Julia
Twenty-six, dark-haired and freckled, a mechanic on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She wears the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League because it is good cover, and has been breaking the rules since she was sixteen.
To take her pleasures and stay alive, without expecting either to lead anywhere. "If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones," is how she puts it, and she has no interest in the next generation, only in this one.
The book
At a glance
- Winston's lover, and a mechanic in the Fiction Department
- Twenty-six, stated flatly; Winston guesses about twenty-seven when he first sees her
- Short thick dark hair, freckles, light brown eyes, a wide red mouth, athletic
- Outer Party blue overalls and the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League
- Never given; Winston never learns it, or her address
- Not until Part Two; through Part One she is only the girl with dark hair
- Servicing the novel-writing machines; a year in Pornosec before that
- A hostel shared with thirty other girls
- Spies troop leader, Youth League branch secretary, Junior Anti-Sex League volunteer
- A grandfather who talked about the days before the Revolution and vanished when she was eight
- Never go home the same way you went out
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJulia is introduced as a threat. Winston knows her by sight from the Ministry corridors, sometimes with oily hands and a spanner, and dislikes her for the atmosphere of hockey fields and cold baths she carries about with her. She is bold-looking, about twenty-seven by his guess and twenty-six in fact, with thick dark hair, a freckled face, light brown eyes and swift athletic movements, and she wears a narrow scarlet sash wound several times round the waist of her overalls. The sash is the emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League. It is also, she says later, the reason nobody suspects her of anything.
She lives in a hostel with thirty other girls, works on the kaleidoscopes that rough in the plots of novels, and is good with her hands and uninterested in the results. She was captain of the hockey team, won the gymnastics trophy two years running, was a troop leader in the Spies and a branch secretary in the Youth League, and did a year in Pornosec turning out sealed booklets for proles. She has always borne an excellent character. Her first affair was at sixteen with a Party member of sixty who later killed himself to avoid arrest, which she thinks was a good job, since otherwise they would have had her name out of him. Since then there have been scores of others, always Party members, never Inner Party.
Her politics are entirely practical and she states them without embarrassment: you want a good time, they want to stop you having it, so you break the rules and do not get caught. She keeps every small rule in order to break the big ones, carries a banner in every procession, yells with the crowd, and volunteers for the Anti-Sex League three evenings a week. She refuses to believe the Brotherhood exists, thinks organised revolt is stupid because it is bound to fail, and has never heard of most of what Winston cares about. She also arrives at the rented room with real sugar, real white bread, jam, tinned milk, tea and a kilo of Inner Party coffee, all of it stolen or bought on the black market, and then paints her face and says that in this room she is going to be a woman and not a Party comrade.
In one respect she is sharper than Winston. She tells him casually that in her opinion the war is not happening at all, and that the rocket bombs falling on London are probably fired by Oceania itself to keep people frightened, an idea that has never once occurred to him. In another respect she is much less use to him. She cannot remember that the enemy changed four years ago, does not think it matters, and falls asleep whenever he starts on doublethink and the mutability of the past. He tells her she is only a rebel from the waist downwards, and she thinks it is a very good joke.
How the book draws them
- How the book describes herShort dark hair, extraordinarily thick and soft. A freckled face, light brown eyes with dark lashes, and a wide red mouth, which is the one feature Winston says you could call beautiful. There is a line or two round the eyes if you look closely. Her movements are swift and athletic, and Orwell describes her body as young and strong.
- What she wearsThe blue overalls of the Outer Party, with the narrow scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League wound several times round the waist. It is the only strong colour on her. Party women do not paint their faces, and when she puts on rouge, powder and lipstick in the rented room it is the first time Winston has seen cosmetics on a Party member.
- The noteShe trips in a Ministry corridor with one arm in a sling, cries out in real pain, and while Winston helps her up presses a folded scrap of paper into his hand. It says I LOVE YOU, in a large unformed hand. He has to wait most of an hour before it is safe to read it.
- How she arranges a meetingStanding shoulder to shoulder with him in a crowd watching a convoy of prisoners, lips barely moving. She gives him the route to the clearing in one go — a half-hour train journey, turn left outside the station, two kilometres, a gate with the top bar missing, a path across a field, a dead tree with moss on it — and Winston notes that she has a map inside her head.
- FieldcraftNever go home the same way you went out. Any hide-out is generally safe to use twice, but not for another month or two. Never speak in a side street. She can talk without moving her lips, calls it talking by instalments, and has an exhaustive knowledge of the countryside round London picked up on community hikes.
- The gestureWinston had dreamed for years of a girl tearing off her clothes and flinging them aside with a movement that seemed to annihilate a whole civilization. In the clearing Julia does exactly that, having first thrown the scarlet sash onto a bough. It is the one moment in the book where his private imagery arrives intact in the real world.
- The chocolateDark, shiny, wrapped in silver paper, bought on the black market, and nothing like the crumbly brown stuff the ration provides. Winston tastes it and cannot place the memory it disturbs. That memory is his sister's.
- What she says about chastityThat marching and cheering and flag-waving is sex gone sour, and that the Party cannot bear people to feel happy and spent, because it needs them bursting with energy. Winston has been circling the same idea for years without stating it; she gets there through her own body and states it in three sentences.
- The ratShe sees one put its nose out of the wainscoting, throws a shoe at it with the same boyish jerk of the arm with which she once threw a dictionary at Goldstein's face, and promises to plug the hole with sacking. She is puzzled by how pale Winston has gone.
- AsleepShe can go to sleep at any hour in any position, and does so through most of the theory. Winston reads her the chapter of Goldstein's book called War is Peace and looks up to find she has been asleep for some time. It is the last quiet moment either of them gets.
Julia quotes
They can make you say anything--ANYTHING--but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.