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Anonymous Sat Dec 23 14:13:22 2017 No.10438763 [Reply] [Original]

How come in 1984, Orwell always portrays follows of the party as looking physically weird and fat? Look at this description while Winston is in the cafeteria

Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal — tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree — existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

And look at these descriptions of Winston after he gets tortured

>As the gin rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they released him, and had regained his old colour — indeed, more than regained it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink.

And of Julia:

>Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened
>Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.

Why does Orwell connect party loyalty with physical ugliness? What exactly is he going for? It's never really explained so I don't understand the meaning behind it, but I feel like it has to mean something

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