{"id":4527,"date":"2015-09-02T17:44:50","date_gmt":"2015-09-02T22:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4527"},"modified":"2015-09-03T02:54:30","modified_gmt":"2015-09-03T07:54:30","slug":"notes-on-a-clergymans-daughter-george-orwells-search-for-the-meaning-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2015\/09\/02\/worldview\/notes-on-a-clergymans-daughter-george-orwells-search-for-the-meaning-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on “A Clergyman’s Daughter” – George Orwell’s Search for the Meaning of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

A synopsis of George Orwell’s<\/a> A Clergyman’s Daughter<\/em><\/a> may be found in the Wiki entry on the same.\u00a0 In short, it relates the experiences of Dorothy Hare, only daughter of the Reverend Charles Hare, a “gentleman” clergyman with a chronic habit of living beyond his means.\u00a0 Dorothy’s life is consumed by a frantic\u00a0struggle to maintain respectability in spite of\u00a0a mountain of debt owed to the local tradesmen, a dwindling congregation, and a church gradually decaying to ruin for lack of maintenance.\u00a0 There’s also a problem so repressed in Dorothy’s mind that she’s hardly conscious of it; she is losing her Christian faith.<\/p>\n

Eventually the pressure becomes unbearable.\u00a0 At the end of Chapter 1 we leave Dorothy exhausted, working herself beyond endurance late at night\u00a0to prepare costumes for a children’s play.\u00a0 At the start of Chapter 2 we find her teleported to the Old Kent Road, south of London, where she wakes up with a bad case of amnesia and only half a crown in her pocket.\u00a0 A good German might describe this rather remarkable turn of events as an den Haaren herbeigezogen<\/em> (dragged in by the hair.)\u00a0 In other words, it’s far fetched, but we can forgive it because Orwell refrains from boring us with explanatory psychobabble, it’s in one of his earliest books, and he needs\u00a0some such device\u00a0in order to dish up a fictional version of the autobiographical events described in his Down and Out in Paris and London<\/em>, published a couple of years earlier.<\/p>\n

Eventually Dorothy is rescued from starvation and squalor by a much older cousin, who sets her up as a school teacher at Ringwood House,\u00a0which Orwell describes as a fourth rate private school with only 21 female inmates.\u00a0 At this point the astute reader will discover something that might come as a revelation to those who are only familiar with Animal Farm<\/a><\/em> and 1984<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Orwell was a convinced socialist when he wrote the book, and remained one until the end of his life.\u00a0 Mrs. Creevy, the woman who runs the school, is a grasping capitalist, interested only in squeezing as much profit out of the enterprise as possible.\u00a0 The girls “education” consists mainly of a mind-numbing routine of rote memorization and handwriting drills.\u00a0 Dorothy’s attempts at education reform are nipped in the bud, and she is eventually sacked.\u00a0 In Mrs. Creevy’s words,<\/p>\n

It’s the fees I’m after, not developing the children’s minds<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s not to be supposed as anyone’s to go to all the trouble of keeping a school and having the house turned upside down by a pack of brats, if it wasn’t that there’s a bit of money to be made out of it.\u00a0 The fee comes first, and everything else comes afterwards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orwell later elaborates,<\/p>\n

There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England. \u00a0Second-rate, third-rate, and fourth-rate (Ringwood House was a specimen of the fourth-rate school), they exist by the dozen and the score in every London suburb and every provincial town.\u00a0 At any given moment there are somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to Government inspection.\u00a0 And though some of them are better than others, and a certain number, probably, are better than the council schools with which they compete, there is the same fundamental evil in all of them; that is , that they have ultimately no purpose except to make money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So long as schools are run primarily for money, things like this will happen.\u00a0 The expensive private schools to which the rich send their children are not, on the surface, so bad as the others, because they can afford a proper staff, and the Public School examination system keeps them up to the mark; but they have the same essential taint.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Recall that the book was published in 1935.\u00a0 The Spanish Civil War, in which Orwell fought with a socialist unit not affiliated with the Communists, began in 1936.\u00a0 In that conflict he had his nose rubbed in the reality of totalitarianism, socialism that had dropped the democratic mask.\u00a0 The experience is described in his Homage to Catalonia<\/em><\/a>, which is essential reading for anyone interested in learning what inspired his later work.\u00a0\u00a0There he\u00a0tells how\u00a0the Communist legions\u00a0attacked and destroyed his own division, regardless of the fact that it was fighting on the same side.\u00a0 Totalitarianism has never recognized more than two sides; the side that it controls, and the side that it doesn’t.\u00a0 He saw that its real reason for existence was nothing like a worker’s paradise, or any other version of “human flourishing,” but absolute, unconditional power.\u00a0 The nature of the system and the power it aimed at was what he described in 1984<\/em>.\u00a0 When A Clergyman’s Daughter<\/em> was published, that revelation still lay in the future.\u00a0\u00a0It may be that in 1935\u00a0Orwell still thought of the socialists as one big, happy, if occasionally quarrelsome, family.<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, the real interest of the book, at least as far as I’m concerned, lies at the end.\u00a0 There, more explicitly than in any other of his novels or essays, Orwell takes up the question of the Meaning of Life.\u00a0 While down and out, Dorothy had lost her faith once and for all.\u00a0 In spite of that, after Mrs. Creevy sacks her, she finds her way back to the family parsonage, and takes up again where she left off.\u00a0 She suffers from no illusions.\u00a0 As Orwell puts it,<\/p>\n

It was not that she was in any doubt about the external facts of her future.\u00a0 She could see it all quite clearly before her… Whatever happened, at the very best, she had got to face the destiny that is common to all lonely and penniless women.\u00a0 “The Old Maids of Old England,” as somebody called them.\u00a0 She was twenty-eight – just old enough to enter their ranks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She was not the same women as before.\u00a0 She had lost her faith, and yet, she meditated,<\/p>\n

Faith vanishes, but the need for faith remains the same as before.\u00a0 And given only faith, how can anything else matter?\u00a0 How can anything dismay you if only there is some purpose in the world which you can serve, and which, while serving it, you can understand?\u00a0 Your whole life is illumined by that sense of purpose.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Life, if the grave really ends it, is monstrous and dreadful.\u00a0 No use trying to argue it away.\u00a0 Think of life as it really is, think of the details<\/em> of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave.\u00a0 Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her mind struggled with the problem, while perceiving that there was no solution.\u00a0 There was, she saw clearly, no possible substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient unto itself, no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of “progress” with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete.\u00a0 It is all or nothing.\u00a0 Either life on earth is a preparation for something greater and more lasting, or it is meaningless, dark and dreadful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we see that, even in 1935, Orwell wasn’t quite convinced that the Soviet version of\u00a0a Brave New World really represented “progress.”\u00a0 And while democratic socialism may have later given him something of a sense of purpose, it wasn’t yet filling the void.\u00a0 Dorothy considers,<\/p>\n

Where had she got to?\u00a0 She had been saying that if death ends all, then there is no hope and no meaning in anything.\u00a0 Well, what then?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this point, the true believers chime in.\u00a0 They know the answer.\u00a0 Bring back faith, and, voila<\/em>, the void is filled!\u00a0 So many of them honestly seem to believe that, because they feel a need, the thing needed will automatically pop into existence.\u00a0 They need absolute moral standards.\u00a0 Therefore their faith\u00a0must be\u00a0true.\u00a0 They need a purpose in life.\u00a0 Therefore their faith\u00a0must be\u00a0true.\u00a0 They need human existence to have meaning.\u00a0 Therefore their faith\u00a0must be\u00a0true.\u00a0\u00a0They must have unquestionable rights.\u00a0 Therefore their faith must be true.\u00a0 And so on, and so on.\u00a0 Orwell is having none of it.\u00a0 Dorothy muses on,<\/p>\n

And how cowardly, after all, to regret a superstition that you had got rid of – to want to believe something that you knew in your bones to be untrue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orwell provides us with no magic solution to this thorny problem.\u00a0 Indeed, in the end his answer is singularly unsatisfying.\u00a0 He suggests that we just get on with it and leave it at that.\u00a0 As Dorothy glues together strips of paper, forming the boots, armor, and other accoutrements required for the next church play, she has stumbled into the solution without realizing it:<\/p>\n

The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer.\u00a0 She did not know this.\u00a0 She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable.\u00a0 She could not formulate these thoughts as yet, she could only live them.\u00a0 Much later, perhaps, she would formulate them and draw comfort from them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and, finally,<\/p>\n

Dorothy sliced two more sheets of brown paper into strips, and took up the breastplate to give it its final coating.\u00a0 The problem of faith and no faith had vanished utterly from her mind.\u00a0 It was beginning to get dark, but, too busy to stop and light the lamp, she worked on, pasting strip after strip of paper into place, with absorbed, with pious concentration, in the penetrating smell of the gluepot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orwell didn’t want A Clergyman’s Daughter<\/em> to be republished, unless, perhaps, in a cheap version to scare up a few pounds for his heirs.\u00a0 No doubt he considered it too immature.\u00a0 We can be grateful that his literary executors thought otherwise, else we might never have known of his struggles with the Meaning of Life<\/em> problem so early in his career.\u00a0\u00a0He didn’t spill much ink over the problem later on, but we must assume that he had found some\u00a0more inspiring\u00a0purpose to strive for than just “getting on with it.”\u00a0 Weak and in pain, he fought to complete 1984<\/em> on his death bed with incredible tenacity and dedication.\u00a0 It was a gift to all of us that didn’t follow him to the grave, but lived long after he was gone as the single most effective literary weapon against a threat that had materialized as Communism in his own day, but will likely always lurk among us in one form or another.<\/p>\n

And what of the Meaning of Life<\/em>?\u00a0 That’s a\u00a0question we must all\u00a0provide an answer for on our own.\u00a0 None of the imaginary super-beings we have dreamed up over the years is likely to materialize to trivialize the search.\u00a0 And just as Orwell wrote, whether we care to deal with the problem or not, there is no objective solution.\u00a0 It must be subjective and individual.\u00a0\u00a0It need not be any less compelling for all that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A synopsis of George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter may be found in the Wiki entry on the same.\u00a0 In short, it relates the experiences of Dorothy Hare, only daughter of the Reverend Charles Hare, a “gentleman” clergyman with a chronic habit of living beyond his means.\u00a0 Dorothy’s life is consumed by a frantic\u00a0struggle to maintain … Continue reading “Notes on “A Clergyman’s Daughter” – George Orwell’s Search for the Meaning of Life”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[284,34,254,29,7,233,234,1],"tags":[236,332],"class_list":["post-4527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-george-orwell","category-literature","category-novels","category-philosophy","category-religion","category-the-meaning-of-life","category-the-purpose-of-life","category-worldview","tag-meaning-of-life","tag-orwell"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-1b1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4527"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4538,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4527\/revisions\/4538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}