Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money. He jingled the coins in his pocket. He was nearly thirty and had accomplished nothing; only his miserable book of poems that had fallen flatter than any pancake. And ever since, for two whole years, he had been struggling in the labyrinth of a dreadful book that never got any further, and which, as he knew in his moments of clarity, never would get any further. It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to ‘write.’” 

Money is at the root of all problems, at least in Gordon’s opinion. The lack of money even hinders the creative process, for the reasons Gordon lists. This becomes a recurring theme in the book, as Gordon views his poverty as limiting him in all aspects of his life by his poverty. This tying of money to worth both mirrors and subverts how capitalist society judges people’s value; where the latter assumes wealth proves someone’s worth, Gordon assumes wealth is a prerequisite for creativity, morality, etc. 

“At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable […] For can you not see, if you know how to look, that behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? The great death-wish of the modern world.” 

Gordon’s politics are mostly limited to the view that “civilisation’s dying” and there is nothing to be done about it (90). In Gordon’s view, society is stuck in a self-destructive spiral. This reflects and encourages Gordon’s willingness to ruin his own life to follow his anti-money philosophy. 

“Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure—above all, it means loneliness.” 

Poverty means no social life in Gordon’s view. However, as the novel’s events make clear, he manages to retain the friendship of Ravelston and his relationship with Rosemary even at his lowest. While a lack of money does make it difficult for Gordon to go out to bars, it is also clear that he himself worsens the situation by refusing to allow Rosemary or Ravelston to pay for meals. 

“It was not merely the lack of money. It was rather that, having no money, they still lived mentally in the money-world—the world in which money is virtue and poverty is crime. It was not poverty but the down-dragging of respectable poverty that had done for them. They had accepted the money-code, and by that code they were failures.” 

Gordon identifies the problem with his family as their commitment to a middle-class mindset even after becoming impoverished. This is correct, at least in that his family makes their situation worse by sending him to pricey boarding schools in an attempt to prove their wealth and thus their “virtue.” 

“You don’t suffer real physical hardship on two quid a week, and if you did it wouldn’t matter. It is in the brain and the soul that lack of money damages you. Mental deadness, spiritual squalor—they seem to descend upon you inescapably when your income drops below a certain point. Faith, hope, money—only a saint could have the first two without having the third.” 

For Gordon, poverty has a mental as well as a material effect. The challenge of making ends meet can impact a person’s ability to dedicate themselves to creative activities. In fact, throughout the novel we see that the worse Gordon’s material conditions get, the less he writes. On the other hand, it is when Gordon adopts a middle-class lifestyle that he casts aside writing altogether, since his work itself centered on money, capitalism, and poverty. 

“Because he had no money the Dorings snubbed him, because he had no money the Primrose had turned down his poem, because he had no money Rosemary wouldn’t sleep with him. Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure—they are all the same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.” 

Although Gordon is not wrong about the effects of poverty and how much capitalism dominates society, he often leaps to conclusions. He has no proof the Dorings deliberately snubbed him, but he comes to believe this “snubbing” is evidence that his poverty causes people to shun him. 

“Ravelston persuaded himself that he was fond of pubs, especially low-class pubs. Pubs are genuinely proletarian. In a pub you can meet the working class on equal terms—that’s the theory, anyway. But in practice Ravelston never went into a pub unless he was with somebody like Gordon, and he always felt like a fish out of water when he got there.” 

As shown here, there are tensions Ravelston cannot overcome between his commitment to the working class and his wealthy background. Still, it is important to note that he does not let these tensions get in the way of living his life. This is in contrast to Gordon, whose attempts to distance himself from his middle-class background only hurt him and his relationships.

“You don’t know what it means to have to crawl along on two quid a week. It isn’t a question of hardship—it’s nothing so decent as hardship. It’s the bloody, sneaking, squalid meanness of it. Living alone for weeks on end because when you’ve no money you’ve no friends. Calling yourself a writer and never even producing anything because you’re always too washed out to write. It’s a sort of filthy sub-world one lives in. A sort of spiritual sewer.” 

Again, this quote illustrates Gordon’s belief that poverty affects a person’s mental and spiritual well-being. Gordon is not wrong about the impact of poverty. However, the reader knows it is to an extent self-imposed because of his refusal to accept money from his friends and girlfriend.

“The aspidistra stood in its pot, dull green, ailing, pathetic in its sickly ugliness. As he sat down, he pulled it towards him and looked at it meditatively. There was the intimacy of hatred between the aspidistra and him. ‘I’ll beat you yet, you b—,’ he whispered to the dusty leaves.” 

The aspidistra represents the English middle class and, for Gordon, everything against which he is rebelling. Significantly, he makes this threat to the aspidistra in his apartment just before he cuts ties with the Dorings, who could potentially offer him social and financial opportunities. 

“They are to blame, finally. Because it’s the women who really believe in the money-code. The men obey it; they have to, but they don’t believe in it. It’s the women who keep it going. The women and their Putney villas and their fur coats and their babies and their aspidistras.” 

Gordon’s sexism is intertwined with his war against money. According to Gordon, women are responsible for the societal worship of money because they prefer men with money over those without. It’s notable that Gordon mentions “babies” in this passage; many socialists argue that women’s reproductive capacity plays a role in maintaining capitalism. However, rather than making this systemic critique, Gordon instead lumps babies into the consumerism he misogynistically blames women for perpetuating. Although Rosemary initially laughs off Gordon’s comments, his attitude does threaten his relationship with Rosemary when she refuses to sleep with him out of fear of pregnancy. 

“‘Letting you pay for my meals. A man pays for a woman, a woman doesn’t pay for a man.’

‘Oh, Gordon! Are we living in the reign of Queen Victoria?’” 

This exchange is between Gordon and Rosemary, who are arguing over Rosemary’s offer to pay for a meal with Gordon. Like Ravelston does earlier, Rosemary points out how much Gordon’s attitudes toward borrowing money are a product of middle-class culture—in this case, not just the need to appear self-reliant, but also to preserve traditional gender roles surrounding money. 

“Why is it that one can’t borrow from a rich friend and can from a half-starved relative? But one’s family, of course, ‘don’t count.’”

This is a key inconsistency in Gordon’s behavior. He will not take money from Ravelston or Rosemary, but he will borrow from his sister Julia. The implication is that, because she is a female relative, Julia was raised to sacrifice for the men in her family. 

“‘I tell you it’d never even enter your head to worry about a baby if it wasn’t for the money. You’d want the baby if it weren’t for that. You say you ‘can’t’ have a baby. What do you mean, you ‘can’t’ have a baby? You mean you daren’t; because you’d lose your job and I’ve got no money and all of us would starve. This birth-control business! It’s just another way they’ve found out of bullying us. And you want to acquiesce in it apparently.’

‘But what am I to do, Gordon? What am I to do?’” 

Even though Gordon claims all his problems are the result of poverty, he blames Rosemary for not wanting to have sex with him out of fear of pregnancy. Of course, as Gordon says here, there are social and economic repercussions to becoming pregnant. However, rather than sympathize with the reality of Rosemary’s situation, Gordon views it in abstract moralized terms and criticizes her for “acquiescing” to capitalism by suggesting they use birth control (since, he implies, there would be no need for birth control in different economic circumstances).

“He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money. The earth is ploughed, ships sail, miners sweat in dripping tunnels underground, clerks hurry for the eight-fifteen with the fear of the boss eating at their vitals. And even in bed with their wives they tremble and obey. Obey whom? The money-priesthood, the pink-faced masters of the world. The Upper Crust. A welter of sleek young rabbits in thousand guinea motor cars, of golfing stockbrokers and cosmopolitan financiers, of Chancery lawyers and fashionable Nancy boys, of bankers, newspaper peers, novelists of all four sexes, American pugilists, lady aviators, film stars, bishops, titled poets and Chicago gorillas.” 

This quote summarizes Gordon’s worldview: Everyone lives in slavery to money, and that defines their entire existence. Only later does Gordon change his view. He remains critical of capitalism, but he accepts that there is more to life for the middle class. 

“It was queer how different you felt with all that money in your pocket. Not opulent, merely, but reassured, revivified, reborn. He felt a different person from what he had been yesterday. He was a different person. He was no longer the downtrodden wretch who made secret cups of tea over the oil stove at 31 Willowbed Road.” 

This is the effect receiving a check for one of his poems has on Gordon. Even though Gordon claims he is rebelling against money, money still determines his self-worth and his confidence in his poetry. 

“She was not Rosemary to him any longer, she was just a girl, a girl’s body. That was the thing that upset her.” 

While drunk, Gordon nearly forces himself on Rosemary. Here, it’s explicitly stated that Gordon in the moment views Rosemary as an object. Again, the sort of viewpoint that he criticizes in middle-class culture is something that he himself practices, in this case by treating a woman as an interchangeable commodity. 

“Why does one do these things? Money again, always money! The rich don’t behave like that. The rich are graceful even in their vices. But if you have no money you don’t even know how to spend it when you get it. You just splurge it frantically away, like a sailor in a bawdy-house his first night ashore.” 

Gordon does not take responsibility for his actions but instead fits his mistakes into his views about money. The fact that Ravelston refused to splurge only confirms Gordon’s beliefs because Ravelston, unlike Gordon, is wealthy. 

“Oh, in principle! We can’t afford principles, people like us. That’s what Gordon doesn’t seem to understand.” 

If there is any line of dialogue from the book that illuminates the novel’s main point, this is it. Essentially, Rosemary—and Orwell—are arguing that, whatever principles you have, you still have to live. 

“There was no trouble about a job like this; no room for ambition, no effort, no hope. Ten bob less—ten bob nearer the mud. It was what he wanted.” 

After his arrest and losing his job at the bookseller, Gordon deliberately decides to sink downward. He hopes to find “a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal” (203). In short, Gordon wishes to be free from ambition and judgment, which he feels he can only achieve by fully embracing poverty. 

“Before, he had fought against the money-code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink, as Rosemary had said.” 

Letting his living and work situation deteriorate further is a way for Gordon to free himself from all expectations. Also, it is another effort to escape from middle-class culture. However, Gordon is not successful, as symbolized by the fact that Gordon’s new landlady gives him an aspidistra.

“But the strange thing is that often it is harder to sink than to rise. There is always something that drags one upwards. After all, one is never quite alone; there are always friends, lovers, relatives”

This passage hammers home the importance of community as a support for Gordon. In contrast to Gordon’s insistence that his poverty drives people away from him, his social support network comes through for him when he is at his lowest both financially and emotionally.

“The mistake you make, don’t you see, is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You’re trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can’t. One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can’t put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.” 

This is Ravelston echoing Rosemary’s claim that people like her and Gordon cannot afford principles. Ravelston himself is an example. He does not eschew his wealth. By embracing it, he is able to give money to support struggling writers. Although this might seem inadequate (if not outright hypocritical), Ravelston’s point is that no one can individually opt out of capitalist society; the only way to change it is systemically.

“Now that the thing was done he felt nothing but relief; relief that now at last he had finished with dirt, cold, hunger and loneliness and could get back to decent, fully human life. His resolutions, now that he had broken them, seemed nothing but a frightful weight he had cast off.” 

Abandoning his war on money, Gordon feels relief rather than disappointment. By pursuing this war, Gordon has only caused himself and his loved ones unnecessary suffering. It is noteworthy that Gordon describes his new life as “decent”—a term he previously associated with the middle class and consequently disparaged.