Here's the
second stanza of the woman's song:
They sye that time
'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But
the smiles an' the tears across the years
They twist my 'eart-strings
yet!
gives us the analysis himself in his
narration:
She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it
seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of
happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June
evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand
years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had
never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed
slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when
people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.
The significance of the song is not the lyrics; it's the fact that
she sang "alone and spontaneously." Whereas the Party members recite nationalistic
verses in unison and without feeling, the woman sings a folk song, a kind of blues that aches
with comic and tragic feeling.
Psychoanalytically, a woman hanging diapers
must remindof his mother, whom he lost. Her lyrics about "time heals" and "never
forget" and "smiles and tears across the years" reveal his desire to be nurtured
and loved. There, with , must be the first time in years that's he's felt that safe and
vulnerable, so her song triggers his memory of childhood.
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