The Metaphor of Crowds in Party Going and Homage to Catalonia Anonymous College

In Henry Green’s Party Going and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the authors portray crowds as singular bodies, in which people lose their identities to conform to the identity of the crowd. Their portrayals illustrate the theories about crowd behavior that were developed in the 1930s by Sigmund Freud and Gustave Le Bon. Both Green and Orwell personify the crowd to represent how it has its own mentality and individuals cease to exist once they join a crowd. The loss of individualism is what separates crowds from parties and masses and the reason crowds were perceived as threatening in the 1930s.

In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s documentary of his experience in a crowd illustrates the way he was swept away and lost his personal will to the crowd. In the first chapter, Orwell describes the first crowd he experiences: “All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.” (Homage to Catalonia, 3-4). Orwell consciously reflects that he was moved by the crowd to join their cause and fight in their army despite not understanding or even liking it. Orwell clearly illustrates the danger of crowds...