Method
Our digital edition of this poem is meant to provide access and a better understanding of the Orwellian thoughts on religion displayed in this poem, and it was intended for a general public, and can be worked on at a high-school level. George Orwell is not among the hardest writers to read ; still, the poem “The Lesser Evil” was published in 1936 and some of the vocabulary can be tough to understand for some readers. So, the very first goal of this digital edition was to make the poem understandable. This is achievable through two types of annotations :
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- Dictionary annotations
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These annotations are simply giving a definition of certain terms used in the poem that can be archaic, unused today of hardly understandable for an inexperienced audience, such as high-school students, foreign language readers or simply people not used to work with these texts.
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- Common language annotations
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These annotations are the continuation of the dictionary annotations, but rather than simply updating archaic vocabulary to words we could use today, they rephrase the sentence used by the author in a different, more understandable way that will help anyone to understand what is meant.
Now that we gave to the reader a better understanding and glonal comprehension of the text, we want to start digging into our subject : the Orwellian Faith, and more globally the takes of George Orwell on religion.
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- Faith, religion and Orwellian views
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These annotations are here to dig deeper in the meaning of the text and to understand what the author, Orwell, is telling us in his poem. Accordingly with our subject, we decided to analyze the religious aspect of the text.
Results
Dictionary annotations have been realized by myself and the rest of them were done by my partner. As we can see, a few words of vocabulary such as “leaden”, “weary”, “caterwauling” or “dismal” needed to be explicated for some occasional or foreign readers. This gives us a first reading of the poem. Then, the modern annotations help us to better understand what is happening through the text: what we get from it is that “religious duty” has come again. The protagonist needs to go to the church again but the atmosphere is not quite good, as the poem opens with “Empty as death and slow as pain” (talking about the days). Then, referring to “maidens” speaking a tale of “thorns and blood”, the author depicts the church and the religions as a very unappealing ideology. The maidens, representatives or the virginity and the purity of the church are howling as the protagonist enters “the house of sin”. In it, everything is gloomy, “dying flowers”, “the betel juice” (related to blood color), “the rotten bamboo”. A woman is waiting for him in the church he doesn’t come to often. She is crying as nobody is respecting the place, as people spat the juice on the floor (they spit on the floor). But the woman could also be a prostitute, one of the evils, begging the man to come more often so he can pay her to have sex with her. Two interpretations are possible. In the end of the poem, the cycle repeats and the woman is waiting again for the man, with her “oily hair” that show that she neglected herself.
What interpretation can we make of it ?
The poem is about how humans often make wrong choices and struggle to balance their desires with their sense of right and wrong. Despite thinking of all the good and Holy things where Christians sang, the speaker still chooses to go into the evil house of sin where he feels the temptation. The house of sin is not taken care of, it represent neglect and the opposites of holiness, with dying flowers and people spiting on the floor. the woman who is a prostituted is asking the speaker to come more often, maybe because that is how she makes her money. But when walking pass her neglected home he tries to rush through it to not fall to temptation and turn his back on Christianity.
In this poem, the church is a metaphor of a prostitution institution: the “maidens” are the prostitutes, and they are “singing holy songs” in front of the brothel. As the man goes to the church on a Sunday, he passes in front of them and tries to resist the temptation of paying for sex but generally cannot. At the end of the poem, it is said that the man is walking fast to resist his desires.