Orwell's Roses

The title of Part 6, “The Price of Roses,” refers not to the retail price of a dozen long-stemmed red roses but rather to the hidden costs of production—including nonunionized labor and ecological impacts—which drives Solnit to reconsider the aesthetic value of flowers. Chapter 4’s title, “The Ugliness of Roses,” makes her view explicit. The underlying costs of producing mass-market roses, and flowers in general, from the mechanized nature of the work to the exploitation of a marginalized workforce, render the flowers aesthetically compromised. This argument, ostensibly about flower production in South America, contains a commentary regarding the work of Orwell, intertwined with an examination of beauty and values.

Solnit discusses the problems associated with making art—written or otherwise—in the face of social ills and political challenges. That is, she asks whether art can, or even should, be made when large, seemingly more important, issues loom. First, she notes that Orwell always considered aesthetic value, even when writing about political problems. For example, Winston Smith’s paperweight, with its centerpiece of coral, in 1984 is a beautiful object that also functions as a piece of protest against a regime under which beauty is suspect. In addition, Solnit discusses artists working during the AIDS crisis of the late 20th century, for whom art became a respite from pain. Those who believe that “paying attention to that which does not need to be changed [i.e., beauty] is idleness, dissipation, and distraction” are misguided (192). Instead, an ethical commitment to social justice might require a respite in beauty, or at the least, an examination of what beauty really means.

The very idea of a “Rose Factory” (part of the title of Chapter 2) is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, at least by conventional wisdom. An organic object of beauty, which symbolizes such lofty things as love and honor, being produced via highly mechanized and exploitative means disrupts what it symbolizes. Thus, Solnit concludes that, while roses and flowers in general are themselves inherently beautiful, the modern industry surrounding them is decidedly ugly.

The factory produces roses whose beauty is compromised by the means of production and the needs of distribution; that is, they must be hearty enough to survive transport. Thus, many of the commercially produced roses are mere buds, looking to Solnit like “a quiver of gaudy arrows” (202). She critiques the factory’s growing facilities too:

A rose is beautiful, but a greenhouse with thousands upon thousands of roses, a place producing millions per year, with stems and leaves and petals all strewn on the floor and heaped together in bins as byproduct, was not (202).

The scale of mass production renders the object less valuable, both literally and aesthetically. Also, like the sugar plantations in Jamaica that make country houses in England possible, these places are “the invisible factories of visual pleasure” (203) for those living privileged lives elsewhere. The cost to the environment and to the workers themselves—injury, illness, and exploitation—are all completely invisible to the consumer.

Furthermore, these hidden costs are intentionally buried. The beautiful, evocative names of the many varieties of roses deliberately obscure the industry’s ugliness, and the fact that these commercial flowers have “almost no smell” (213) strips them of their very essence, according to Solnit. After speaking with women who work in the industry, as they describe untreated injuries, their declining ratio of pay to the cost of living, and the industry’s negative impacts on local aquifers, Solnit wonders if these flowers are “now emblems of deceit” (219) rather than symbols of truth and beauty. She notes how she found the literally “Orwellian” slogans on the backs of the workers uniforms “ominous in their insincerity and unsettling in their contradictions and their imposition on workers who seemed unlikely to agree wholeheartedly with them or to be wearing them by choice” (200). She cites an example of a slogan, translated from Spanish into English: “Effort and passion make us feel satisfied in our work” (200). The word Orwellian has entered the English language to describe a frightening kind of dystopia wherein totalitarian forces eclipse political liberty and personal autonomy. Solnit implies that these factories are examples of Orwellian entities.

Thus, the flowers’ natural beauty is undercut by the ugliness of their production. Solnit posits that aesthetic beauty in artistic production, specifically in writing, “lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see” (206). In other words, without sustainable and ethical values, artistic work can’t truly be beautiful. Thus, Beauty and Truth is a main theme in the book. The integral relationship between truth and beauty, Solnit argues, is the position that Orwell takes in his work: “Orwell’s writing life started out with an ordinary loathing of hypocrisy and evasiveness” (224). However, through the extraordinary events of the time in which he lived—the rise of fascism, the horrific reign of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the increase of dangerous propaganda—he became the voice of integrity, critiquing the left as harshly as he lambasted the right. Without the aesthetic element, however Orwell wouldn’t have been as important a writer: “The ethical purpose sharpened the aesthetic means […] and politics saved him from insignificance” (230). Solnit’s inherited Orwell’s talent for juxtaposition: Aesthetic beauty has political meaning, and aesthetic experience enhances political writing.