The Heart of the Matter

George Orwell and Fatherhood: Part Two

Fathers – as Portrayed in Orwell’s Novels

The next section of the essay examines the many contrasting – and usually highly symbolic – ways in which Orwell portrays fathers in his novels.

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A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935): Dorothy ‘Not an Individual in her Own Right’

Significantly, Dorothy Hare, the leading protagonist in this novel, is defined throughout entirely in relation to her father. As Daphne Patai notes (1984: 96):

The very title of Orwell’s second novel at once induces the reader to take a particular perspective on his protagonist. She is to be viewed not as an individual in her own right but rather in terms of her relationship to a man, a clergyman, her father. This is the only one of Orwell’s novels to have such a title, one that refers to the main character and at the same time identifies this character through a relationship to someone else. Dorothy Hare is not even the clergyman’s daughter, which would give her a more specific identity, but merely a clergyman’s daughter, a generic, or rather paradigmatic, being.

A Penguin edition of A Clergyman’s Daughter

Not surprisingly then, her father looms over all the action in the novel. We are first introduced to Dorothy as ‘the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk’ (1976 [1935]: 255). And she is constantly overwhelmed by his grumbling and excessive demands. All that, together with a sexual assault by her neighbour Mr Warburton (Orwell originally described this as an ‘attempted rape’ but that had to be cut: see Davison 1996: 55), leads to Dorothy having a complete mental breakdown – and she awakens in the New Kent Road not knowing who she is. But she is still haunted by her father. As the headlines in the gossip sheet Pippin’s Weekly proclaim: ‘PARSON’S DAUGHTER AND ELDERLY SEDUCER’ and ‘WHITE-HAIRED FATHER PROSTRATE WITH GRIEF’ (ibid329). Underneath, the copy reads:

‘I would sooner have seen her in her grave!’ was the heartbroken cry of the Rev. Charles Hare, Rector of Knype Hill, Suffolk, on learning of his twenty-eight-year-old daughter’s elopement with an elderly bachelor named Warburton, described as an artist. Miss Hare, who left the town on the night of the twenty-first of August, is still missing, and all attempts to trace her have failed. [In leaded type] Rumour, as yet unconfirmed, states that she was recently seen with a male companion in a hotel of evil repute in Vienna (ibid: 329-330).

Orwell here is highlighting the ways in which the mass media sensationalise and ludicrously invent facts (‘fake news’ is certainly nothing new) in a ruthless, profit-oriented strategy to boost sales. But he is also cleverly illustrating how Dorothy’s self-perception primarily as a daughter reflects dominant societal attitudes as shown in the newspaper headlines. At the end of the novel, Warburton ‘rescues’ Dorothy and spells out her options – all of them tied to her position as a clergyman’s daughter:

‘After ten yours your father will die and he will leave you with not a penny, only debts. You will be nearly forty, with no money, no profession, no chance of marrying, just a derelict parson’s daughter like the ten thousand others in England. And after that, what do you suppose will become of you? You will have to find yourself a job – the sort of job that parsons’ daughters get. A nursery governess, for instance, or companion to some diseased hag who will occupy herself in thinking of ways to humiliate you (ibid: 417).

Not surprisingly after that psychological battering, Dorothy decides to resume her onerous duties – looking after her father at the rectory and keeping the church going.

Given the centrality of the theme of fatherhood in the novel, Orwell is careful to represent the rakish Warburton as an irresponsible parent. His three illegitimate children (he calls them bastards) ‘were one of the chief scandals of Knype Hill’. ‘He lived, or rather stayed periodically, in open concubinage with a woman whom he called his housekeeper. Four months ago this woman – she was a foreigner, a Spaniard it was said – had created a fresh and worse scandal by abruptly deserting him, and his three children were now parked with some long-suffering relative in London’ (ibid: 277).

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Coming Up for Air (1939): Fatherhood Looms Over Everything

The novel is perhaps best seen as essentially a novel about fatherhood. Indeed, the memories George Bowling has of his father loom over the whole of the narrative just as Bowling’s own experiences of being a father are the crucial drivers of the storyline

The first we hear of his father – Samuel Bowling, corn and seed merchant, of 57 High Street – comes when George ponders his current lifestyle as a travelling salesman for the Flying Salamander Life insurance company: ‘It may seem queer, but my father would probably be rather proud of me if he could see me now. He’d think it a wonderful thing that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with bathroom’ (1976 [1939]: 449). So it is clear that, for George, it is absolutely crucial that his father be proud of him and his achievements. And as he recalls his youth, his father is ever present:

Half-way through the morning some of the farmers would come into the shop and run samples of seed through their fingers. Actually Father did very little business with the farmers because he had no delivery van and couldn’t afford to give long credits. Mostly he did a rather petty class of business, poultry food and fodder for the tradesmen’s horses and so forth (ibid: 453).

He remembers an argument his father had with Uncle Ezekiel and his ‘quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice’ (ibid: 455). But it’s the detail of the recollections that is so striking:

Father had been educated at Walton Grammar School where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their sons, whereas Uncle Ezekiel liked to boast that he’d never been to school in his life and had taught himself to read by a tallow candle after working hours. But he was much quicker-witted man than Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote Carlyle and Spencer by the year. Father had a slow sort of mind, he’d never taken to ‘book-learning’, as he called it, and his English wasn’t good. On Sunday afternoons, the only time when he took things easy, he’d settle down by the parlour fireplace to have what he called a ‘good read’ at the Sunday paper (ibid).

Most of the time, he says, his father was overwhelmed by business. ‘There wasn’t really such a lot to do but he seemed to be always busy, either in the loft behind the yard, struggling about with sacks and bales or in the kind of dusty little cubby-hole behind the counter in the shop, adding figures up with a stump of pencil’ (ibid: 456). Yet Orwell, through his narrator Bowling, is keen to show the gender dynamics in the workplace: the shop was Father’s business, Mother’s job, ‘the woman’s work’, on the other hand ‘was to look after the house and the meals and the laundry and the children. She’d have a fit if she’d seen Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a button for himself’ (ibid: 458). Again, Mother never said grace at mealtimes – it ‘had to be someone of the male sex’ (ibid: 460).

A Penguin edition of Coming Up For Air

On the question of discipline, Mother was the firmer. ‘Father was always “going to” give Joe [Bowling’s brother who, in the end, leaves home – never to be seen again] a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories, which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing anything with him’ (ibid: 458).

Fishing plays a highly symbolic role in the novel. Bowling dwells at length on his teenage obsession with the sport, his love of the solitude it requires, and his joy at catching enormous carp in the pond at Binfield House. He reflects: ‘I am sentimental about my childhood – not my particular childhood but the civilization which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick. And fishing is somehow typical of that civilization. As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong to the modern world’ (ibid: 473). Significantly, it’s his father who has given him his first fishing rod – for Christmas in 1903 (ibid: 471).

After fishing, reading comes a close second obsession for Bowling. And as he tells of his own reading interests (the Left Book Club etc), his thoughts inevitably turn to Father. There were hardly any books in their house and Father had never read a book in his life ‘except the Bible and Smiles’s Self Help…’ (ibid: 481).

As the narrative moves on, his father’s business is hit by competition. The inexorable rise of monopoly capitalism was in the process of eliminating small firms – seemingly out of the control of ‘ordinary people’. As George reflects: ‘None of us had any grasp of what was happening’ (ibid: 485).

Father was worried, puzzled and vaguely resentful. I can see him yet, with the meal on his bald head, and the bit of grey hair over his ears, and his spectacles and his grey moustache. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him. For years his profits had gone up, slowly and steadily, ten pounds this year, twenty pounds that year, and now suddenly they’d gone down with a bump. He couldn’t understand it (ibid: 484).

So George leaves school and goes to work at Grimmett’s shop – and stays there for six years. After service in the war, his parents die. One day, walking down Charing Cross, in central London, a poster proclaiming ‘KING ZOG’S WEDDING POSTPONED’ together with the sound of traffic and smell of horse-dung bring back memories of his childhood – and he resolves to lie to his wife, take time off work and spend some time back in Lower Binfield rediscovering the Golden Age of his youth (ibid: 445).. But as Gordon Bowker summarises: ‘The journey is doomed – the small town had been engulfed by suburbia and his woodland paradise infested with fruit juice-drinking, sandal-wearing, nudist vegetarians and Garden City cranks. The Golden Age is done for…’ (2003: 250). Significantly, the memory that dominates during his trip is that of his father. So, not surprisingly, he is determined to see his shop.

It was funny. Twenty-one years ago, the day of mother’s funeral, I’d pass it in the station fly, and seen it all shut up and dusty, with the sign burnt off with a plumber’s blowflame, and I hadn’t cared a damn. And now, when I was so much further away from it, when there were actually details about the inside of the house that I couldn’t remember, the thought of seeing it again did things to my heart and guts (op cit: 541).

The transformation of his father’s workplace into a teashop symbolises the terrible decline in Lower Binfield for George. ‘Father and mother,’ he stresses ‘have never faded out of my mind. It’s as if they existed somewhere or other in a kind of eternity, Mother behind the brown teapot, Father with his bald head a little mealy, and his spectacles and his grey moustache, fixed for ever like people in a picture, and yet in some way, alive’ (ibid: 543).

George Bowling’s dissatisfaction with his lot as a father is also a central theme of the novel. He wins seventeen quid on a bet and secretly places the money in a bank: ‘A good husband would have spent it on a dress for Hilda (that’s my wife) and boots for the kids. But I’d been a good husband and father for fifteen years and I was beginning to get fed up with it’ (ibid: 432)

He ponders his plight as one of the residents of Ellesmere Road – and it’s horrifying: ‘Just a prison with the cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like a nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches’ (ibid: 435-436).

When he returns home and his wife, Hilda, confronts him with the evidence that he has been lying, he tries to invent excuses. In the end, George is left with three options: to tell her what he’d really been doing and somehow make her believe him; to ‘pull the old gag about losing my memory’, and to let Hilda go on thinking he had been with a woman and ‘take his medicine’. But George ends cunningly: ‘But, damn it. I knew which it would have to be’ (ibid: 571). Yet significantly in this final scene, George is acting entirely as a husband. He has completely forgotten his role as a father. The trip down memory lane has shocked him so much that it has erased – at least for a time – his identity as a father. That is the hidden – and largely over-looked – tragedy in the story.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): Fathers’ Basic Role – to Produce Willing Slaves of the Secret State

The bleakest picture of fatherhood comes in Orwell’s last novel. Orwell represents Oceania as hyper-puritanical: the aim of Party is to remove all pleasure from the sexual act; all marriages have to be approved by committee; permission is refused if the couple give the impression of being physically attracted to one another; the only recognised purpose of marriage is to beget children to serve the Party; sexual intercourse is seen as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema – and the Junior Anti-Sex league advocates complete celibacy for both sexes (Orwell 2000 [1949]: 75). In addition, all children are to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem in Newspeak, the language of the state) and raised in public institutions. At the same time, promiscuity is permitted amongst the proles – and pornography is produced specially for them in Pornosec, a sub-section of the Fiction Department (ibid: 50). Towards the end of the novel, as O’Brien tortures Winston, he pronounces (ibid: 306):

We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. … The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm.

Winston Smith, the anti-hero of the novel, appears as a disgruntled husband engaging in a passionate, secret – and ultimately doomed – affair with Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’. Rather, his colleague at the Ministry of Truth, Tom Parsons, comes to represent Oceania’s archetypal father. He lives with his wife – both of them totally dedicated to the Party –in a dingy, messy flat.

Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had been visited by some large violent animal. Games impedimenta – hockey sticks, boxing gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out – lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise books. On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies and a full-sized poster of Big Brother (ibid: 25).

The Parsons’ children in Michael Radford’s film 1984

But most frightening of all, Parsons’ two children, a boy of nine and a girl about two years younger, are shown as super-enthusiastic Spies for the Party and keen to see the latest public hanging of a traitor (ibid: 25-27). In this way, Orwell highlights the horror of the Party’s totalitarian secret state in which a father’s basic role is to produce willing slaves of the secret state.

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