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wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation—people who
had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a
dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth thinking
about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's
wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.
"What was she like, your wife?" said Julia.
"She was—do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox,
incapable of thinking a bad thought?"
"No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough."
He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough she appeared to know the
essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the
stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be
pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. With
Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things; Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a
painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.
"I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing," he said. He told her about the frigid little
ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. "She hated it, but
nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it—but you'll never guess."
"Our duty to the Party," said Julia promptly.
"How did you know that?"
"I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth
Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can
never tell; people are such hypocrites."
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As
soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she
had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct
created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be
destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which
was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The way she put it
was:
"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn
for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the