‘추한’ 디스토피아의 교훈―오웰의 『1984』가 보여주는 심미적 열정의 중요성과 영어교육의 모델

Lessons from the “Ugly” Dystopia: The Importance of Aesthetic Enthusiasm in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Its Implications for English Education

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is fundamentally a political novel. It is a powerful critique of totalitarian regimes and the mechanisms they use to control and oppress individuals and society. Orwell wrote the novel as a response to the political ideologies and totalitarian practices he witnessed in the early 20th century, particularly under Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. Through the fictional world of Oceania and its omnipotent leader, Big Brother, Orwell illustrates how language, information, and even thought can be controlled to maintain an absolute power structure. Yet, while the novel serves as a warning against totalitarianism, it also implicitly highlights the loss of aesthetic enthusiasm and the pursuit of beauty as part of the societal decay under oppressive regimes. Orwell portrays Oceania as an “ugly” world marked by poverty, uniform structures and a profound absence of art, sensuous pleasure, and individual expression. Orwell’s depiction of the world bereft of beauty underlines that the suppression of beauty and creative passion can be the broader strategy of totalitarian governance to maintain control by stripping individuals of their sensory and aesthetic experiences. To demonstrate the point, this paper delves into Big Brother’s calculated efforts to enforce an anti-beautiful environment marked by ugliness, and demonstrates that the suppression of beauty and aesthetic passion causes de-humanization, reinforcing subjection to the national leader and diminishing personal aspirations for freedom and artistic fulfillment. Through the analysis, this paper argues that Orwell posits aesthetic enthusiasm and the pursuit of beauty as a subtle yet potent form of political resistance against totalitarian suppression. Furthermore, while examining the protagonist’s aesthetic enthusiasm and practices as acts of resistance against Big Brother, it discusses ways to apply these insights in the context of English education.