Orwell's Roses

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 7: “The River Orwell”

Part 7, Chapter 1 Summary: “An Inventory of Pleasure”

Solnit recounts the difficult final years of Orwell’s life. While his attitude remained sunny, his health was deteriorating; his tuberculosis worsened during and after the war. He and his wife, Eileen Blair, adopted a son in 1944, though Eileen died less than a year after the adoption. Orwell raised his son alone, with help from nannies and his sister, until his own death in 1950. Solnit notes that during all of this, Orwell wrote prodigiously, turning out essay after essay on various topics. In particular, she mentions the many essays on what might be considered lighthearted topics, such as food and the joys of junk shops. However, he also produced some of his most well-known work, such as the novel Animal Farm (1945) and the essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

During this time, Orwell returned to the cottage in Wallington—the one to which Solnit journeys at the beginning of the book. He needed to clear out all his belongings before moving to Jura, an island off the coast of Scotland where Orwell had always wanted to live. Orwell’s experience in Jura was both idyllic and difficult; it was remote, and the weather was harsh. Still, he wanted “out of London literary life and back into literary productivity” (247), and he wanted his son to experience a rural upbringing. Solnit notes that Orwell appeared happy during this time, expending much energy in planting an extensive garden.

Part 7, Chapter 2 Summary: “’As the Rose-Hip to the Rose’”

Solnit rereads Orwell’s most famous work, the novel 1984, and is struck by how differently it reads in light of her recent explorations of his life and work. She focuses on passages that previously seemed insignificant to her. For example, Winston Smith often recounts his dreams, and in a recurring one, he returns to a place he calls the “Golden Country.” It’s replete with natural splendor, and Solnit now sees it as “a classic Orwell landscape, full of unexceptional beauty” (253). Additionally, she notes that one of the novel’s motifs is the elevation of apparently useless acts, pointless places, and impractical objects (e.g., Winston’s lover Julia’s womanly gestures; the junk shop where he buys the damning journal; the benevolent countryside; Winston’s paperweight).

The apotheosis of Winston’s admiration for all that’s useless—that is, aesthetically or sensually pleasing—is, for Solnit, his dawning acknowledgment that the old washerwoman was beautiful. In her lost youth and baggy figure, in the repetitive nature of her work, and in her marginalized social position, she represents “survival and endurance as beautiful in themselves” (257). Alas, as Solnit knows, the rest of the book charts Winston’s defeat in the face of the authoritarian powers. Still, Solnit finds hope in the image of the washerwoman, in whom Winston—and, by extension, Orwell—placed his hopes for the future.

Solnit reveals that as Orwell completed the novel, his health was rapidly declining, and in December 1947, he was admitted to a hospital, where he stayed for many months; when he was released, he resumed his domestic diary in Jura, where he recorded his garden’s abundance alongside his own decline. He spent another nine months in a hospital in early 1949 and returned to Jura only briefly before being readmitted to the hospital, where he died in January 1950: “He asked that roses be planted on his grave” (264).

Part 7, Chapter 3 Summary: “The River Orwell”

Solnit ruminates on the river from which Orwell presumably took his pen name. Its length is undetermined, depending on from what vantage point one looks; its path and size might yet be impacted by climate change; and it marks a place where traders and raiders alike sailed many centuries ago. Her companion on this visit makes the comment that the term “Orwellian” describes something very different from this natural scene.

Solnit notes that in this book, she has tried to seek a very different Orwell than the one enshrined in the popular imagination. She claims that it would’ve been easy to connect Orwell to the “age of Trump and climate denial,” preceded by an era of “corrosive politics” that obscures “class and race war” and enables a “campaign of deceit” engendering an endless war on trumped-up terror (267). Instead, her objective is to resuscitate an Orwell who was idealistic, compelled by aesthetic as well as political commitment, and enthralled with the natural world.

Part 7 Analysis

In the short, final section of the book, Solnit returns to the point of origin:

The ebullient essay that had made such an impact on me so long ago, that had led me to the cottage in Wallington and the roses blooming there, was the result of a widower’s expedition to revisit the scenes of his married life and end that era (244-45).

Thus, as throughout this entire work, Solnit juxtaposes endings with beginnings, like the cycle of nature—from blushing bloom to senescent decline and back again. Orwell’s closure becomes her starting point, and she ends the book about his declining years and death with a discussion of his greatest work and some of his lightest essays—all containing a message of hope.

Solnit points out that Orwell’s lighthearted essays were really anything but: “[H]e may have been endeavoring to cheer up others—and himself—by turning to things he relished” (238). She notes that combating despair contains an ethical imperative to talk about pleasures, including food—and that these essays were “written at the end of a war with rationing still in effect and food still scarce and drab” (239). Thus, in discussing the glories of traditional food, for example, Orwell provides an inventory of the imagination, giving people hope for a better and brighter future—for the continuation of history, in the form of tradition, after an unimaginably destructive war. His own personal activities—moving to Jura, which was “the realization of a dream” (246), and planting a vast garden—further reveal his deeply held optimism. Solnit writes that Orwell was not merely planting a garden: “He was planting a future again, or at least a hope for one” (148).

Solnit’s analysis of 1984 is influenced by this take on Orwell’s final years, reflected through a lens that sees a better future rather than one consumed with a bitter past. Therefore, she focuses on the small moments of beauty sprinkled throughout 1984—a novel famed for its warnings about political corruption, the debasement of language, and the end of personal autonomy. Instead, Solnit sees Winston Smith’s devotion to Julia, the journal, and the paperweight as an engagement with beauty and an embrace of life in defiance of totalitarian forces: “Uselessness is itself a kind of resistance” (255). The “uselessness” of the lovely paperweight, the sensual pleasures of sex, and the personal inventory of thoughts actually become subversive: “Love is subversive. Memory is subversive. Hope is subversive. Even perception is subversive” (256). Winston wages war against Big Brother by admiring a paperweight, recording his memories, and falling in love, underscoring a main theme in Solnit’s book: Beauty and Truth. What seems insignificant in the face of political corruption and historical erasure is, in fact, the most heroic and honorable of struggles.

The washerwomen in whom Winston finally sees beauty signifies that their power is limited and their future is doomed. Winston, alas, is broken through torture, losing his personal autonomy and pledging allegiance to the party—but that isn’t where the reader’s hope should lie. Winston himself says, “‘[I]f there is hope…it lies in the proles’” (258)—the proletariat, like the washerwoman, who will endure long after Big Brother’s regime is toppled. Solnit finds inspiration in this interpretation of the novel: “The book doesn’t rest its case on [Winston’s] fate; it bets on the washerwoman and what she represents, as vitality and generosity and fecundity” (258). In the end, Winston “found what he sought” (258)—love, beauty, and meaning. These things, Solnit implies, were what Orwell, too, sought—and found.

Taking his pen name from a river that still flows, where forces of history once collided and the future was determined, seems in harmony with this view of Orwell: “It was a port from which military invasions were launched, pilgrims embarked, and trade ships sailed and landed, carrying wool, salt, and cloth and bringing books and wine from the continent” (266). It was an international hub of historical importance, just as Orwell’s work continues to be. Solnit summarizes his lasting significance clearly:

Orwell’s signal achievement was to name and describe as no one else had the way that totalitarianism was a threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness, and he did it in so compelling a way that his last book casts a shadow—or a beacon’s light—into the present (268).

As she notes in the penultimate chapter, roses still bloom on his solemn grave.