35 pages • 1 hour read
George OrwellKeep the Aspidistra Flying
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Gordon Comstock
Gordon is a roughly 30-year-old poet who comes from a once affluent middle-class family that has become impoverished. He is a talented writer who published one poetry collection, Mice, and is struggling to finish the second collection, London Pleasures. Declaring war on money itself, Gordon refuses to accept a high-paying job, even leaving a copywriting job at the advertising firm New Albion. Still, he is not interested in socialism, believing its implementation would mean “[f]our hours a day in a model factory, tightening up bolt number 6003” (88).
Orwell describes Gordon as physically unimposing but proud: “Gordon was not impressive to look at. He was just five feet seven inches high […] he carried himself very upright, throwing a chest, with a you-be-damned air which occasionally deceived simple people” (5). His attitude toward money is the result of his upbringing—especially the bullying he endured at boarding school because of his poverty. Because of this, Gordon has deliberately sought out poverty, hoping to make a living from his writing.
Despite his resentful attitude and stubborn commitment to his beliefs, Gordon does feel guilt for his actions. After leaving New Albion, he experiences “a hateful feeling of having behaved perversely and ungratefully” (56). His guilt over leaving New Albion and depending on his relatives’ assistance does not stop him from deliberately relinquishing certain opportunities. However, when he impregnates his girlfriend Rosemary, he realizes that taking the job with New Albion “[is] what, in his secret heart, he ha[s] desired” and settles down into something resembling middle-class family life (237).
Rosemary
Rosemary is almost 30 years old and has been Gordon’s girlfriend since he worked at New Albion. She is “a strong, agile girl, with stiff black hair, a small triangular face and very pronounced eyebrows” who is always “rather nicely dressed” despite her low wages (107). Like Gordon, she lives in a tenant house that does not allow visitors of the opposite sex.
Rosemary tolerates Gordon’s rants about how women prefer men with money. However, she does push back: “‘Women!’ echoed Rosemary on a different note. ‘I hate the way men are always talking about women. ‘Women do this,’ and ‘Women do that’—as though all women were exactly the same!’” (114). When she becomes pregnant, Gordon decides to take back his former job at New Albion and marries her.
Ravelston
Ravelston is Gordon’s “charming rich friend […] of whom he [is] extravagantly fond” (14). He runs a leftist literary journal titled Antichrist. Despite being wealthy, he supports the careers of numerous poor writers, including Gordon, and is an avowed socialist. Nevertheless, he is uncomfortable in a working-class pub and dates a rich woman named Hermione Slater who has nothing but contempt for the poor. He lives in a posh upper-class apartment, even though he thinks of it as a “pokey little place […] practically the same thing as living in the slums” (80).
Despite their differences, Ravelston is a loyal friend to Gordon. Further, he is overall an extremely considerate person: “As a matter of fact, Ravelston was incapable of being properly angry” (173). Unlike Gordon, he is able to reconcile his socialist beliefs with his economic status. He does so by being generous with his money to people who need it.
Mrs. Wisbeach
Mrs. Wisbeach is Gordon’s landlady. Rather authoritarian, she refuses to allow her single, male tenants to receive female visitors or even make tea in their own rooms: “She was one of those malignant respectable women who keep lodging-houses. Age about forty-five, stout but active, with a pink, fine-featured, horribly observant face, beautiful grey hair and a permanent grievance” (23). She runs “one of those houses where you cannot even go to the W.C. in peace because of the feeling that somebody is listening to you” (29). To Gordon, Mrs. Wisbeach embodies the petty tyranny of middle-class culture.
Julia Comstock
Julia is Gordon’s sister—a “self-effacing, home-keeping, ironing, darning and mending kind of girl, a natural spinster-soul” (41). Although she plays a small part in the novel, she represents Gordon’s dependence on his family and his willingness to borrow money from his impoverished relatives. Working at a tea shop, Julia lives in relative poverty. Despite that, her life revolves around her contributions to others, like the lives of many women of the time: “That was the great event of her life nowadays—Christmas and the giving of presents” (124). She might have had the opportunity to open up her own tea shop, but her family was determined to spend the money on Gordon’s education (45).
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