Julia
Julia, the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department, becomes Winston Smith's lover and, after the Party itself, the novel's most vivid counterforce to it. She first appears nameless in the Two Minutes Hate, a bold-looking figure in the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League, and she ends as a broken stranger who tells Winston, 'I betrayed you.' Between those two moments she passes him a note reading 'I love you,' gives herself the name Julia in a sunlit clearing, and conducts an affair that is at once the most hopeful and the most doomed thing in the book.
Identity and Introduction
Julia is introduced as a bold-looking girl of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. Winston knows her only by sight: she works in the Fiction Department, and he has sometimes seen her with oily hands and a spanner, doing a mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, is wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. In the Two Minutes Hate she is the one who cries out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and flings a heavy Newspeak dictionary at Goldstein's nose.
Her biography is a portrait of model orthodoxy. When they are safe in the church belfry she tells Winston she is twenty-six and lives in a hostel with thirty other girls; at school she was captain of the hockey team and won the gymnastics trophy two years running; she was a troop-leader in the Spies, a branch secretary in the Youth League, and then a tireless volunteer for the Junior Anti-Sex League, spending hours pasting its leaflets across London. She even spent a year in Pornosec, the Fiction Department sub-section that turned out cheap pornography for the proles—a mark of good reputation, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls' School. Her own account of survival is disarmingly frank: 'I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.'
The Secret Affair
The affair begins in a Ministry corridor, when Julia, her right arm in a sling, stumbles and falls almost flat on her face in front of Winston; while he helps her up she slips a scrap of paper into his hand. It reads 'I love you.' For a week their meetings are a torment of failed chances—she vanishes for three days, he nearly speaks to her and is interrupted—until she arranges a rendezvous in Victory Square and gives him precise directions to a hidden clearing: a half-hour railway journey, a gate with the top bar missing, a path across a field, a dead tree with moss on it.
In the clearing she names herself—'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston – Winston Smith.'—and produces a slab of dark, silver-papered chocolate from the black market that tastes unlike anything Winston has eaten in years. The clearing is the Golden Country of his dreams, with a thrush pouring out its song and a stream among the willows; Julia tells him to keep behind the boughs. They make love among the fallen bluebells; later she tells him she has had lovers before, always Party members, and Winston finds her corruption liberating. Her practical cunning governs the affair: 'Never go home the same way as you went out' is her rule, and in the streets they learn to carry on 'talking by instalments', flicking on and off like the beams of a lighthouse.
Once they rent the room above Mr Charrington's shop, Julia turns it into a pocket of the abolished past. She arrives with a tool-bag full of spanners and, underneath, neat paper packets of real sugar, white bread, jam, tinned milk, a kilo of Inner Party coffee and a little packet of tea. She paints her face with rouge, powder and scent, declaring, 'In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.' On the huge mahogany bed, in the bugs and the heat, they make love and sleep; when a rat sticks its nose out of the wainscoting she seizes a shoe and flings it—'Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'—with the same boyish jerk with which she had flung the dictionary at Goldstein.
Rebellion and Its Limits
Julia's rebellion is practical, not ideological. She dislikes the Party and says so in the crudest words, but she has no interest in general criticism: 'The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.' In the official mythology Goldstein is the primal traitor, commander of a vast shadowy Brotherhood that circulates a forbidden book; Julia has never heard of the Brotherhood and refuses to believe it exists—the tales are, she says, rubbish the Party invented for its own purposes. She remains almost untouched by Ingsoc, doublethink and the mutability of the past—subjects that bore her to sleep.
Her sharpest insight is about the Party's sexual puritanism. The Party's real, undeclared purpose, Winston reflects, is to remove all pleasure from the sexual act; Julia has grasped the inner meaning of the policy, that sexual privation induces hysteria which can be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. 'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything,' she tells him. The same clear-sightedness makes her say that the war is not happening—the rocket bombs are probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'—and she cannot even remember that four years earlier the enemy was Eastasia, not Eurasia. The world she drifts through runs on doublethink: to know and not to know at the same time.
She pays for her freedom in constant performance. She spends her evenings at lectures and demonstrations, distributing Junior Anti-Sex League leaflets, preparing banners for Hate Week, and her rule is to 'always look cheerful.' Winston, too, sets the expression of quiet optimism on his face before the telescreen, where even an improper expression is a punishable offence—facecrime, in Newspeak. Their world is one of bare, dingy listlessness, in which the Ministry's statistics are simply made up out of someone's head, and in which, Winston comes to believe, only the proles have stayed human.
Arrest, Betrayal, and the Last Meeting
Their hiding-place finally betrays them. Behind the steel engraving of St Clement's Dane a telescreen is uncovered; an iron voice echoes Winston's 'We are the dead,' and black-uniformed guards break in. Mr Charrington, revealed as a member of the Thought Police, stands transformed—black-haired, straight-backed, without his spectacles. A guard smashes his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up, and she is carried out of the room 'like a sack.' Winston last sees her face upside down, yellow and contorted, with the eyes shut and a smear of rouge on either cheek.
In the Ministry of Love, O'Brien tells Winston that Julia betrayed him 'Immediately – unreservedly.' When they meet again, on a vile, biting day in March, she says baldly, 'I betrayed you,' and he answers, 'I betrayed you.' She describes the mechanism: they threaten you with something unendurable and you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so'—and at the time you mean it. Her face is sallower, with a long scar across forehead and temple; her waist has thickened and stiffened; her glance is full of contempt and dislike. They agree 'We must meet again,' but the feeling is gone.
The deepest horror of her fate is that the Party has indeed got inside her. Winston once clung to her boast that 'They can't get inside you'; in Room 101, with the rat cage pressed to his face, he screams 'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!'—the very betrayal she would later describe. Pynchon's introduction notes that something very much like brainwashing happens in the novel 'in lengthy and terrifying detail,' and reads Julia's arc as a turn 'from a tough-cookie seductress into a loving young woman' before her love is dismantled and destroyed. What O'Brien calls a perfect conversion is, from the outside, an annihilation.
