Personally, I'm on Rosemary's side, and I kind of think Orwell is too. Where I'm fuzzy is whether Orwell despises Gordon for giving in and joining the consumer class, or whether he's pointing out that we all have to live and work and eat. The resulting baby produces a crisis: does Gordon give in, marry Rosemary, and sell his soul at the advertising agency, or does he let her go back to her family to raise the child alone? In the end, he's relieved to surrender his principles, get furniture on the installment plan, and write ads about foot odor. (Large chunks of this are familiar from Down and Out in Paris and London.) Nevertheless, even though he's living in filth and refuses even to try, Rosemary finally insists on sleeping with him. He loses his job, and finally gets what he wants - to sink down into a life so low and ill-paid that he is just about really poor. He gets extremely drunk, is awful to everybody, and ends up in jail. When Gordon finally does get some money paid to him for a poem, it ends in disaster. She doesn't want to sleep with Gordon yet, which he blames on his lack of money (of course). The amount she puts up with from him is astonishing, and indeed she only sticks around because she's a fictional character. Gordon does have a girlfriend who he hardly ever gets to see, Rosemary, who works at the ad agency and who loves him very much. Gordon blames his misery and loneliness on his poverty and is quite vocal about it to his friends, which is one reason he doesn't have many. He resents having to work, he resents not having any money he resents the aspidistra* in his room.indeed, the list of things Gordon does not hate is quite short. Thus he has thrown away his 'good' job, and now he works at a used bookshop for practically nothing. Instead the only job he could find was at an advertising agency, and he was horrified to discover that he has a real talent for writing ad copy. His family has come down in the world, so he has a sort-of-public school education, but has never had the money for a leisured, upper-class lifestyle. His theory is that everybody (especially women) worship the Money-God, and he's going to refuse to participate in this corrupt, shallow, venial society. Gordon Comstock, wannabe poet, has declared war on Money. I liked it then and I like it now, though I can't quite explain why probably for reasons opposite to what Orwell meant. I first read this fairly early Orwell novel back in college, and I still have my old copy. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell

Let the aspidistra flying