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.
Themes
Capitalism and the Importance of Money
Capitalism—especially capitalist consumerism—pervades the setting of 1930s London. In fact, advertisements play a key role in shaping Gordon’s broader ideas about money: “Curiously enough, it was the advertisements in the Underground stations that first brought [the problems with capitalism] home for him” (43). Later in life, Gordon’s feelings about money compel him to leave his job at the advertising firm New Albion even though he is very good at copywriting: “There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity—advertising—is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced” (51). Gordon and the other employees’ awareness that they’re contributing to a “dirty ramp” reflects the broader difficulty of avoiding complicity in a capitalist economy. Advertising is itself a mechanism of that complicity since it persuades people to endlessly accumulate consumer goods while padding the pockets of those who produce (or rather, own the factories that produce) those items.
Capitalism also tends to judge people based on their wealth, often through the ideal of the ”self-made” man—someone whose wealth reflects his perseverance and industry. Despite his war on money, Gordon shares the view that money determines people’s worth (though in his case, he views wealth as the factor that enables virtue, creativity, etc. rather than as evidence of those qualities). He attributes Ravelston’s open-mindedness to the fact that he comes from a wealthy background, noting that “the rich can afford to be intelligent” (54). Likewise, he identifies most of the customers at the bookshop according to their class. Further, he views being a writer as impossible unless one has money to provide one with educational opportunities or, at least, “peace of mind”: ”Could you even write a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?” (9).
This is not just Gordon’s mindset. Money is indeed very crucial to society. It is because of money that Gordon’s father became an accountant on his own father’s wishes—an act that foreshadows Gordon’s own return to copywriting in the wake of Rosemary’s pregnancy. Gordon comes to believe that you can be concerned about money and still be “bound up in the bundle of life” (239)—in other words, that there is more to life than just money. Although one could see this as selling out, it is arguably just a recognition of the impossibility of remaining pure in a corrupt system.
Culture and the English Middle Class
In Orwell’s England, being middle class was not just about belonging to an income bracket but to a culture. This is true for Gordon as well, who views middle-class culture as moralistic, repressive, and hypocritical. To Gordon, one particular bookstore customer embodies everything wrong with the middle class; he assumes the customer is “president of the local Purity League or Seaside Vigilance Committee” but “now up in town on the razzle” (7).
Gordon sees the regime of Mrs. Wisbeach at the tenant house similarly. Reflecting back on his time at Wisbeach’s, Gordon compares his new tenant house to it, approvingly noting that there is now “no mingy lower-middle class decency […] no feeling of being spied upon and disapproved of” (207). Even in relative poverty, people like Mrs. Wisbeach try to maintain and impose middle-class ideas of respectability and morality, which include preventing men and women from having sex in their private rooms. Rosemary lives with a similarly strict landlady, and the ramifications of middle-class sexual morality seriously complicate her relationship with Gordon. Becoming pregnant out of wedlock would reflect poorly on her character, but Gordon rejects birth control as a solution on the grounds that it too reflects middle-class morality—specifically, a kind of capitalistic alienation from one’s physicality (many critics read his poem’s reference to a “sleek, estranging shield” as a description of condoms).
Middle-class culture also involves certain expectations regarding education and work. This especially manifests in Gordon’s family spending lavishly on sending him to boarding schools: “Since the Comstocks were genteel as well as shabby, it was considered necessary to waste huge sums on Gordon’s ‘education’” (40). Meanwhile, the family neglects Julia’s education, and it is strongly implied that Julia’s own experience of middle-class culture was of sacrificing her own wants and needs to support Gordon: “All through his childhood she watched over him, nursed him, spoiled him, went in rags so that he might have the right clothes to go to school in, saved up her wretched pocket-money to buy him Christmas presents and birthday presents” (41). Both in education and sexual relations, middle-class culture is therefore strongly sexist.
Gordon’s War on Money and Its Futility
Gordon’s experiences growing up poor in a family clinging to its middle-class status have embittered him to the point that the thought of wealth disgusts him: “Very well, then, he would refuse the whole business of ‘succeeding’; he would make it his especial purpose not to ‘succeed’” (45). However, Gordon’s school-age interest in radical politics has vanished by the time the novel begins. Rather than embracing socialism, Gordon just insists, “If the whole of England was starving except myself and the people I care about, I wouldn’t give a damn” (90).
Gordon’s frustration with money is therefore a dead end; although he recognizes that the problem is systemic, he does not view societal change as possible and therefore tries to disengage from the system as much as possible as an individual. Further, Gordon does not realize how much money and middle-class culture have actually shaped his viewpoint. Although he has no problem taking money from his impoverished sister Julia, Gordon refuses to let Ravelston lend him money, saying that taking money from him would endanger their friendship. This prompts Ravelston to ask, “Isn’t that rather—well, rather a bourgeois kind of thing to say?” (96). Gordon also refuses to allow Rosemary to pay for a meal, insisting, “It ‘isn’t done’!”, to which Rosemary pointedly asks, “Oh, Gordon! Are we living in the reign of Queen Victoria?” (118). As Rosemary and Ravelston both point out, Gordon claims to be rebelling against money. However, in many ways, he follows the rules of money and middle-class culture.
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