A Dystopian View of Women: How a Freudian reading of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four can be used in Swedish EFL classrooms

Sammanfattning: This essay shows how Freudian psychoanalytic literary criticism can be used to analyze representations of what could be called literary characters’ unconscious, i.e. their thoughts and dreams, to attempt to determine and explain their view of women. The analysis serves as an example of what EFL teachers can focus on regarding Freudian criticism. This is applied to Winston, the protagonist of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by analyzing his descriptions of and interactions with women in his thoughts, dreams and reality using Freudian concepts through a qualitative reading of the novel. These concepts are repression, projection, dream images, displacement, condensation and sublimation. Although Freud’s theories have been heavily criticized, the essay argues that they can still be used to provide different perspectives on literary subjects. The essay concludes that Winston is misogynistic, which can be explained by his mother’s and sister’s disappearance in his childhood and his unconscious projection of hatred towards the Party onto women in the novel, which leads to his misogynistic descriptions of, interactions with and thoughts about women. Furthermore, an argument is made to support the use of this type of analysis in the EFL classroom since it can provide a discussion about social issues such as gender equality, which is supposed to be a part of the education according to the Swedish curriculum for upper-secondary school.