Orwell's Roses

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2021

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Themes

Politics and the Natural Landscape

From the beginning, Solnit makes it clear that the lens through which she’ll view Orwell isn’t typical. Much like Orwell himself, Solnit is an iconoclast, and she wants to examine Orwell’s legacy in other ways than through his infamous prophecies about the consequences of totalitarianism and its destruction of individual autonomy. Rather, she’s interested in Orwell’s sense of optimism, his hope for the future, and his commitment to aesthetic beauty—as evident in his love for nature and his planting of roses. Solnit notes, however, that an attachment to the natural world—the English countryside or the impractical rose—isn’t devoid of political context, nor is gardening an activity exempted from political significance. As in Orwell’s renowned essay “Politics and the English Language,” depictions of the natural landscape—like language itself—can be manipulated to serve particular ends, the origins obscured to promote particular perspectives. Nature, like language, is fraught with politics.

When Solnit analyzes some of Orwell’s reportage during the Second World War, she notes the juxtaposition between his portrayal of the brutal acts of wartime and his writing about seemingly small details, usually rooted in nature. For example, when Orwell encounters the dead body of a German soldier, he notes the flowers placed upon his chest. Solnit observes the contrast in these depictions: “It makes a picture and strikes a balance, that yellow face and those lilacs, death and life, the vigor of the spring and the immense devastation of the war” (29). The one image seems to highlight or underscore the other; juxtaposing them in this stark manner heightens each. It also emphasizes Orwell’s compassion, his tragic understanding of war and its consequences: “The flowers say that this person a British reader would look upon as the enemy was someone’s friend or beloved, that this corpse had a personal as well as a political history” (29). In this way, Orwell both politicizes those lilacs—they make a statement about the atrocities of war—and personalizes the political. The dead Nazi is more than a casualty of war; under the spray of flowers is a human being caught in the larger forces of history.

In addition, gardens themselves symbolize identity in general. As Solnit puts it, “[G]ardens are one way that culture does nature” (149). That is, cultural values and desires can dramatically affect the bits of natural landscape cultivated for beauty or food. These plots are bound up with class and privilege: “A garden is what you want (and can manage and afford), and what you want is who you are, and who you are is always a political and cultural question” (149). In this way, gardens are inseparable from the politics and cultural perspectives of any given era. Hence, the enclosure acts passed by parliament were explicitly political acts, intended to prohibit the lower classes from inhabiting formerly public lands. Further, these acts “were arguments […] that the English aristocracy and the social hierarchy were themselves natural, that […] power and privilege was rooted in the actual landscape, even as the humbler dwellers […] were uprooted” (150-51). A garden becomes a marker of privilege, afforded to those who own the land, which itself denotes both financial security and sociopolitical advantage—made (literally and metaphorically) “natural” in a circular justification.

Thus, nature is political: “All art is propaganda, Orwell noted, and nature is political. So are gardens. Flowers. Trees. Water. Air. Soil. Weather” (154). Solnit points out that contemporary desires to reconnect to nature and to work the land are almost inevitably born of privilege:

You have to feel securely high to want to go low, urban to yearn for the rural, smooth to desire roughness, anxious about artificiality to seek this version of authenticity. And if you see the countryside as a place of rest and respite you’re probably not a farmworker (156).

Even to suggest that nature is a space free from political significance or cultural baggage is to take a political stance: It provides an “alibi,” as Solnit puts it (163), for remaining willfully ignorant of the unseen forces that make the natural space, the idyllic retreat, possible.

Beauty and Truth

Orwell didn’t merely write about politics or report on brutal wars, according to Solnit. He was deeply invested in simple (at least, seemingly simple) pleasures, the experience of joy, and the appreciation of beauty. Solnit catalogues “how much he recounted enjoyment [...] most of all [in] animals, plants, flowers, natural landscapes, gardening, the countryside, pleasures that surface over and over again in his books” (24). As such, he was acutely aware not only of the political impact of his work—his desire to speak truth to power, as it were—but also of the aesthetic value inherent in his work and in writing in general. His concern for aesthetic value, in turn, was inextricably linked to ideas about authenticity, truth, and meaning beyond an uncomplicated vision of beauty. He wanted, as Solnit directly quotes him, “to make political writing into an art” (230). Thus, Orwell’s legacy isn’t merely that he exposed the brutal hypocrisy of authoritarianism and the erasure of truth in history and language but also that he valued the aesthetic beauty of nature and of writing. Orwell’s roses gracefully symbolize this legacy—so much so that the flower still blooms on his grave today.

“If you do go through this door marked aesthetics and Orwell,” Solnit writes, “you wander toward the very center of his life’s pursuits” (188). In contradiction to previous critics of Orwell’s work—who claim that Orwell “‘almost never praises beauty’”—Solnit notes, “I’d argue that he praises beauty often, and those overlooked things become means of broadening the definition of beauty, finding versions that are not elite or established” (189). Orwell was working against the entrenched—class-based, race-biased—designations of beauty, against the conventional wisdom of his day. This desire to broaden and complicate the definition of beauty is also a political stance: “What one does not wish to change can be the desirable condition realized, and it’s where aesthetic and ethical standards meet” (191). That is, if the words are beautiful but the intentions behind them are vile—as in furthering political oppression, suppressing others’ free expression, or supporting unjust causes—then unethical purposes have compromised any aesthetic value. One must have both to achieve the highest goals of writing or any other creative expression.

Solnit herself struggles with this in her investigation of the flower industry. On the one hand, flowers in general and roses in particular are intrinsically beautiful. On the other hand, their beauty becomes corrupted by the ugliness of the industry that produces them, through its exploitation of workers and its degradation of natural resources: “The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced by hideous means” (209). This, in turn, debases the gesture of gifting someone a bouquet of flowers: “When we give them to each other we intend to hand each other not only a dozen roses but the associations that come with them. What do we hand each other when historic meaning and current reality are in conflict?” (211). The realities of the means of production, of its violation of ethical standards, taint the aesthetic value in the gesture of giving roses and admiring the gift.

The desire to fuse the aesthetic with the ethical is what Solnit traces in Orwell’s best writing. Orwell wasn’t dedicated only to writing the truth as he saw it but to doing so in a way that was morally, and thus aesthetically, pleasing: “Clarity, honesty, accuracy, truth are beautiful because in them representation is true to its subject, knowledge is democratized, people are empowered, doors are open, information moves freely, contracts are honored.” (231). Orwell’s political commitments are inseparable from his aesthetic achievement. Solnit expounds on this achievement, suggesting that it “is enriched and deepened by the […] idealism that fueled it, […] his valuation of […] pleasure and joy, and his recognition that these can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its soul-destroying institutions” (268). That is, aesthetic achievement—as well as sensual pleasure and simple joy—can convey an ethical attitude of resistance to despotism and deceit.

The Roots of Writing

Orwell’s Roses is a book about not only a renowned writer but roses and nature in general. It’s also about the political implications not only of writing itself but also of the production of roses and the depiction of nature. As such, it focuses equal concern on the act of writing and the value of beauty, especially the kind of beauty found in nature. Solnit suggests that Orwell’s act of planting roses is somehow intimately connected with the act of writing. She explores Orwell’s connection to nature in terms of his commitment to truth and authenticity as well as aesthetic beauty and the experience of joy. In writing about nature and the sensory pleasures of natural desire, Orwell conducted “acts of resistance” (44) against an increasingly-mechanized and politically-corrupt era.

Solnit celebrates the solaces of the garden and what gardens might mean to writers: “A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing,” she notes (44). Writing is an ephemeral endeavor, in which “the return (as impact, as income, as appreciation) can be a nebulous thing, but you reap what you sow in a garden” (45). Writing must be balanced by the more (and literally) grounded activities that take the writer away from the abstract plane of thought and into the concrete world of reality, according to Solnit: “Walking or cooking or laboring on simple or repetitive tasks can also be a way to leave the work behind so you can come back to it fresh or find unexpected points of entry into it” (45). Thus, Orwell’s gardening functions as a respite from writing as well as an inspiration for it. In thinking about Orwell’s 1984, Solnit even suggests that tending a garden can be an act of defiance: That is, the deception inherent in totalitarianism—the slippery nature of Newspeak, with its obscured, truncated meanings—withers in the face of the incontrovertible laws of the natural world.

She also suggests that Orwell’s turn toward nature informed his style of writing itself. His metaphorical language is heavily rooted in “the natural, rural, and agrarian world: the language of plowing ahead, having a hard row to hoe, reaping what you sow, making a beeline, going out on a limb, not see the forest for the trees [...] and all the rest” (45). While Newspeak tries to eradicate the nuance of language, Orwell resuscitates its rich, earthy metaphorical inheritance: “Orwell in going rural was, among other things, returning to the source of metaphor, aphorism, simile” (45). Later, she states even more explicitly that writing—the metaphors that populate the most vivid styles—grows organically from nature, from natural inspiration: “Plants too provide us with metaphors and meanings and images, with stems, offshoots, grafts, roots and branches, information trees, seeds of ideas, fruits of our labor, cross-pollinations, ripeness and greenness” (126). Thus, Orwell’s forays into the countryside and out back to the garden provided him with fertilizer for every new crop of ideas.

This extends to descriptions of sensory pleasures like sex and an understanding of human fertility in general, both literal and creative. Instead of removing humanity from the cycles of nature or elevating some humans over others, Orwell’s work reminds his readers that all humans are intimately connected to natural cycles. The washerwoman in 1984 serves as a touchstone for such connection. When Winston Smith, the protagonist, thinks about the coarse-bodied, aging woman, he sees something beautiful:

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse [amid her many labors]. At the end of it she was still singing (257).

She’s beautiful because she’s natural; the beauty rests in the imagery’s authenticity, in her sheer fecundity—labor indicates both literal childbirth and ceaseless toil. Orwell’s string of organic metaphors describe what’s valuable about the washerwoman, though her worth also rests in her inherent opposition to the totalitarian regime. She, Winston believes, represents the fertile future, while Big Brother and the Thought Police symbolize the sterility of oppression and control. Winston’s affair with Julia likewise underscores what the authorities can’t control: love and passion. When they have sex, it’s not only an expression of desire between two people but also “a political act, a blow against the regime, a victory” (259). Orwell’s writing resists what doesn’t foster individual autonomy or common community; this interrupts the harmony between the natural attractions between people as well as the connections between people and the natural world. His writing flows organically from such lofty ideals.