“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 course in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful” (181).
In Orwell's 1984, this singing woman strikes Winston as beautiful because, unlike him, she has truly lived. She has had a normal life with children and housework and singing and dancing, and she is so content and healthy. This woman has lived the life that people are supposed to live, and Winston might even look up to her. She symbolizes everything that the party is not. She is the old way of living, which is clearly a happier existence because she is still singing, unlike anyone in the Party.
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