Julia's Passive Resistance: A Study in Orwell's Dystopia

Orwell utilizes Julia’s character in order to capture the attitude of the oppressed as well. Winston wonders, “Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same” (Orwell 131). Julia has no interest in overtly fighting the Party because she believes that the rebellion would never work out in her favor. Winston goes on to think:
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 rebellion against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dogged a dog. (Orwell 131)
Although Julia attempts to break the rules, she accepts her situations. For Julia, the existence of this totalitarian government is all she has ever known. Many people remained under control of powerful dictators because they believed they wouldn’t make a difference.

However, there are other critiques that take a different approach on the oppression that exists in the novel. In "Urban Panopticism And Heterotopic Space In Kafka 's Der Process And Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Raj Shah argues that the way in which society in novel is oppressed is not an obvious oppression but one that focuses on constant surveillance. He uses Foucault’s arguments on panopticism to describe this. Shah states, “Foucault neologizes panopticism to describe a form of power relying not on overt repression, but rather upon the continuous surveillance of a population and the consequent strict regulation of the body” (703). He explains it is the constant surveillance that strips individuals of their rights and places them under oppression. He goes on to