Orwell's Inner Tyranny: A Personal and Literary Examination

George Orwell’s work on fascism has long been lionized—not just for its clarity on how such systems form, for the moral certainty it claims about which side one should take. If only he’d had the courage to turn those wax wings inward and face the heat of his own insights.

He was an incredibly insightful writer, but insight does not always translate to self-awareness, and the distinction matters a great deal when it comes to the interpretation of his work.

I had not read a great deal of Orwell beyond the usual required high school reading of what is regarded as his masterpiece, 1984. I recently came across his essay, Why I Write, and saw in that a nuance so slight that, when it tipped its hand, sent me down a rabbit hole to re-examine 1984 from a different lens.

It was a subtle confession—almost offhand—that writers are "driven by some demon," a line that hinted at something unresolved within Orwell himself. 1984 is not just a political warning, but also a cautionary tale about the human condition, utterly humbled and unprotected by its vanity.

He knew—whether he could say it plainly or not—that the inner life always makes its way into the work. The personal is inescapable. I took the time to examine Orwell’s inner life, since apparently he didn’t, poring through biographies and other critiques.

As a writer, Orwell used his pen like a scalpel on systems of control, dissecting these nameless, faceless blobs that must be tightly controlled lest one succumb to their siren’s song of comfort and false promises. Systems don’t spring out of Zeus’s head fully formed; they are composed of individuals, each acting in accordance with their own interests. Orwell writes about his "desire to push the world in a certain direction," his call to action "to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after," upholding a standard of decency.

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change. For I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed.” —Marcus Aurelius

I’m not here to burn Orwell at the stake. I’m here to explore an idea I haven’t seen touched on with any significance—what if the man who wrote about authoritarianism was living under the illusion that he wasn’t one himself?

That doesn’t dilute his work—it intensifies it. It invites us to examine not just political regimes, but the human condition itself: how we manage control, how we justify it, and where we fail to recognize it in our own lives. The truth is hard, but we need to stop lying to ourselves and take responsibility for our behaviors—both our decencies and our flaws—if we have any hope of leaving the world better than we found it.

We’re all contradictions. I’m no exception. But not all contradictions are equal.

Some are harmless. Some are honest. And some—like preaching against tyranny while practicing it in your home—aren’t contradictions.

They’re betrayals.

Orwell fought the right fight—but for the wrong reasons. His resistance to fascism was real but felt less about justice for justice's sake and more reactive at its core, needed more to restore his own sense of sovereignty coming from an upbringing of shame, bullying, and struggle. That doesn’t make the fight meaningless. But it does complicate the man behind the banner.

Intentions matter. But when they serve the self more than the cause—especially when harm is done in private—they don’t absolve. They indict.

“He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.” —Theodor W. Adorno

His private relationships demonstrate this contradiction in how he related to those closest to him. Undeniably, the man who warned us about the abuse of power—its distortions, its gaslighting, its quiet brutality—mirrored those very dynamics in how he treated the one person who loved him most: his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

I read Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, and 1984 not just for the story, but for the subtext beneath. What I found was a strong, congruent thread—not just of Orwell’s view on society, but a window into his inner world.

Anna Funder’s brilliant read, Wifedom, exhaustively researches Eileen, giving her a voice. She masterfully stitches together Eileen’s life with Orwell, and the picture that emerges is of a troubled genius who worked out his emotional turmoil within the subtext of his writing.

One of Eileen’s closest friends, Lydia, who wrote about her experience staying with George and Eileen, felt Orwell took Eileen too much for granted, remarking that she never saw tenderness or appreciation from him towards his wife. Eileen did all the work, prepared the meals, and served. Afterwards, he withdrew upstairs to work; getting up and simply leaving the table. I’m quite sure without even having the decency to push his chair in.

That’s what wives were for.

During their union, Orwell had numerous affairs—and wasn’t especially discreet about them. For a man whose core value was decency, his treatment of his wife was anything but. Unless, of course, John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling—got a rebrand. I found evidence of all four in his writing, letters, and observations from those who knew him.

You can see these same dynamics play out in Coming Up for Air, where the narrator, George Bowling, describes his wife Hilda as joyless and of possibly “bad stock.” It’s not just a passing insult—it’s a textbook example of Gottman’s contempt, disguised as wry observation. Bowling blames her for his own disconnection, never reflecting upon how he was showing up in the relationship.

Bowling came across as emotionally arrested, entitled; above the need to self-reflect. He never questioned how he had gotten to this point in life, discharging any personal accountability onto someone else. He spent the majority of the book justifying why he needed to escape the drudgery of his life only to begrudgingly return. Bowling’s nostalgia for a past that didn’t really exist felt emotionally flat. You got the impression that at no point was he ever present in his own life. There’s a difference between being present and emotionally available. He didn’t evoke the texture of memory—just its aftermath. It read like someone trying to feel something, but only managing to report on the echo.

Brenda Salkeld, the inspiration for A Clergyman’s Daughter, said to Orwell:

“Never write about people; you don’t understand them. Even about yourself, you haven’t a clue.”

Within months of getting married, Orwell goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, camouflaging his emotional impotence around principle.

Of course, I can’t say with any certainty I know how Eileen truly felt, but I have a hard time believing that any woman who was continually disrespected, humiliated by their spouse’s numerous indiscreet dalliances, and abandoned—both emotionally and physically—felt loved, supported, or cherished. By all accounts—through both her letters and the recollections of friends—she loved Orwell and gave of herself, all of herself, freely. I’d imagine Eileen would have felt small, insignificant, unworthy, and aggrieved. George, for his part, seemed to become more and more emboldened with each emotional breach.

I imagine him sauntering back after a betrayal like nothing happened, asking what’s for dinner. With the crusts cut off.

The fact that Eileen stayed isn’t evidence there was love or respect. And while it’s true we can’t possibly know what goes on within someone else’s relationship, Marcus Aurelius warned:

“You are what you do repeatedly. Your character is the sum of your actions.”

And based on an abundance of historical evidence, Orwell’s repeated actions tell a story of someone to be found wanting.

Orwell repeatedly demonstrated a lack of growth throughout their years together, withdrawing either emotionally or physically whenever demands outside the purview of what he preferred to do took center stage. Before the din of “There was a war on! He was a writer, he had to write!” begins—for every account of the “it was a different time” canard, there are just as many accounts of other writers during the same time whose actions matched their words. We have to stop playing the shell game of excuses when we all know any good reasons were already palmed under the table.

Decency is like a little black dress. It’s timeless.

Before their son Richard was even a toddler, Orwell once again abandoned his wife to go to the front lines under the guise of reporting. While Orwell was busy being Andy Capp with a typewriter, Eileen was left to manage a baby, a household, the recent loss of her beloved brother, and her ill health—which had progressed in severity—with nary any support from the one person she should have been able to count on: her “partner.”

I would go as far as to say that Orwell’s naked entitlement really shows in his choice of partners—someone smart, attractive, and nurturing to care for him because he was special—only to give heartache in exchange for the love and care he received. He privileged himself to everything she had to give, wringing her dry like a towel until it was threadbare.

No woman who writes to her spouse right before undergoing a serious operation, alone:

is feeling seen or supported.

It sounds like a woman still begging, with pleading eyes, desperate to be seen by the person she entrusted the most.

She probably felt scared, neglected, and unimportant in a time of great need; with a heavy heart to be left once again, to solely figure out a solution to a dire problem. Orwell’s behaviors toward his wife were erasure of selfhood by a thousand cuts of neglect.

Orwell received her letter after her death.

He tells a friend:

“The last time he saw her he wanted to tell her that he loved her much more now since they’d had Richard and he didn’t tell her and regretted it immensely.”

Such are the fish tales of every emotional avoidant—they “were” going to, but alas, now it’s time for the eulogy.

The time to tell someone is before the eulogy. In fact, you should live every day with someone you made a commitment to like every day is their eulogy—so there are no regrets of the unsaid later.

Research suggests a strong overlap of traits of an emotional avoidant personality with a toxic control personality. Control is used as a way to manage the overwhelm from feelings in general but especially when feeling vulnerable.

From my gaze, Orwell appears to be an almost textbook example. While I can hold grace, it has a limit because I guess one of my ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ is that if someone knows the difference between right and wrong and can see how much their behavior impacts someone they love, then I hold the boundary at virtue over virtue signaling and put the onus of responsibility where it firmly belongs — on the shoulders of the perpetrator.

I was curious about the traits that comprise an authoritarian personality and was genuinely surprised to see Orwell was an almost perfect match. I guess that’s why he had such insight into understanding the mindset.

Mind you, as with anything, having traits does not mean someone is going to become Franco, but it does mean if someone leans into being hyper-rigid, holds dissent up as a personal attack that demands correction, clings to moral superiority, and dominates to the point where fealty is considered connection and accountability is never taken, then they’re going to get side-eyed for being controlling.

And craven.

In fact, I would go insofar as to say in less literary parlance someone could be labeled a selfish, entitled, condescending, arrogant moralistic asshole.

Orwell’s persona was one where he fought for societal decency and the common man. It was morality in drag based on the record of his actions, not his words. Especially when it came to the woman who sacrificed her entire self for him not just because she loved him, but because she believed in him.

That’s the thing about the tyranny of control in intimate relationships: everyone thinks tyranny looks different than it actually does. We expect it to be loud, brutal, obvious. It isn’t. Most of the time, it comes disguised—dripping from derisive comments, hiding in stonewalling, embedded in secret behaviors kept from someone you supposedly love. It doesn’t protect their well-being—it corrodes it. And the final act of control? Making the victim of their toxic control feel like they failed—when in fact it’s the other way around. It’s DARVO on steroids.

The brilliant Hannah Arendt once wrote about the “banality of evil” in her coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. She noted how ordinary he seemed—mild, deferential, even boring. And yet, he was a key architect of the Final Solution. That’s the nature of tyranny: it often arrives looking like nothing at all. Just small choices, small cruelties, the expectation of unconditional acceptance of numerous slights stacking up quietly over time until the shape of something monstrous becomes impossible to ignore.

The only difference between a system and a relationship… is scale. It’s not about words. It’s about behaviors.

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.” —Theodor W. Adorno

In his essay on Dali, even though Orwell didn’t agree with Dali’s personal choices, he did say that to use the argument that Dali wasn’t a good artist to discredit his erratic personal life was specious. He’s correct; Dali could paint—even if he probably thought the canvas was breathing on him at times—but he also had a twisted version of what constituted character.

The same can be said of Orwell. Orwell was an excellent writer and I think 1984 should be held up exactly as it’s been written—what life is like under a totalitarian regime. It’s a splendid example. A warning of what to look out for lest we fall victim as a society.

Or personally.

Guilt-ridden and haunted over his treatment of his wife Eileen after her untimely death, 1984 was not constructed as just a political treatise, but—in my opinion—an allegory about internal tyranny and the damage an unexamined life and the refusal— of accountability for one’s behaviors, and the recalcitrance to making the essential repairs— and what it leaves in its wake.

Room 101.

The fear of erasure, the psychological torture of Room 101, and the rewriting of history are not just mechanisms of state control but metaphors for Orwell’s own avoidance, shame, and longing for absolution.

The same collapse that topples nations begins inside the man who refuses to face himself.

We cannot talk about power if we don’t talk about how it plays out in personal relationships.

We cannot analyze behavior from the past without understanding the structure that allowed it.

Orwell’s genius wasn’t just in diagnosing systems of control. It was in his accidental confession—his unconscious self-portrait as a man who constructed a psychic totalitarian regime to avoid the one thing he feared most:

In 1984, Orwell doesn’t just construct a chilling vision of state tyranny; he encodes a deeply personal confession about emotional failure. Much has been made of Julia as a character, but if we examine her not as a literal woman, but as an emotional cipher, a different story begins to emerge. Julia is not Eileen. She is not even a woman, per se. Julia is the embodiment of a feeling—the fragile, dangerous desire for vulnerability, intimacy, and connection. The thing Orwell both craved and feared. The thing he could never quite hold without trying to control or destroy it.

He predicated his entire relationship with Eileen where he was blameless and always justified, so he built a world in which control—the real mistress in his relationship—provided the perfect programmed response to even a hint of culpability.

"I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her very badly, and I think she treated me badly too at times, but it was a real marriage in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work." —George Orwell to Ann Popham

I’d be curious to know what Eileen didn’t give enough of herself to satisfy Orwell’s bottomless pit of entitlement and what she did that he considered ‘bad treatment’. I’m going to go out on a limb here as someone who has seen this dynamic before and say that quip most likely referred to a reactive response to a behavior he initiated. Apparently, even in death he still looked for an escape hatch from responsibility.

In other words, he spent a lifetime reacting to how something made him feel versus reacting to what was said. When feelings are uncomfortable, you will do anything to make that discomfort stop. Even if it means blaming someone else to discharge the distress.

Julia, then, is the fantasy of emotional freedom and authenticity. She is passion, risk, and chaotic intimacy—all the things Orwell couldn’t live with, even as he longed for them. His urge to both love and destroy her is not a contradiction—it’s the truest expression of ambivalence toward his own personal demons. Julia represents the terrifying proposition that to be fully seen is to be exposed. And Orwell would rather destroy that possibility than let it undo the self-narrative he clung to.

In Room 101, when Winston says, “Do it to Julia!”, he isn’t betraying a lover. He’s surrendering the part of himself that dared to want more but was too cowardly to embrace. Julia the woman is not betrayed. She is the cost of never learning how to be vulnerable. She is the emotional reckoning that Orwell could not stand to bear witness to in his own life.

The sacrifice—or betrayal—of Julia is a metaphor for what Orwell couldn’t do in real life for Eileen. And the impact of what it meant—not just to feel it, but to finally realize it—is what awaited him in Room 101.

The poison of overzealous control’s worst destruction was not of institutions, but of the personal: the unexamined life—shame, regret, self-loathing, and failure.

Shame was his personal boot stamped on a human face forever—the mark of the beast—the rage from within that demanded total control in order to soothe it. Unmoored, this shame shape-shifted into victimhood, its sharp edges leaving cuts and scrapes on everything it touched—especially those who gave of themselves freely, only to be left abandoned. Reciprocity replaced with the intractable insolence of justification and excuses.

Shame awaited him in Room 101 and by this point, after so many refusals to remedy the damage done, it was no longer offering mercy.

“…A time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone.” —1984

Room 101 is the reckoning with yourself—the abyss staring back, with a smirk.

Stripped of your usual excuses to disguise the indefensible.

No cognitive dissonance (Doublethink) to shield you, no weaponized language (Newspeak) to deflect accountability.

It’s just you and what you refused to face, eye to eye.

And it intends to collect what it's due.

1984 isn’t just about the system of fascism. It’s about the unrelenting tyranny of shame when you’ve betrayed your own humanity, and the futile lengths the mind goes to avoid ever saying: “It was me.”

Winston’s breakdown is Orwell’s internal war:

Orwell wants to be the victim of memory—not its custodian.

If you do not face yourself, the system will do it for you—and it will not be kind.

You can’t fight tyranny if you’re reinforcing it in your own life. Orwell created a dystopian world where betrayal in his mind is inevitable. This way, he could never fail or be blamed.

We’re responsible not just for our choices but for the impact of those choices, and that’s where we fall short—and then the “system” is to blame. We offshore our discomfort and accountability, choosing between Space Gray or Starlight to absolve ourselves of our guilt before it becomes shame.

But you can’t outrun shame; only bear witness to the aftermath—a karma you can never outrun. It will always be waiting for you in Room 101. If we keep feeding our unexamined selves into unaccountable machines, we will get tyranny in return. First personally—and then collectively.

Winston surrendered agency in order to feel safe and be absolved of responsibility and avoid blame. Do it to Julia isn’t just betrayal—it’s the death rattle of emotional avoidance. Winston’s final act is not resistance, but choosing not to feel, living the rest of his life comfortably numb. I love Big Brother is his willing forfeit of agency. Not because the system broke him—but because shame forced his surrender due to its unbearable discomfort, and he would do anything, except take accountability, to discharge it.

Not because they feel good— But because they are true.

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell