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First published October 19, 2023
Winston was more interested in 'Spanking Stories', of which she remembered only that there was spanking, some of which was done with a shoe
All her life, Julia had obeyed the unwritten rules that kept her far from guilt. She had known who was safe, and felt an unfeigned disgust for unsafe people. Instinctively she’d loved the lucky and clever. If she ever took a risk, it wasn’t for fools. It wasn’t for the dead or those half-dead. It was actually cruel to give them hope.
…
‘So you may take this as a fact. You are not to be harmed. You will believe this, I hope, before you leave this room. You are one of our people and no one can harm you again. This I can promise. Now, sit.’ He gestured toward an armchair. ‘We have a great deal to discuss.’
…
‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘That’s the horrid thing. One has no choice, and yet one must live through it exactly as if one had.’
"...disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."Julia Worthing may have been a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, and participated in vapid sloganeering and the daily Two Minutes Hate just like everyone else, but Newman fleshes her out as a real character far more alive, complex, unstraightforward, and defiant than Orwell's protagonist would let on. As more than a mere device for setting Winston's socio-political rebellion into motion (he sees the act of sleeping with Julia chiefly as a political act), this Julia addresses the blind spot of Orwell's imagination and introduces readers to the subjection of women in a totalitarian state. It is not quite The Handmaid's Tale, but Newman certainly does write with a touch of Atwood, showing how differently surveillance, the loss of private life, and the ensuing abuse weigh on women. Already in the second chapter, when Julia excuses herself from her shift at the Ministry of Truth citing "Sickness: Menstrual," the novel has added a dimension to life in Oceania that Orwell's original never had, and our understanding of the high stakes only expands as we go on to see a gruesome abortion and the disturbing but unremarked-upon disappearances of two women in the pages that follow.