Facism, Women, and Orwell, Oh My! Kyndra Kelley College

George Orwell, while quite well-known for expressing political views in his literature, such as those of anti-fascism and pro-democratic socialism, was hardly a feminist. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell tells a tale of the proletariat man fighting for survival through the agonies of prolonged trench warfare, while forgetting about the women who supported him and his comrades.

When George Orwell arrived in Barcelona in 1936, he was not planning to join the Spanish Civil War, much less to return home to England with a bullet hole in his neck. Despite the initial journalistic purposes of his trip, Orwell’s strong sense of anti-fascism and hope for a leftist government led him to join a worker’s militia. In the line, Orwell finds that he is not exactly fighting facism as he had hoped, but merely surviving the cold, damp trenches. He begins to find the pseudo-fighting quite absurd, remarking that “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting” (Orwell 52). This realization informs his view of war and makes him begin to realize he does not truly understand what parties are fighting and why.

Despite the political...