Feeling Lonely in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Down and Out in Paris and London

Abstract

This essay explores systemic, romantic, financial, and sexual failures that lead to individual and shared experiences of loneliness. This essay examines the role of money as a limiting or permissive agent in the formation of relationships. It explores involuntary celibacy and the attempt to resolve loneliness through the purchase of intimacy. Unsatisfied, both Gordon, the protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and Charlie, a young man from an affluent family in the novel Down and Out in Paris and London, engage in predatory sexual behaviour. Sadistic expressions of male sexuality are present in both texts and are illustrated through Orwell’s use of animal imagery. Gordon is disempowered and resentful, convinced that poverty has deprived him of sex, intimacy, and companionship. Charlie glorifies his violent rape of a woman in Paris and leaves feeling empty, cold, and isolated. This essay extends the consideration of individual loneliness, to examine experiences of collective loneliness and the communities that emerge through shared hardship. It explores the loneliness of the British lower-middle class in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and of wandering tramps in Down and Out in Paris and London, addressing the weaponisation of sexuality, and the insecurity that results from loneliness.