She is not merely, as Winston first supposed, a ‘rebel from the waist downwards’. (This is, of course, a very impractical and silly thing to do.) That she allows herself to be caught is her downfall but it is always-already her final triumph, too. Julia, we recall, allows herself to be conquered by love for Winston, in a world where it was thought impossible.
Her grainy and stubborn presence provides hard evidence that we are often at our best when the world is at its worst. Like St Jude, she proclaims necessary defiance under extreme circumstances. Julia is also St Jude, a patron saint of impossible causes, for a Godless age. As such, Julia is always with us, in fact, at precisely those moments when we believe we are most irrevocably lost, damned, or alone. She represents the fighting chance that inspires hope or, as Chippewa critic Gerald Vizenor calls it, she conveys (at least for me) ‘the chance of no chance’.
She courts betrayal so as to entertain freedom. And if it is a cliché that love and betrayal go hand in hand, then Julia is their handmaiden. Julia is this moment of abandon prior to capture. She is both a character in the book and, at least for me, an emblem of what disinterested love itself can, and often does, result in just prior to the moment of capture, just prior to the moment the repressive secret police (of the self, of the state) burst in: Julia, you recall, was Winston Smith’s great love in George Orwell’s 1984.
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