First love-making in the wood

On the second of May, after a train journey through the outskirts of a drab and defeated London, Winston Smith walked up a country lane into a hidden clearing where the girl from the Fiction Department was waiting for him. Their first love-making is one of the most consequential acts in Nineteen Eighty-Four: it joins two separate acts of disobedience into a shared rebellion, breaks the Party's prohibition on pleasure, and becomes, in Winston's mind, a political act — a blow struck against the Party. The scene is also the novel's most concentrated image of what totalitarianism cannot kill: spontaneous human desire.

Setting and the Journey to the Clearing

Winston had been given precise instructions at their street rendezvous: a half-hour railway journey, a turn left outside the station, two kilometres along the road, a gate with its top bar missing, a path across a field, a grass-grown lane, a track between bushes, a dead tree with moss on it. The carriage was filled to overflowing by a single enormous prole family, from a toothless great-grandmother to a month-old baby, bound for a black-market butter expedition. The lane itself was misty with bluebells, and the air seemed to kiss one's skin; from deeper in the wood came the droning of ring-doves. He knelt and picked a bunch of flowers — partly to pass the time, partly out of a vague idea of offering them to the girl — and when a foot cracked on twigs behind him he went on picking, because to look round would be to show guilt. A hand fell lightly on his shoulder; it was Julia, who warned him to silence with a shake of her head and led him through the bushes into the tiny grassy knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely.

The Meeting and the Gesture

In the clearing Julia stood very upright, a faintly ironical smile on her face, as though she were wondering why he was so slow to act. He took her hand; bluebells cascaded onto the ground as though of their own accord. He told her he had never known the colour of her eyes until that instant — they proved to be brown, a light shade with dark lashes — and confessed his age, his wife, his varicose veins and his five false teeth. 'I couldn't care less,' she said. Then, with what seemed a single movement, she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside; Winston saw once again the magnificent gesture that annihilated a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could be swept into nothingness by one splendid movement of the arm. He knelt and took her hands, and asked, 'Have you done this before?'

The Political Meaning of the Act

The Party's war on sex gave the act its meaning. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act; marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee, and permission was refused whenever a couple showed physical attraction. The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party, and even the memory of a different life was being erased from the records Winston himself falsified day by day in the Records Department — the Ministry of Plenty's boot output, the rectified forecasts, the invented Comrade Ogilvy. In such a world, the embrace on the bluebells was not merely a lapse but a weapon. As Winston later reflected, their love-making had been a battle, the climax a victory; it was 'a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.'

Julia's Self-Revelation

Julia had already explained, as she broke a slab of black-market chocolate, that she was 'that sort of girl, to look at': a former troop-leader in the Spies, a branch secretary in the Youth League, a volunteer who had spent hours pasting Junior Anti-Sex League slogans over London and always carried one end of a banner in processions. 'Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.' When Winston asked how many times she had done this, she replied, 'Of course. Hundreds of times – well, scores of times, anyway', always with Party members, never with the Inner Party. Her rebellion was not ideological but hedonistic: she broke rules in order to enjoy herself, and she saw the whole elaborate structure of the Party as simply 'they'—a hostile power to be dodged.

Aftermath and Consequences

They slept for about half an hour in the warm sun. When Winston woke first and watched her sleeping face — the short dark hair extraordinarily thick and soft, the line or two round the eyes — he felt a pitying, protecting tenderness, but also the thought that in this world no emotion was pure: everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. The scene established the pattern of their affair: street-corner conversations by instalments, a second meeting in a church belfry, and finally the rented room above Mr Charrington's shop, where a glass paperweight seemed to hold their lives in a miniature eternity. The end was already contained in the beginning. In Room 101 Winston would scream 'Do it to Julia!', and their final meeting in the park would show her waist thickened and stiffened, her body like a corpse dragged from ruins. Yet the afternoon in the wood had given him, if only briefly, the proles' knowledge that mere impulses and feelings could have value in themselves — the humanity that the Party had tried to cut out of him.