The woman in the yard
A prole woman with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron, who pegs out washing in the court below the rented room and sings the whole time. Winston Smith watches her from behind the curtain through most of the middle of the novel, and eventually decides she is beautiful.
To get the washing out. She works the yard from morning to dusk with a full mouth of clothes pegs, and the singing goes on between loads.
The book
At a glance
- A prole washerwoman in the court below the rented room
- About fifty
- The window of the room over Mr Charrington's shop
- Part Two, Chapters 4 and 10
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeShe is first heard rather than seen. Winston Smith peeps out from behind the muslin curtain of the room above Mr Charrington's shop and finds, in the sun-filled court below, a woman stumping between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out babies' diapers. George Orwell describes her as monstrous, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle.
She sings whenever her mouth is not corked with clothes pegs. The song is one of the machine-made hits produced for the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department, written with no human intervention at all on an instrument called a versificator, and she sings the rubbish so tunefully that it becomes almost pleasant. There seems to be no hour of daylight when she is not out there, alternately gagging herself with pegs and breaking into song.
Late in the book Winston watches her again and the arithmetic changes. He counts the children she has borne and the years of washing, looks at the thickened, coarsened body, and it strikes him for the first time that she is beautiful. He says so aloud. Julia's reply is that the woman is a metre across the hips, easily. Winston's answer is that this is her style of beauty, and the hope he builds on her follows from it: that somewhere in the world there are hundreds of millions of people like her who have never learned to think and have kept the thing the Party has taken from everyone else.
How the book draws them
- How the book draws herMonstrous, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line.
- Her skinCoarsened by work until it is rough in the grain, and rasping red. It is the only colouring the book gives her. Her face and her hair are never described at all, and she is a prole, so there is no uniform to describe either.
- The singingA powerful contralto, on a song composed by machine for the proles. Orwell's point is that she sings it well enough to redeem it, which the versificator could not have intended.
- The washingSquare white things that Winston recognises as babies' diapers, pegged out load after load. She appears to be in the yard at every hour of daylight the couple are in the room.
- "She's beautiful"Winston's verdict, arrived at late and murmured aloud. Julia answers that she is a metre across the hips. He replies that this is her style of beauty, and does not take it back.
- What she stands forThe novel's whole case for the proles rests on her rather than on any argument: strong, indifferent to politics, and outnumbering the Party by hundreds of millions.