The Orwell Foundation, which has done such good work in promoting the study of George Orwell’s writings, has released a 75th anniversary edition of his most famous and important work, his dystopian novel, 1984. Unfortunately, in their wisdom, they have given the task of writing a new introduction, not to some Orwell scholar such as Peter Stansky, D.J. Taylor, or John Rodden, but to a little-known novelist, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, for what I assume is a fresh insight into the novel. If that were the case, they failed in their task.
She brings nothing new or original to her Introduction but instead reveals a shocking lack of understanding of the novel and who Orwell was.
Introductions can serve a valuable purpose. They can place a work in its historical context or explain how it fits in the development of a writer’s career, although most introductions are unnecessary. This proves to be especially true in Perkins-Valdez’s case. She finds two fatal flaws in 1984. The novel “does not speak much to race and ethnicity,” and the lack of black characters disturbs her. She is also concerned by what she calls Orwell’s “despicable misogyny.”
Attacks on 1984 have usually come from the Left, accusing him of not understanding Marxism or exaggerating the dangers of Soviet Communism. A recent study, George Orwell and Russia by Masha Karp, focused instead on the reaction of people behind the Iron Curtain when they came across illicit copies of 1984. They were shocked to discover that Orwell had never been to the Soviet Union. “How did he know?” was their reaction.
Perkins-Valdez’s charge of “misogyny” is not new. It has been around for a while. It was first leveled by an academic scholar, Daphne Patai, 40 years ago as part of the feminist re-reading of literature. If Patai went too far, she at least showed some understanding of Orwell’s writing and thinking.
More recently, the novelist Anna Funder went one step further in the feminist rereading (really misreading) of Orwell’s writing. In her book Wifedom, she claimed, with no serious evidence, that Orwell’s work was really that of his wife, Eileen, who was not only cleverer but also the real force behind his books. No Orwell scholar took that charge seriously, but it caught the attention of a public always looking for secret meanings to an author’s work.
Perkins-Valdez’s charge that there is a lack of black characters to identify with in 1984 is silly. If a work of literature can only have meaning for a black person if it has black characters, then the whole of Western literature becomes irrelevant. There goes Dickens, Tolstoy, Jane Austen down the drain, or as Orwell put it in 1984, down the memory hole.
What makes Perkins-Valdez’s approach so dangerous in my mind is that it is part of a campaign that has aimed at rendering Orwell irrelevant. I wonder how long his work will remain part of the high school and college curricula. Will “Shooting an Elephant” or “A Hanging” go to the bin as examples of “Orientalism,” a white view of non-white history? I fear that views like Perkins-Valdez may prevail.
John P. Rossi is a professor of history at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
READ MORE from John P. Rossi:
Tim Robey’s Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops
Farewell Mr. Waugh: Political Correctness and Censorship Continue to Wreak Havoc
