Title: What is the significance of the “Golden Country,” and why is it important to Winston? - eNotes.com
Headings: What is the significance of the “Golden Country,” and why is it important to Winston?
1984
What is the significance of the “Golden Country,” and why is it important to Winston?
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Content: Winston's everyday life is spent amidst crowds of people in a grimy, overpopulated city. He is under constant surveillance from the telescreen and has to use various machines such as the speakwrite in his work. He is hemmed in on every side by threatening technology and despicable, filthy, frightened humanity. The peace and emptiness of the Golden Country constitute the precise opposite of everything he hates about his situation in life. It is scarcely surprising that, as his life becomes worse, when he is being tortured by O'Brien in the Ministry of Love, his mental visits to the Golden Country become ever more frequent. It is, however, a sign of his continuing admiration for O'Brien, which verges on hero-worship, that Winston also imagines him in the Golden Country, alongside Julia and his mother. Last Updated by eNotes Editorial on March 16, 2020
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In Chapter Three of 1984, George Orwell ’s depiction of a then-futuristic dystopian totalitarian society where the government, Big Brother, monitors your every action, the Golden Country is a presented as Winston’s dream-like fantasy world, where he can stand among nature’s beauty and appreciate the nonchalance of the naked dark-haired girl’s gesture as she flings her clothes away. Orwell describes this dream world as follows: “The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country.