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This article examines sadomasochism in the life and works of George Orwell, with emphasis on the works. The author's argument is that the freudian theory of the dynamics of sadomasochism offers a way of understanding the major characters in Orwell's five novels. The climax of the essay is the postulate that all of Orwell's life was a preparation for 1984, the novel that embodies his hidden psychological wound and expresses his almost universal sadism (now out of control) and the dynamics of paranoia. The originality and challenge of this article lie in the fact that it demonstrates a clear and recurrent psychological pattern in Orwell's novels usually assumed to be purely political and social in content. The author shows that this is especially true of 1984.
Still, there is a problem. It is one thing to argue for the psychological authenticity of Orwell's characters, including those in 1984, in which Orwell shows the neurotic psyche as well as the tendency toward authoritarianism of modern man. It is another to suggest, as much psychological criticism does, that the presence of primitive, unconscious impulses and/or fantasies in a work of art is the sole basis of its appeal. There is no doubt that unconscious impulses and fantasies are important. But in a novel such as 1984, is it true or merely reductionistic to say that 'all the conviction which the nightmare world of 1984 carries derives from the tensions set up by these mechanisms'? This article illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of psychoanalytic literary criticism.