Written in 1934 and 1935, ‘Keep The
Aspidistra Flying’ is a scathing satire on the 1930s society. George Orwell
demonstrates his disillusionment with his surroundings, and his caustic wit is
present throughout the novel, as he seeks to challenge the conventional
lifestyle of aspiration to financial stability and corporate success.
The book is chiefly concerned with Gordon
Comstock, who abandons a ‘good job’ in advertising to work part-time in a
bookstore, and the subsequent poverty that it brings him. ‘The public are
swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’; this is
how Gordon perceives the job from which he has escaped, for he has vowed to
resist the ‘money-god’ that those around him worship so ardently, and feels
that such reverence ‘has been elevated into a religion… Money is what God used
to be.’ Through his protagonist, Orwell excoriates the society in which he was
living.
At first, Gordon sees himself as a ‘poet
starving in a garret - but starving, somehow, not uncomfortably.’
Unfortunately, this quixotic view is soon expunged by reality, and he finds
the first consequence of poverty to be the extinguishing of his imagination and
creativity, and his life is soon dreary and insalubrious. He works in the
bookstore with the ambition of establishing himself as a writer, but falls
instead into self-loathing, seeing his poems as ‘forty or fifty drab, dead
little poems, each like a little abortion in its jar.’ Orwell himself was also
subjected to poverty, though wilfully, as is recorded in his account ‘Down and Out in Paris and
London’. He drew on many of his own experiences to write this book: in 1934, he
was employed as a bookstore’s assistant, and documented in his essay, ‘Bookshop
Memories’ the ‘decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day,
sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books’; in ‘Keep
The Aspidistra Flying’, this ubiquitous figure is recycled in the form of an
‘old woman’ who smells of ‘very, very old breadcrusts.’
To him, the eponymous aspidistra embodies
tedious, middle-class righteousness. These household plants become ‘a sort of
symbol for Gordon’; he despises all they represent, and denounces them in the
sarcastic lines, ‘The aspidistra, flower of England! It ought to be on our coat
of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in
England while there are aspidistras in the windows.’
Whilst abhorring those who aspire to
wealth, Gordon harbours a fanatical obsession with money, and in his eyes, it
oozes into every crevice of life, especially social relationships. He feels
that women in particular find only financially stable men desirous: ‘serve the
money-god, or do without women - those are the only alternatives. And both were
equally impossible.’
When he comes into 10 pounds unexpectedly,
Orwell does not afford any sympathy to his character; instead, Gordon promptly
spends the whole amount in one alcohol-fuelled evening of profligate decadence,
and wryly observes that: ‘if you have no money you don’t even know how to spend
it when you get it. You just splurge it frantically away, like a sailor in a
bawdy-house his first night ashore.’ It takes the unexpected pregnancy of his
girlfriend, Rosemary, to persuade him to relinquish his beliefs, raise himself
from his abject poverty and take up his job again at the advertising firm in
order to provide for his family; ‘his long and lonely war had ended in
ignominious defeat.’ Remarkably, however, he experiences only relief upon
finally submitting himself to the way of life that he resents, having nurtured
a secret longing, he admits, to leave his ‘moneyless existence to which he had
condemned himself.’ It is as though an epiphany has occurred: he goes on to
hypothesize that ‘to abjure money is to abjure life.’
What Orwell presents as a happy ending
could perhaps be interpreted as containing less positive undertones; from
having detested the aspidistra, the final scene depicts Gordon demanding the
presence of one in their new flat, a representation of his dramatic change of
opinion. He reflects that, actually, ‘the aspidistra is the tree of life’; this
ending is redolent of 1984, where, having waged a secret battle against the
totalitarian regime, Winston Smith finally accepts their policies and declares
his love for The Party, after being brutally tortured. Orwell is a concise and
economic writer, who possesses a sharp and conscious wit, and his prose strides
fluently and purposefully; as there is no linguistic surplus, he is able to
hone to his core messages concerning society. There is no need for superfluous
vocabulary, for the meaning of his phrases is clearly
communicated to the reader, while the tone creates a potent sense of atmosphere
and place. The narrative style captures the essence of Gordon’s opinions,
leading the reader to question the lifestyle with which they may be familiar:
Orwell encourages his audience both to associate with Gordon and to despair of
his extreme views. The plot of the story is refined into the following quote:
‘You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can be possess
money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and
fail to get it.’
