Proles in 1984 Essay

George Orwells

1984

A DISCUSSION ON THE ROLE OF THE PROLES IN THE NOVEL

If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.

Placing this quote at the beginning of the essay was not accidental, since the book left me feeling the same way as Winston Smith felt about those dumb masses who we habitually refer to as the proles.

The book compares the proles to the Party members on several levels. First one mentioned might be the language. They might be seen as the preservers of the language spoken before the new regime came. On the occasion where Syme and Winston have lunch, they talk about Newspeak and mention the Oldspeak:

Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? Except---began Winston doubtfully, and then stopped. It had been on the tip of his tongue to say Except the proles, but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say. The proles are not human beings, he said carelessly.

Symes opinion about the proles is not solitary since there are other mentions of the proles being seen as lesser beings in Oceanias society. One of them can be found in The theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism, a forbidden book written by Emmanuel Goldstein, a fictional leader of Oceanias anti-government movement. As Winston reads the book he finds that the proles are seen as

the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as the proles, numbering perhaps eighty-five per cent of the population. In the terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave populations of equatorial lands, who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.

In the same book there is also a description of the past, description of the classes long gone but parallel to the proles, the Outer Party and the Inner Party. In my opinion that parallel is significant for we have historical proofs that the Lows could rebel and overturn the ruling classes. But, they would only react when enlisted by the Middle. In a way this might be interpreted that when the time comes and the Outer Party wakes, they would be able to overthrow the Inner Party (the oppressive collective behind Big Brother) only with the help of the proles:

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low (...) is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. (...) (The High) are overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. (...) Of three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. (...) From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

Previous thesis might be challenged by some quotes found on the page 229 and formed as Winstons thoughts about the existence of proles, shaped seconds before he was captured by the Thought Police:

It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same everywhere, all over the world , hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one anothers existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldsteins final message. The future belonged to the proles. () The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.

One might argue that the latter thought is the very essence of the role of the proles in this novel and is embedded in every oppressed society, in the past or still existing. But, there are some other comparisons between the proles and the party members.

Humanity is not lost within the proles. Unlike Party members, they were not indoctrinated by the persuasion that

mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. () What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.

Another thing noticeable about the proles is physical difference between them and the members of the Party. While women belonging to the Party are thin and perhaps even dried by constantly having to doublethink (like Mrs parsons, Winstons neighbour), prole women are drained by constantly giving birth to an army of children and slavering around the house (a woman Winston saw through the window of his hideout):

A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and lined face, was standing outside. () (Mrs Parsons) was a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face. () She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. () Mrs Parsonss eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.

Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered whether she took in washing for a living, or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren. () As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened , roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. () The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. () Shes a metre across her hips, easily, said Julia. () The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly. () She had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilised fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.

Physical construction is not the only difference between these classes of women. While prole women put make-up on their faces, Party women are strictly forbidden to do the same. This fact might emphasize the importance that prole women have in doing something just for beautys sake. Beauty is also forbidden since it produces nothing of use. In a small way it is also a rebellion rising within proles and Party members who are Goldsteins followers: