Persistence of Obedience: Theological Space and Ritual Conversion in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
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George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is generally regarded as a dystopian text engaging the challenge posed to the personal self by totalitarian politics. As opposed to that, this essay seeks to recast the text in the generic frame of the conversion narrative in which the transformation of an autonomous subject into a passive and ardent follower of a new faith is documented. It will be argued that for Orwell the re-admission to some kind of assimilative faith appears to represent a strong utopian element, one offering release from both individual conscience and social responsibility. Profoundly upset by the horrors of the twentieth century, Orwell in the 1940s was visibly beginning to deem the claims of personal judgement and humanist freedom as too heavy a burden for individual man.