The Nightmare of History in George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter

Abstract

‘When I read [Ulysses] and then come back to my own work’, George Orwell complained as he wrote his 1935 novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, ‘I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.’¹ Critics have long noticed the impact of Joyce’s Ulysses on Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter, whose protagonist, Dorothy Hare, spends a night in Trafalgar Square during which homeless eccentrics rave in a manner clearly derived from the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses. The standard line is that this is an inept pastiche, weirdly out of place amid the novel’s Dickensian realism.² Recently, however, Michael Levenson, Keith Williams, and Martha Carpentier have pointed out more subtle connections between Orwell and Joyce, puncturing the myth that Orwell definitively rejected modernist experimentalism.³ Following their lead, I argue here that Orwell found in Joyce a way of thinking and writing about his characters’ subjectivity in relation to history. In particular, I explore Orwell’s borrowings from two chapters, ‘Circe’ and ‘Nestor’, in which his heroine, Dorothy Hare, replays Stephen Dedalus’s negotiations with history, both personal and national. Orwell shared with Joyce a desire to dramatize the intersection of individual consciousness with institutionalized discourses — what Orwell called more broadly in his 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’ the ‘historical process of the moment.’⁴