Orwell's Roses

“Medieval theologians speculated that there were roses in the Garden of Eden, but the thorns came after the fall from grace.”

Roses symbolize many things, such as love, romance, passion, and sacrifice. In addition, they’re often associated with the feminine; thus, the thorns indicate the woman’s negative aspects. In the above association, the thorns symbolize Eve’s disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; that is, the thorns were the price for her loss of innocence.

“It is often implied (or shouted) that if you enjoy hedgehogs you do not care about the evils of the age, but they routinely coexist in experience and imagination.”

To some, the enjoyment of nature—e.g., hedgehogs—preempts a political conscience. That is, to revel in beauty or in nature is to ignore or to dismiss political struggle and social injustice. Solnit posits the opposite: Enjoying nature is, instead, an integral part of forming a political consciousness; in fact, nature itself—and preserving, valuing, and encouraging it—is a site of political tension. Hence, the title of Part 1, “The Prophet and the Hedgehog,” associates the lofty goals of philosophers with the earthy respite of wild creatures.

“Like William Morris, he believed that paradise was behind us, in the old ways of life, and in the organic world, rather than ahead of us in an urbanized and industrialized future.”

Orwell was conservative in this manner: While he was optimistic about a future wherein social justice is attainable, he was pessimistic about the socialist view that industry and mechanization would bring about such a world. Like his approximate contemporary, J. R. R. Tolkien (of Lord of the Rings fame), Orwell believed that these modern forces threatened nature—and that nature itself would be instrumental in resuscitating humankind after the devastations of war.

“That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world. Orwell was rectifying this obliviousness when he went up north to meet the working class out of work and down in the mines and to bear witness to that foundational commodity, coal, and the conditions of its extractions.”

Like the trees in the quotation above, journalism bears witness to the events of history. While Orwell himself doesn’t lead a revolution or a call to unionization, his reportage brings light to working conditions long hidden in darkness. As such, he contributes to the exposure of this exploitation, which has the effect of making his readers accountable: When they use coal, they participate in this exploitation and cruelty. Solnit mirrors this approach when she exposes the working conditions and environmental degradations of the flower industry.

“The machine power driven by burning coal and then oil produced economic and political power, and the concentrated sources of energy allowed for unprecedented concentrations of power in the hands of the few, including, eventually, the major fossil fuel corporations and petro-nations.”

Solnit follows Orwell’s lead in exposing the complex webs of power and control that underpin the leisure and wealth of industrialized nations. This echoes her later revelations about the British country house and gentry: Their wealth and leisure come at the expense of enslaved labor in faraway places.

“To garden is to make whole again that which has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a window-sill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.”

The process of planting seeds, tending plants, and reaping harvests (or simply enjoying the beauty of flowers) directly contrasts the forces at work in the coal/oil and flower industries. These industries distance the consumer from the means of production, which helps enable the exploitation of workers and the destruction of the environment. In gardening, however, each part of the process is visible and thus takes on ethical importance.

“The beauty of flowers is not merely visual; it’s metaphysical, and tactile, and with many of them olfactory: they can be smelled and touched and sometimes tasted.”

Beauty here represents a synesthesia of the senses: Flowers are beautiful to the sight, touch, smell, and taste—all at once. Extending on the quote above, Solnit points out that the shape of mandalas and other geometric expressions of spirituality grow out of natural models; that is, the spiritual derives from the natural, from “Asian sacred paintings” to “Gothic churches’ rose windows” (80). Flowers don’t just please to the senses but also fulfill the spirit.

“If roses represent pleasure, leisure, self-determination, interior life, and the unquantifiable, the struggle for them is sometimes not only against owners and bosses seeking to crush their workers but against other factions of the left who disparage the necessity of these things.”

In her attempt to explain the reasoning behind slogans that use “bread and roses,” Solnit points out that workers aren’t agitating only for a living wage but also for work that allows for leisure time, creative autonomy, and pleasurable pursuits. In this search, workers often encounter well-meaning but wrong-headed thinkers on the progressive left who suggest that such pursuits are insignificant in the face of political revolution or struggle. That is, many writers, artists, and thinkers on the left in Orwell’s time disapproved of the “roses” in this formula; leisure must be sacrificed in the service of creating a new political ideal. Solnit claims that Orwell was decidedly not among this faction.

“Art that is not about the politics of this very moment may reinforce a sense of self and society, of values and commitments, or even a capacity to pay attention, that equip a person to meet the crises of the day.”

Solnit posits that art that isn’t explicitly about politics is in itself political—by what it omits. The pursuit of aesthetic enjoyment allows for reflection on the beauty and joy for which one is fighting. If all that society has produced is ugly and simply utilitarian, the point of agitating for its preservation is questionable. Beautiful art that doesn’t overtly engage in political expression serves an important function, a reminder of the world’s inherent beauty and a refreshing, if momentary, retreat from the sociopolitical battlegrounds of the day.

“When Woodcock compared Orwell to Antaeus, who draws his strength from the earth, he might also have meant that he drew his intellectual strength from the specific and tangible and from firsthand experience. It set him at odds with an era in which ideologies led many astray, not least as doctrines defending authority and delegitimizing dissent and independence.”

Orwell sought that reminder and that momentary refreshment in nature: This was partly why he was so attached to his gardens, as Solnit claims—part of the reason that he planted roses, which aren’t solely utilitarian plants but also objects of beauty. Orwell was rooted to the land that shaped him, and his tangible experience of working with the earth grounded him. He was not swayed by sweeping and general ideologies because he was connected to the specifics of his experience, not least of which was with nature.

“It was quite literally a landscape of bread and roses, and also of blackberries, chalk, flint, and ancient paths that were still public rights of way across all this agricultural space.”

Solnit describes the small town of Wallington, where Orwell’s cottage with the rosebushes is located. Metaphorically speaking, Wallington is a crossroads wherein many of her themes coalesce: the bread of solid labor well-rewarded; the aesthetic beauty of nature; the markers of geological history (chalk and flint) as well as sociological history (paths and public rights). Her passing reference to “public rights of way” acknowledges that certain areas of the English countryside escaped the partitioning of the enclosure acts.

“In the postwar years, Stalin became preoccupied with pushing lemon trees beyond their natural limits. He was apparently convinced that the fundamental nature of citrus trees, like people, like wheat, could be remade through sheer force and tried to get them to grow outdoors at his dacha in Ukraine’s Crimea region and at his Kuntsevo dacha on the outskirts of Moscow.”

This passage is from the chapter titled “Forcing Lemons.” Solnit compares Stalin’s attitude toward nature with Orwell’s, at least implicitly. Stalin’s attempts to control nature, to bend it to his will, is the diametric opposite of Orwell’s pleasure in the natural world as it organically unfolds. This, in turn, represents their attendant attitudes toward human beings: While Stalin wishes to control and conquer, Orwell agitates for individual autonomy and self-determination.

“I know that even the desire to garden, to be in the country, to rusticate, is culturally determined and rooted in class, or at least the forms it takes are.”

Solnit acknowledges that the fetishization of nature is often the province of the privileged. That is, the yearning to return to rural roots or to commune with nature is frequently associated with white, wealthy, urban residents who have never been forced to labor on a farm or plantation. In addition, the act of gardening itself can reveal class status; it’s a hobby, or a leisurely activity, afforded to those with the time, money, and space to cultivate a garden.

“Or, in other terms, the elegance of the men and their temperate-zone landscape of leisure is underwritten by labor in a brutal industry in the tropics. The business became famous as the triangle trade, in which British goods were traded for human beings from Africa who were taken to the Americas where sugar and rum were taken in. Asian trade goods were also part of the system, which was more circular than triangular and ugly at every stage. Brutality begot a luxury that was itself concentrated sweetness.”

The wealth of the English gentry—and of the British Empire in general—resulted from international arrangements based on the violation of basic human rights and was sustained by a global network of trade. The exploitation of enslaved labor to produce commodity (and luxury) goods underpinned the wealth of England’s upper classes, affording them the leisure time to enjoy the spoils of others’ labors. That this system was largely invisible to those who engaged in such activities, like high tea, is part of its insidious longevity and legacy.

“Daffodils and the English language mean different things to someone born to them.”

In her analysis of the work of Antiguan-born writer Jamaica Kincaid, Solnit points out that cultural inheritance is geographically specific. Thus, an Englishman like Orwell perceives the cultivation of daffodils (or roses) differently than does a formerly-colonized population that had English culture foisted upon it. Even more importantly, the English language functions as a tool of alienation for Kincaid, whose mother tongue was erased in the process of colonization. Orwell’s use of it, in this sense, is part of his privilege.

“So beauty can be both what one does not wish to change and where one wishes to go, the compass or rather North Star for change.”

Solnit again emphasizes that beauty is not apolitical. Here, beauty isn’t merely the eternal expression of something aesthetically pleasing but also the ideal to which one turns when one wishes to enact change in the world. That is, beauty serves as a guide for the kind of world one wishes to see.

“The thorns were never far away. Strands of twine stretched from wooden posts held the stems in place, and there was a sense of crowding, of compression, of repetition, and almost of confusion from so many roses in so many rows stretching so far that vanishing point perspective came in and you could see roses and poles and support beams getting smaller and smaller in the distance that was still inside the plastic greenhouse.”

In the rose factory outside of Bogota, Columbia, Solnit experiences the conditions firsthand (much as Orwell did when going down into the coal mines for The Road to Wigan Pier). The breathless second sentence in the above quotation feels overwhelming and almost claustrophobic in its description; the roses are nearly menacing, looming over the observer. The thorns—symbolically representing the flaws in the industry itself—are close enough to scratch anyone who dares get too near to the truth of the roses themselves.

“The coexistence of opposites and their clash occurs often in Orwell’s work, generating the tensions he explores, hedgehogs and prophets, lilacs and Nazis, toads and atom bombs, beautiful old books and memory holes.”

Solnit employs Orwell’s writing tactics, juxtaposing ideas throughout: The earthy and vulnerable hedgehogs coexist with the lofty philosophical musings of the prophet; the dead Nazi, symbolizing political ugliness, has a lovely lilac on his chest. Solnit uses these juxtaposed images as part titles in the book. “Old books and memory holes” refers to 1984, in which Winston Smith frequents a junk shop that sells old books (among other things that preserve the past) but works for the Ministry of Truth (an oxymoron), getting rid of facts inconvenient to the regime by throwing them down “memory holes.”

“Much of Orwell’s work was about ugliness of various kinds, but what he found hideous serves as a negative image of what he found beautiful.”

Solnit writes this in the context of her investigations into the flower industry. She herself has the same kind of experience in reverse: What she finds ugly about flower factories mirrors what she finds beautiful about flowers. That is, Orwell could find beauty in hideous things—the lilac adorning the Nazi—and Solnit finds the opposite.

“Although he denounces stale metaphors in this essay [“Politics and the English Language”], he uses fresher ones himself, and as is so often the case with metaphors, they come from the natural world. First comes the image of muffling snow blurring what lies beneath it, an image of whiteness, then comes one of darkness: ‘When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.’”

Orwell’s writing, like Solnit’s in homage, employs metaphors that grow organically from nature. The image of snow represents how politicians blanket their true intentions with vague and misleading statements (and this has even entered the vernacular as slang for deception: “He was snowing his audience with lots of statistics”). The cuttlefish’s ink is another metaphor for obscuring the truth by using overwrought language to deceive or dodge.

“‘Politics and the English Language’ addresses language that is too loose, blurring, evading, meandering, avoiding. Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts language when it is too tight, too restrictive in vocabulary and connotation, when some words have been murdered and others severed from too many of their associations. Somewhere in between is the possibility of a language that is clear but evocative, in which the speaker or writer’s explorations invite those of the listener or reader, in which there is something a little wild in language, and the wild and the free overlap.”

Orwell believed—as does Solnit—in the innate power of language. Language has the capacity to represent truth, to agitate for social justice, to speak to human rights. It also has the power to deceive, via evasion, like the politicians’ “snow and ink.” However, it must be protected vigilantly, lest it be impaired by authoritarian powers who seek to shrink its capacity (as in the “thought police” and “Newspeak” in 1984). Thus, Orwell sought to bring clarity and ethical standards—not to mention a spirit of individualism—to his writing.

“Lists are a form of collecting, an inventory of what is available at least to the imagination, and sometimes a reaching for assurance that there is some kind of abundance beyond the privation at hand.”

Solnit points out Orwell’s habit of using lists in his writing, particularly after the war years. For example, his essay defending English cooking—which was notoriously bad, especially in the lean postwar years—evokes pleasures of tables past with lists of foods and dishes for which he yearns. In Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air, the protagonist thinks of a long list of fish names that express his nostalgia for years past. However, in Solnit’s view, this nostalgic yearning also expresses a hopefulness for the future, an assurance that these lists of abundance will again come to be.

“Rereading a significant book is like revisiting an old friend: you find out how you’ve changed when you encounter them again; you see differently because you are different. Some books grow, some wither upon reacquaintance, or because you’re asking different questions you find different answers. What struck me this time around was how much lushness and beauty and pleasure are in Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Solnit revisits Orwell’s most famous book in light of all she has learned about his gardening habits, his attachments to beauty, and his natural pursuits. She wants to emphasize what is beautiful and pleasurable about it—not only to reassess Orwell’s literary legacy but also to argue that these joyful moments, these beautiful objects, are points of resistance. For example, to engage in sexual pleasure or to enjoy a lovely paperweight is to resist the totalitarian authority that seeks to destroy individual autonomy and creative thought.