George Orwell and John Wyndham: Class, Hypocrisy, Society

Introduction: Orwell, Wyndham, and the Bourgeois Critique

George Orwell wrote much of his work with the ills of society in mind. Among these is his disdain for the general bourgeois mentality he observed in the England of his time. Two major issues he addresses in A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) are religious hypocrisy and the education system. Both result in society churning out more of the same dull, prejudiced, bourgeois people that they themselves have become. Similarly, John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) has been called a "middle-class catastrophe," addressing unquestioned bourgeois values, political hypocrisy, and the search for self-sufficiency above all else.

Dorothy is the main character of Orwell's novel. When the novel begins, she is completely sincere in her piety. She honestly tries to be as good a Christian as she can be and chides herself constantly for "sins" that she feels are unbecoming of a clergyman's daughter, or indeed of any Christian. She also attempts to correct her father's hypocrisy in failing to pay his bills to the tradesmen in town, upon which he responds:

Religious Hypocrisy in A Clergyman's Daughter

"Nonsense, my dear child! These people expect to be kept waiting for their money. They like it. It brings them more in the end." (p. 31)

The most obvious theme here is hypocrisy. The Rector attempts to justify his failures and his debt by asserting that it is actually good to owe money. This kind of hypocrisy, according to Orwell, is typical of the bourgeoisie when plagued by poverty. Unable to accept any financial shortage, the bourgeoisie continues to pretend that things are fine, and thus the clergyman attempts to frame his failure to pay bills as a characteristic of a "good" person.

Dorothy, however, refuses to accept this and finds it "terrible" that her father could behave in such a way. She is therefore in opposition to societal and bourgeois hypocrisy at the novel's opening. Her faith and her life are genuine. She genuinely strives to be a good person and demonstrates this through her daily activities. On her "to do" list she writes everything that must be done each day — for example, she wants to visit a woman who has just had a baby in order to encourage her to attend church. These actions are the consequence of her sincere Christian sentiments.

Dorothy's loss of memory in Chapter II marks the turning point in her life. Knowing only that "I am I!" (p. 97), she wanders away to adventures hitherto unknown to her in her bourgeois existence. First she becomes a beggar, after which she arrives at a job in the Kentish hopfields. When she hears that her new friends are going to Kent, it gives her some sort of comfort. On a subconscious level, Kent represents the life she had known so far — civilization and refinement. Although the hopfields are not exactly civilized or refined, Dorothy does recover her memory to some degree there.

This recovery leads to a further "refined" job in a snobbish private school, where Orwell criticizes the education system for its rigidity and its failure to serve the needs of its students. Dorothy is again the representative of sincerity. She attempts to be honest and forthright in her lessons and to teach the students in an interesting manner. The parents, however, would not have it:

Education and Social Conformity

"The fact was that the parents were growing perturbed by the tales their children brought home about Dorothy's methods. They saw no sense whatever in these new-fangled ideas of making plasticine maps and reading poetry, and the old mechanical routine which had so horrified Dorothy struck them as eminently sensible." (p. 247)

The parents are thus sketched in the same way that Orwell saw the society of his time: dull and hardly alive, attempting to make of their children the same dull, deadened people as themselves.

The Comfort Zone in The Day of the Triffids

Orwell here criticizes a world in which it is impossible to be anything other than what the world dictates. Dorothy had attempted to change her father's habit of not paying his bills. She had attempted to change the school system. Neither effort met with any success. At the end of the novel, as she wonders what to do next, she realizes that she is not alone in her fate — and her acceptance of this is her downfall.

Soon after her realization, Dorothy again begins her lists and her good works. The piety in her mind is still sincere in form, but this time the works are all that is left. There is none of the underlying Christian sincerity that once inspired them. Dorothy has learned to find satisfaction in the things that she does, rather than in the faith that originally motivated them. The grim finality of it all is that she, too, has become a hypocrite like the rest of the world — and is not even aware of it.

Throughout The Day of the Triffids, Wyndham comments upon the bourgeois tendency to become overly comfortable with the established order of the world. The narrator reflects:

"there was so much routine, things were so interlinked. Each one of us so steadily did his little part in the right place that it was easy to mistake habit and custom for the natural law — and all the more disturbing, therefore, when the routine was in any way upset." (1951: 17)

The order of things as the middle classes knew it was a daily routine, and it was therefore very difficult to adjust when almost everyone lost the sense of sight they had taken for granted throughout their lives. When Bill Masen finds that his breakfast has not arrived at the expected time in hospital, he is extremely nervous — and things only grow worse as the novel progresses.

Other elements of the "comfort zone" that Wyndham touches upon include the politics surrounding the triffids. Politicians initially deny their existence, and people are happy to believe them. This reflects the tendency in society to turn a blind eye toward things that make people uncomfortable, allowing politicians to commit atrocious acts because society prefers not to see. The wide-scale blindness of the people in the novel may also be read as a metaphor for this collective willful ignorance. The politics of the novel, like the politics of Wyndham's time, are unstable; war and hunger are imminent and constant dangers, and the world leaders are doing what they can to prevent these — which is, ironically, what leads to the disaster that leaves most people on earth blind.