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As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower? . . . ‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.

Early in the final chapter of Book Two (which we have labeled “Chapter 10” for clarity, although appended beneath Chapter 9 but without a designation), the prole lady appears and sings yet again. As this quote reveals, Winston becomes rhapsodized by her singing and by her presence and bearing in general, going to far as to call her “beautiful” even though the novel’s many descriptions of her clearly convey that she is not, at least in the traditional sense. What Winston is yet again responding to is her strength and innate unspoiled humanity. What seems to impress him the most in this encounter, however, is how she represents the reproductive capacity of strong prole women, which in turn represents his hope that a new society will take over the planet from its current incapacitated one. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Red-Armed Prole Woman (the third quote).

The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing.

As Winston’s ruminations about the prole woman in Book Two, Chapter 10 continue, he muses further on the reproductive capabilities of the proles, which is one of the many advantages he sees the working class having over him, Julia, and people in their social strata. You can read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Red-Armed Prole Woman (the fourth quote).

[E]verywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands or millions of people just like this . . . people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!

In this final passage from Book Two, Chapter 10, Winston’s admiration and sense of hope regarding the working-class proles reaches its peak, just as he and Julia are about to be arrested by the Thought Police. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Theme: Hopes for Resistance and Revolution (the fourth quote).

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