In George Orwell’s novel 1984, Julia
rebels against the Party for a variety of reasons. Many of them are explained in the
first three chapters of Book II. Her reasons include the
following:
- She feels contempt for the hypocrisy
of many Party members, especially members of the Inner
Party. - She hates the sexual puritanism enforced by the
Party. - She values her own
independence. - She enjoys being
unconventional - She doesn’t care if she is considered
“corrupt” and in fact takes pride in thinking of herself in that
way. - She enjoys sexual activity and refuses to allow the
Party to dictate such intimate behavior. - She also rejects
the mental controls the Party attempts to impose. - She
takes pleasure in pleasure and thus resists efforts to control her
pleasures. - Her opposition to the Party is mainly personal
rather than political per se. She dislikes the restraints the Party
imposes on her own particular life. - She realizes that if
the Party can control people’s sexual impulses, it can harness such energies and exploit
them in its own interests. The narrator reports her thoughts as
follows:
. . . sexual privation induced hysteria, which
was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader
worship.
Basically, then,
Julia rebels against the Party because she has an independent mind, has a strong sexual
appetite, has a strong liking for pleasure in general, and chafes under any kind of
external, imposed control.
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