releasing rats onto victims while he was in the East.^[6]

Dr. Edmond van den Bossche wrote in The New York Times that Winston's story is a warning. He lives in a world where independent thinking is banned. By questioning Big Brother, Winston looks for freedom but is isolated. Other Party members give up the possibilty of critical thought for their physical wellbeing and the common people have no need to question authority. He is the last man, the only character in the novel who wants to use independent thought. He makes the mistake of trusting the wrong people and is doomed to failure. After Winston is converted into a willing supporter of Big Brother, Bossche states that "another slave is born, another cog is placed in the machinery of the State".^[7] Margaret Atwood commented that Winston's surrender to Big Brother has been critically viewed as pessimistic due to his loss of individuality, but she considered that the novel's essay on Newspeak, which is written in standard English and in the past tense, is evidence that the regime reached an end and this showed Orwell's "faith in the resilience of the human spirit".^[5]

In the BBC Two series Faulks on Fiction, Robert Harris discussed the effectiveness of Winston as a character. Noting that Orwell had intended to originally call the novel "The Last Man in Europe", Harris emphasised that Winston is the last survivor of a previous world and has a vague notion of what existed before the Party, making him a relatable character. In addition, Harris felt that there was no difference between Winston and Orwell and said that Orwell had put himself in the novel, particularly as Winston displays similarities to the author in terms of his physical ailments and his views on women.^[8]

In his BBC book Faulks on fiction: great British characters and the secret life of the novel, Sebastian Faulks said that Orwell's skill was to give the reader the impression that Winston is not heroic. He is brave without knowing it and his small act of defiance in writing his diary appears hopeless, which makes him an everyman character. Orwell then shows that even a small, powerless person like Winston can fight an oppressive regime. Faulks considered Winston to be a different kind of hero, because he dares to have individual thought and love in the face of certain death, but ultimately loses.^[9] Christopher Ecclestone, who portrayed Winston in the BBC Radio 4 adaptation, said that Winston is the human element that gives the story its power. His struggle is to resist the nightmarish state oppression of Oceania and to retain his humanity within a dehumanised society.^[10]

Biographical context

Orwell at the BBC

From the summer of 1941 to the autumn of 1943 George Orwell worked as a "talks assistant" or producer for the BBC, which he described as "something halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum". He was employed by its Eastern Service and produced commentaries on the news broadcast to India and the Far East. The work was often mundane and the daily schedule impacted on his damaged respiratory system, forcing him to take several leaves of absence. Orwell told his friend Tosco Fyvel that the work was tedious and the programmes were low quality. D. J. Taylor, a biographer of Orwell, considered this period in Orwell's life to be the origin of Nineteen Eighty Four's conception. Orwell was deeply disillusioned and miserable working in the Corporation offices at 200 Oxford Street, which he expressed in his depiction of Winston's experiences working at the Ministry of Truth. Orwell reputedly took inspiration for Room 101, the torture chamber in the novel, from a room at Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, at Portland Place, where he attended tedious meetings.^[11][12]

Orwell's political ideas had been developing since the Spanish Civil War. He had volunteered in 1937 to fight against General Francisco Franco for the Republicans. His six months in Spain caused him to start believing in Socialism and generated a lasting hatred for totalitarianism.^[13] The concept for the novel began to take shape around 1943 to 1944, when he and his first wife, Eileen, adopted their son Richard Blair. Orwell took inspiration from the dystopian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. He said that he was also influenced by the Tehran Conference, being of the conviction that the Allied leaders, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were planning to divide up the world.^[14] Winston's name is usually taken to come from Winston Churchill and the common surname Smith.^[15] Orwell was fascinated by The Managerial Revolution, a 1941 book by James Burnham.^[16] He was also partly inspired by the character of Rubashov from Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon, especially his response and reaction to his interrogation.^[17] Orwell had experienced wartime terror and loss prior to writing the novel. After adopting Richard, his London flat had been hit by a doodlebug. In March 1945, while in Europe, he received news of the premature death of Eileen.^[14]

At the time of writing the novel, Orwell was, like Winston, in poor health, struggling with the effects of tuberculosis. In May 1946, he travelled to Barnhill, an isolated farmhouse on the island of Jura in the Hebrides, which was owned by his friend David Astor.^[14] There he began working on the novel in a damp climate that worsened his condition. He was forced to type up his illegible manuscript himself due to the isolation and produced 4,000 words per day, mainly sitting ill in bed. He complained to his friends that his illness had caused him to spend 18 months working on the "wretched book", describing it as a "ghastly mess". By the time of the novel's publication he had transferred to a sanatorium near Stroud in Gloucestershire, and then removed to University College Hospital in London. At the hospital bed, he married his second wife, Sonia Brownell on 13 October 1949. His condition grew progressively worse and he died on 21 January 1950 at the age of 46.^[2][18]

75th anniversary edition controversy

A preface written by American novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez, which was added to the 75th anniversary edition published in the US in 2024 by Berkley Books and approved by The Orwell Estate, was criticised for acting as a trigger warning to readers over Winston's views of women. In the edition's introductory essay, Perkins-Valdez described Winston as a "problematic character", highlighting a passage in which Orwell wrote, "He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones." Her essay concluded that Orwell was expressing that Winston's misogyny was a symptom of totalitarian society. Novelist and critic Walter Kirn criticised the preface on the podcast America This Week, describing it as "the most 1984-ish thing I’ve ever f---ing read" and commented, "We’re getting somebody to actually convict George Orwell himself of thought crime in the introduction to his book about thought crime".^[19]

Impact and influence

When the novel was published on 8 June 1949, it achieved phenomenal sales, with 50,000 copies sold in the UK and one third of a million sold in the US. In the following decades, millions of copies have been sold. Additionally, its language, such as "newspeak", "Big Brother", "Thought Police" and "doublethink", has been adopted in published media to discuss contemporary issues. Richard Harris considered Nineteen Eighty-Four to be the most influential novel of its time and described Winston as the most unlikely hero but the most compelling. He attributed the success of the novel to its protagonist, stating that by creating Winston as a believable character, Orwell makes the reader believe in his dystopian world.^[2]

Margaret Atwood was heavily influenced by Nineteen Eighty-Four after reading it in high school a couple of years after it was published in 1949. She expressed an affinity with Winston Smith, as "a skinny person who got tired a lot" and being "silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him". Winston's diary of forbidden thoughts encouraged her to take up writing herself as a teenager. Later in life, she used Orwell as a model when, in 1984, she began writing the dystopian novel titled The Handmaid's Tale.^[5]

In other media

The character of Smith has appeared on radio, television and film in adaptations of the novel.

• The first actor to play the role was David Niven in a 27 August 1949 radio adaptation for NBC's NBC University Theater.^[20]
• Richard Widmark played Smith on a 26 April 1953 broadcast of The United States Steel Hour on ABC radio.^[21]
• In the 21 September 1953 episode of Studio One, Smith was played by Eddie Albert.^[22]
• In BBC One's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) Smith was played by Peter Cushing.^[23]
• Vincent Price played Smith in a 1955 Australian Lux Radio Theatre adaptation.
• In the 1956 film, Smith was played by Edmond O'Brien.^[24]
• In a 1965 dramatisation broadcast on BBC Home Service, Patrick Troughton voiced the part.^[25]
• Gary Watson played the role in a three-part 1967 BBC Radio 4 adaptation.
• John Hurt played Smith in the 1984 film adaptation, 1984.^[26]
• Christopher Eccleston played the role in a two-part 2013 BBC Radio 4 dramatisation.^[27]
• Matt Smith voiced Winston in Twenty Twenty-One, a rereleased version of the novel released in 2021 as an audiobook.^[28]
• In 2024, Andrew Garfield played Winston in an Audible audio adaptation.^[29]