Colin Burrow writes in the Oct. 5, 2023 issue of the LROB:
The Orwellian person seeks surgically to separate himself from every person who materially or emotionally supports him, but then finds he can’t actually live that way. You leave your family, and despise them for supporting you, so you can go off and write about yourself as the freestanding freedom fighter. The Orwellian hero needs a wife to keep the ego-show on the road. But he also needs to edit a wife out to satisfy his own conception of how a hero lives. To me in my teens Orwell’s Orwellian aspiration to escape the aspidistra of domesticity looked like heroism and a radical search for freedom. To me now it looks like the extension of self-harming lovelessness into the realm of conscious cruelty to others.
