Table of contentsIntroductionPower by destroying emotions in 1984ConclusionReferencesIntroduction“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston? » asks O'Brien. Winston's response: "By making him suffer." These two characters inhabit George Orwell's vision of a future totalitarian government that has evolved to become terribly efficient. In 1984, a single organization, the Party, rules everything and everyone in Oceania, creating and destroying the past at will, inducing servile submission in its subjects. There is no escaping the Party or its godlike leader, Big Brother, who declaims its rhetoric on every television screen. No one is ever alone; someone is always watching from the television screens with a predatory eye. In the final part of the book, powerful Party official O'Brien gives this definition of power to Winston, a man completely at his physical mercy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay In a novel where the ruling party is as much a character as an individual, the intricacies of power certainly give each scene implications deeper. Although asserting power by causing pain can be a striking theme, the driving power of the novel arises from the linked notions of annihilation and reconstruction. Power is the ability to annihilate someone by destroying their personal emotions, then recreate them until the world is populated with copies of the model of your choice. In 1984, the Party cuts out the very heart of the human, until, without the personal, the only emotions that exist are decreed and possessed by the Party. Each episode of the novel is a battle within Winston to resist the inexorable emotional grip of the Party. Power by destroying emotions in 1984 We never see Winston as a full human being, completely capable of emotions. Most of the time, Winston resembles the wasp that Orwell cut in two and describes in a book review. It's only when Winston the wasp tries to "fly away" that he understands the horrible thing that happened to him... What was cut off was his soul...". For Winston, “what was cut off” were his personal emotions; what he does or thinks he feels is above all political. The novel opens with Winston's early diary, perhaps the most obvious symbol of personality. He arrives on the date, and then “a feeling of total helplessness fell over him…”. He doesn't know what to write; he has nothing personal to write in a journal. He then thinks about the person for whom the diary is written. He thinks of his audience, perhaps of the future; he obviously cannot conceive of a diary written solely for himself for personal reasons; it must be for a political purpose. Finally, his first burst of words recounts a film he saw: a political film. He then wrote “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” several times; in fact, everything he writes in his diary is political, from thoughts about his future execution to thoughts about thoughtcrime and doublethink. The diary becomes an abject symbol of the emotion of which Winston is incapable. Winston cannot even experience love, the pinnacle of human emotion. In his subconscious, he harbors memories from before the revolution of his mother and his sister who are now deceased. It is therefore not surprising that he dreams of his lost mother and perhaps even unconsciously mourns her. However, even in a confused dream, he realizes that at the time he "was too young and selfish to love her back" and that now that she is gone, he has no chance of to like. Today, withoutintimacy, love and friendship”, there can be no “the emotional dignity of his mother, nor deep or complex sorrows”. Winston can perceive all these emotional nuances, but his acute perception does not help him feel these “deep or complex sorrows” that arise from love. His hazy dream memories are personal, but the emotion in them belongs to a dead world. Continuing his dream, he sees Julia, a colleague and future lover, and he is filled with “admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown aside her clothes. With his grace and carelessness, he seemed to annihilate an entire culture, an entire system of thought, as if Big Brother, the Party and the Thought Police could all be dragged into nothingness by a single splendid swing of his arm. This too was a gesture belonging to ancient times.” Such an intimate sexual fantasy is further reduced to an instinctive political rebellion. Winston can discern and even admire such a triumphant human response to totalitarianism, but he himself cannot feel the same. Such gestures and feelings belong “to ancient times”. Indeed, when Winston sleeps with the dreamed Julia, we only receive confirmation that even his most intimate act is tainted by something political. Sex is political. When Winston wakes up next to Julia and reflects on the sex they had, he understands that there are no purely personal emotions untainted by politics. Once upon a time, he thought, a man would look at a girl's body and see that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you can't have pure love or pure desire these days. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow to the Party. It was a political act. What would have been the most intimate and personal bond between two human beings has turned into a kind of political battle against the Party. Winston is incapable of acting outside of politics, he must “fight” to assert his power and achieve his small “victory” over the Party, even through sex. This crucial sex scene depicts the means by which the Party controls its subjects and points to the remaining components of power and the real conflict in the novel. The fact that Winston cannot lead a life outside of politics means that the Party has already partially won. Although Winston may believe that he has won some sort of victory over the Party by having illicit sexual relations with a Party woman for non-reproductive purposes, even this victory is only a vain self-delusion. The real victory would be having meaningful, personal sex. Instead, the very fact that the Party has infiltrated the deepest parts of the human psyche means that the Party has triumphed by co-opting all personal human passions and thus all threats against itself. Winston's idea that sex is a battle represents a defeat for the Party, even if the battle itself could have been a "victory." Even though Winston tries to rebel against the Party's annihilation, he can't really succeed; what remains for the novel is that he recognizes his defeat and accepts that the Party will replace his soul. This struggle within Winston to recognize and accept his inevitable defeat is what 1984 is about. Since Winston could just as easily be totally wiped out, complete domination of the Party requires only that he think according to the Party's orders. Thus, the initial conflict between Winston and the Party is reduced to Winston's internal struggle between self-control and these lapses of emotion and memory. We see here a sort of incongruity; insteadof a game of chess between two adversaries, we have only one person playing against himself: Winston, struggling with the demons of memory within him. This contradiction is illuminated by the philosopher Hannah Arendt's theories on totalitarianism. In “The Politics of Totalitarianism,” she describes the type of fully evolved totalitarian society that Orwell predicted. According to her, the course of history “may decide that those who eliminate races and individuals today or members of dying classes and decadent peoples will be those who must be sacrificed tomorrow. What the totalitarian regime needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation which makes each of them equally suited to the role of executioner and the role of victim. Applying this theory to 1984, we see that Winston himself has certain aspects of both victim and perpetrator. Winston, emotionally devastated, would certainly be a victim. However, Arendt mentions that each subject must also have within him an executioner, a side which participates in the eradication of the Party. Although Winston is a victim, ultimately he is just a version of himself who has gained enough control to repress his personal emotions; he too is his own executioner. Although at first he shouts at O'Brien in anguish: "How can you stop people from remembering things?... It's involuntary... How can you control memory?" You didn't check mine! ", in the end, the Party doesn't even need to actively control Winston's mind; he does it for himself, constantly continuing the execution or annihilation. Ultimately, Winston is even able to ignore the happy memories of his childhood. He simply “put the image out of his mind.” It was a false memory... They didn't matter as long as we knew them as they were." Thus, not only does the Party annihilate and have power over Winston, but Winston himself ultimately becomes a "executioner" of his own soul In the end, not only can Winston control his own memories and emotions, but he even swallows the Party line – bait, hook and all. The image Orwell leaves us is that of. a hollow, gin-soaked Winston, looking at the image on the telescreen: “He has won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother, if power is established over a man.” by making him suffer,” then Winston has surely escaped the Party’s power and the suffering it has caused. Indeed, integration into the Party collective is Winston’s dubious reward for his newfound ability to conform. Party standards of thought, to believe that two and two make five, and that Big Brother's love does not simply escape him; Party power and personal suffering, he happily immerses himself in the monolithic Party. This collective is what Arendt calls “the Unique.” According to Arendt, in totalitarian society, many individuals become "He who will infallibly act as if he himself were part of the course of history or of nature." A way has been found not only to unleash historical and natural forces, but also to speed up the process.” at a speed they would never achieve if left to their own devices.” Individuals thus obtain the privilege of becoming “more powerful than the most powerful forces generated by the actions and will of men”. In 1984, this is exactly what Arendt described. The One Party will always be more powerful than any individual action or will of one man. At least according to the Party line, O'Brien explains to Winston: “power is collective. The individual has power only to the extent that he ceases to be an individual. The only free human being is always defeated. It must be so, because all beinghuman being is doomed to die, which is the greatest failure of all. But if he can submit completely and totally, if he can escape his identity, if he can merge into the Party to become the Party, then he is omnipotent and immortal.” In a kind of cruel irony and doublethink, it is only by giving up all pretense of having emotions or personal action that Winston gains access to this intoxicating power at the end. It is only through submission and self-execution that Winston wins his battle, ends suffering, and becomes all-powerful by joining the collective of the Party. So, ultimately, the consequence for Oceania is that all victories belong to the Party, just as all emotions belong to the Party. Winston wins the battle to control his mind, but only to join and strengthen the Party. The power of the Party does not consist only in making men suffer; it's about annihilating them and recreating them in one's image, to better absorb them, become even more powerful and repeat the process. It is a never-ending cycle that serves no purpose but perpetuates itself so that the Party can wield even more power. Winston already enters the scene with most of his soul cut off, already unable to fully feel his emotions. In the end, it was rebuilt according to the standard Party model. The consequence for society is that the only emotions that remain are those of the Party. I love Big Brother, not Julia, and in the end Winston does even that. The other feelings – hatred and fear – also belong to the Party. Two-minute hatred is the only tolerable expression of passion, and it can only be directed against those whom the Party considers an enemy at that moment: East Asia, Eurasia, Goldstein, etc. Fear is fear of the Party. Even the most personal fears (in Winston's case, the fear of rats) translate into fear of the Party. O'Brien makes a threatening statement to Winston: "You will never again be able to feel ordinary human feelings." Everything will be dead in you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joie de vivre, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We will empty you, then we will fill you with ourselves. The magnitude of the statement seems to address all of humanity: if ever there were a perfectly healthy human being, there certainly would be none left. Preaching as a Party, O'Brien intones: "We control life...we create human nature." Men are infinitely malleable” (216). Men become the clay from which the Party shapes exactly what it wants. The Party not only accomplishes its mission by annihilating and restructuring Winston, but also all of humanity to an infinite degree; even the concept of a powerful and unalterable “human nature” is corrected, with the Party as master of all power. After all, unbelievers would say, 1984 is just a story, nothing more. Such hellish nonsense cannot exist in our own world. However, these mechanisms of power and control are very real in our own experience. In both Arendt's real totalitarian world and Orwell's fictional one, there are no clear laws “designed to erect boundaries and establish channels of communication between men” (Arendt 411). In our possible future, no one can tell you what thought crosses some fuzzy boundary or other. In Winston's world, it's the same; even if he can rejoice in this collective power of the Party and become one of its executioners, as we have already seen, every glimmer of an individual must be ready to be a sacrificed victim if the doctrine changes or if its thoughts cross an indefinite boundary. . His newspaper is "not illegal (nothing was illegal,)