The Golden Country
The Golden Country is a recurring dream landscape inside Winston Smith's mind in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the closest thing the novel allows to an image of freedom. It first appears as an old, rabbit-bitten pasture on a summer evening, described with such concrete particularity that Winston himself is never sure whether he has seen it in the real world; later he finds almost the same field with Julia in the countryside, and at the very end of his ordeal the place returns as his one consoling vision inside the Ministry of Love. Because it remains beyond the reach of the Party, the Golden Country becomes the story's emblem of everything Oceania has tried to erase: private memory, natural beauty, and the possibility of a life not owned by the State.
The Dream Landscape
The novel reaches the Golden Country after Winston has dreamed of his mother and sister sinking beneath green water. Suddenly he is standing on short springy turf in slanting summer sunlight. The pasture is closely bitten by rabbits, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there; in the ragged hedge the elm boughs sway faintly, their leaves stirring "in dense masses like women’s hair." Somewhere out of sight is a clear, slow-moving stream where dace swim under the willow trees. The landscape recurs so often in his dreams that he is never fully certain whether he has seen it in the real world, and in his waking thoughts he gives it the name the Golden Country. In this same dream the dark-haired girl who will later be Julia comes towards him across the field, tears off her clothes in a single gesture, and inspires an admiration so overwhelming that he wakes with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips.
Recognition with Julia
The place ceases to be purely imaginary in the countryside in May. Standing with Julia in the shade of hazel bushes at the edge of a wood, Winston looks out into a field and undergoes "a curious, slow shock of recognition": an old close-bitten pasture, a footpath, a molehill, elms in a ragged hedge with leaves stirring like women’s hair, and the certainty that a stream with green pools lies nearby. When he asks in a whisper whether there is a stream somewhere near, Julia confirms that it lies at the edge of the next field, with great fish lying in the pools under the willow trees. Winston murmurs, "It’s the Golden Country – almost." Asked what that is, he tells her it is only a landscape he has sometimes seen in a dream. The "almost" is crucial: the real world can approach the dream but not equal it, and what completes the scene is Julia herself, who had already appeared in the original dream crossing the same field.
Return in the Ministry of Love
The landscape survives even the Ministry of Love. After his arrest, when the Party sets out to remake his mind, Winston’s tormented sleep fills with happy dreams, and the happiness always has the same geography: he is in the Golden Country, or sitting among "enormous, glorious, sunlit ruins" with his mother, with Julia, with O’Brien, merely sitting in the sun and talking of peaceful things. In a later reverie he imagines himself walking down the corridor toward his death and being translated into the Golden Country—the foot-track across the rabbit-cropped pasture, the springy turf underfoot, the elm trees at the field’s edge, the stream beyond. The vision breaks when he cries out "Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!," an involuntary confession that his love has survived the Party’s conditioning and that he is still, in the deepest sense, unreformed. The dream place thus becomes a measure of what the Party can and cannot reach.
Significance
In a novel whose slogans announce that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength, the Golden Country stands as the one private landscape that resists translation into Party language. It contains the oldest and least ideological things Winston knows—rabbit-bitten grass, molehills, elms, a stream, dace, willow trees. The fact that it can be "almost" found in the real world, and that it can still be visited in dreams while the Thought Police watch, gives it the force of a memory the Party has forgotten to alter. Winston’s persistent returns to it, even at the point of capitulation, suggest that the desire for such a place is the element of human nature which the Party’s power can deform but not destroy.
