The Use Of Imagery In Winston's Golden Country

Orwell uses imagery with elements of nature throughout the entirety of 1984. Nature is used in this novel often to convey a sort of tranquility, stemming from Winston’s desire to be free of the party. In Winston’s Golden Country, nature is used to signify the breaking of the party’s totalitarian ways; the Red Prole Woman representing his hope for a free future, and the Coral Paperweight representing his hope grasping a freer past.

Winston’s and Julia’s meeting in the woods signifies breaking the totalitarian ways of the party. Here Winston feels free from observation, and gets a glimpse of the freedom that the party opposes. It is a place for lovemaking, a utter horrendous crime in their state. Here there are only Winston’s and Julia’s eyes,

the Party’s watch is everywhere but also nowhere to be seen. When arriving to the fallen tree that Julia had spoken to Winston of, Julia forces apart bushes “in which there did not seem to be an opening.” Until Winston and Julia headed through the bushes, they kept silent knowing that the Party may have tapped mikes into the trees.

These bushes signify the Party’s need for observation and control; an unknowing person would pay no mind towards them, however they ironically are hiding a place free from the Party’s rule. Julia forces the bushes open, though there had seemed to be no opening. Through the bushes is a “natural clearing, a tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and in this clearing, Julia and Winston are free from the watch of the party; shut in completely from the outside world with complete and utter freedom. Winston strangely recalls the place in which he meets Julia as the Golden Country recurring in his dreams, a place in which he describes with a sense of solitude. In his dream the

rays of sunlight are “gilding” the ground, and the “elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze” in which portrays the Golden Country as a scene of peace. The Golden Country represents Winston’s growing desire for freedom and his hatred for the Party. As a person in his society he should not have dreams that go against what the Party stands for, showcasing Winston’s everlasting and hopeless desire for freedom, solitude, and love.

Orwell uses imagery of nature to signify Winston’s hope for the future.

The red-armed prole woman outside Mr. Charrington's shop is a huge symbol in the novel. She is described as a woman “roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip”, her body “like a block of granite”. In Chapter 10 Winston gazes upon her and has “the feeling that the sky had been washed too”, describing her hard work ethic. Winston suddenly comes to the realization that this woman is beautiful because she is free, working relentlessly with her tough but worn body and singing for the world. He sees her as the future of Oceania, as hope for freedom, her built body a catalyst for the future generations of rebelling proles. She “bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose” and imaged “swollen like a fertilized fruit” when pregnant, in which Winston directly alludes to her ability of bearing children through the imagery of flowers. Winston asks himself this question “Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?” as well, showing Winston’s understanding that people are becoming more and more inferior than their previous generations because of the Party. The flower imagery here also is a symbol to her child bearing ability and with this imagery used with the context that generations are becoming more inferior, it cleverly alludes to Winston and Julia seeing her as a birthgiver of rebels. Afterwards he asks Julia if she remembers the thrush that

sang to them in the woods, and she responds saying that the bird wasn’t singing to them but to please himself, or even just to sing. Winston’s question is an obvious comparison of the freedom that both the thrush and the prole woman have, singing to themselves, or singing to sing. She sings the same song the multiple times Winston and Julia stay at Mr. Charrangtons, “It was only an 'opeless fancy, It passed like an Ipril dye, But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!”. This ironically foreshadows Winston's fate, his struggle of grasping freedom proving to be a “‘opeless fancy”, passing “like an Ipril dye”. Before Winston mentioned the prole woman’s beauty, he has the feeling as if the “sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots”, a beautiful scene in Winston’s head. However soon after “The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky”. Winston somehow feels as if his reverence of this woman was mixed with the sky, which is now described with blandness as a “pale, cloudless sky”, foreshadowing his capture immediately after and his faith in the party becoming overthrown crushed. The woman, while unconsciously more free than many, still stood under a bland and pale sky as she sang her songs, doing her work for the inferior generations to come.

Orwell uses imagery through nature to also showcase Winston’s desire to grasp onto the past which was free of the Party. The glass paperweight he buys at Mr. Charrantons shop is a remnant of the past the Party failed to censor. Its glass fascinates Winston, twice describing its “soft” and “rainwatery” appearance. It is a symbol of the freedom of the past that Winston is fascinated with. The paperweight is described “transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete”. Winston sees the paperweight as a tiny and preserved peace of the past, and the world he imagines inside as a link to the past; he did not dream of abundant buildings but the tranquility of nature. “The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal”. Coral is a hard and rocky peace of nature, signifying his and Julia’s relationship which is enclosed in beautiful, rainwatery glass. He has also dreamt of another world free from the Party described through elements of nature, the Golden Country. Winston’s escape from reality inside the paperweight showcases another one of his pleas for freedom. When Winston dreams of the world inside the paperweight, his life seemed to stretch out “like a landscape on a summer evening after rain”, drawing a parallel to the rainwatery beautiful appearance of the glass, and that life without the Party is a truly free and meaningful life. When Winston and Julia get arrested by the thought police, the paperweight is shattered along with Winston’s tiny world. Mr. Charrington's room was supposed to be safe from the Party, a place where anything could be said, a place reminiscent of the past, the paperweight in itself that encloses him and Julia in the middle. However, the hope it entailed for Winston and his tiny world of a free past was swiftly shattered, his freedom with it. “The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!” the coral he once found as a metaphor for his and Julia’s eternal love in the paperweight was extracted from its “eternity at the heart of the crystal”. They will never be fixed securely together back again, the pieces of their minds would soon be rearranged in the Ministry of Love, and the pieces of the paperweight would soon be picked up and discarded.

Winston and his internal struggle for freedom is often explained through elements of nature, its tranquil imagery contrasting the bleak world he lives in. This imagery helps him to grasp onto the peaceful past even through his hopeless present, and even the dream of a truly free future. All this hope is shattered when Winston eventually meets his fate, Orwell refraining from nature when describing the dreadful Ministry of Love; Winston found his “place with no darkness”, in which he will be finally cured of his humanity.