1984 and Julia: Re-writing books and history

Article here. Check back in 300 (or fewer) years. Shakespeare will have been a lesbian and nothing attributable to him (her) will be recognizable by a contemporary scholar. Excerpt:

'Julia also belongs to the recent tradition of feminist retellings—in this case, of a work often criticized for its treatment of women. Newman herself has told the Telegraph that she once “absolutely idolized” Orwell but later came to see his fiction, and especially Nineteen Eighty-four, as steeped in “hatred of women [that] is really extreme.” That’s debatable: Some argue that Orwell’s feminist critics wrongly conflate protagonist Winston Smith’s hostility toward women (explicitly acknowledged in the book and clearly shown to be rooted in totalitarianism’s monstrous warping of human relations) with Orwell’s own attitude.

One could point out that Winston’s vision of humanity unwarped by the Party and its ideology is connected primarily to women—his own vanished mother, the “prole” woman singing as she does her laundry—and that his betrayal of Julia marks the point of no return in his own dehumanization and surrender.
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In Nineteen Eighty-four, the Party seeks to tightly control sexuality by limiting acceptable sex to married, strictly procreative intercourse in which the wife is not expected to take any pleasure and branding everything else “sexcrime”; young adult Party zealots, women especially, are recruited into the “Junior Anti-Sex League,” which advocates total celibacy and procreation through “artsem,” or artificial insemination. Julia plausibly reveals that this anti-sex ideology coexists with the pervasive sexual exploitation of young women, including League members, by senior Party men; “artsem” is, more often than not, a hasty alibi for a pregnancy resulting from these liaisons. A particularly memorable segment of the novel early on, before the start of Julia’s relationship with Winston, chronicles a scandalous incident at the dorm she shares with other young Party women. Fixing a blocked toilet, Julia discovers that the cause of the blockage is an aborted fetus someone has attempted to flush down; the culprit turns out to be Vicky, the young and naïve “baby” of the dorm who has been given abortion-inducing pills by the Party official she’s been involved with. Then, in a fitting postscript to this episode, another dorm resident is hauled away as the transgressor.'