Animal Farm: The Novel in Focus

THE FABLE Animal Farm has been described as an allegorical fable. In literature, an allegory is a symbolic story in which characters, objects, incidents, and descriptions serve as disguised representations for meanings other than those indicated on the surface. The fable is a tale, usually epigrammatic-that is, brief, clever, and usually satirical in nature-illustrating a moral thesis or satirizing human beings. Although most often populated with animals, the fable can use men, gods, and even inanimate objects as characters. The action of a fable illustrates a moral that is stated, more or less explicitly, at the end. As a genre, the fable harks back to the earliest stages of human cultural development, when it was a common part of the oral folk literature of ancient peoples. Fables first appeared in written form in India, Egypt, and Greece. The most famous fables in Western culture are those attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave who lived about 600 b.c.

by George Orwell

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The Novel in Focus

The plot. Mr. Jones, proprietor of the Manor Farm, has fallen on hard times. Disheartened after losing money in a lawsuit, he spends much of his day drinking and has allowed Manor Farm to fall into neglect. Meanwhile, a highly respected boar by the name of Old Major announces that he has had a "strange dream," and he calls a meeting of all the animals on the farm in order to communicate it to them. The dream, it turns out, takes the form of a political conviction: "All the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings" (Animal Farm, p. 5). Old Major implores his fellow animals, to whom he refers as "comrades," to unite and rise up against their enemy, Man. Before he finishes, he leaves them with one last piece of advice: "And above all, no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind" (Animal Farm, p. 6).

Three nights later, Old Major dies peacefully and is buried. But his words live on in the hearts and minds of the animals. Led by the pigs, who are highly intelligent, the animals plan their revolt. Two boars in particular emerge as the leaders-Napoleon, a large, fierce-looking Berkshire boar, and Snowball, who is inventive and eloquent, if somewhat less intimidating. Also notable is a porker named Squealer, who is a brilliant talker and destined to become the mouthpiece for the revolution.

One fateful day, Mr. Jones is so incapacitated by his drinking that he neglects to feed the animals, and the revolution begins. A cow breaks into the supply-shed and all the animals help themselves from the bins. When Mr. Jones and his men come running with lashing whips, the animals attack. The men are so stunned and frightened that they quickly retreat. At last the animals are left alone.

The first order of business is to rename the place, changing Manor Farm to Animal Farm. The second is the posting of the "Seven Commandments," which advocate amity among animals and hatred for humankind. Soon the pigs, although they don't actually labor themselves, are running the farm. The sheep are particularly obedient, while the hardest worker, the source of almost all the labor on Animal Farm, is an enormous cart-horse named Boxer.

For a time, Animal Farm is a kind of utopia in which "everyone worked according to his capacity" (Animal Farm, p. 18). The animals, it seems, can run things just fine on their own. But the first intimations of trouble occur when it is discovered that all the milk and windfallen apples are going exclusively to the pigs. Of course the pigs deny that they are receiving any privileges, explaining to the others that "It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples" (Animal Farm, p. 23).

Meanwhile, Mr. Jones returns with a group of men to retake his farm. But the animals have prepared an ambush, and in a dramatic confrontation they send the men fleeing. A victory celebration ensues, and the day is given a name for all time: the Battle of the Cowshed.

The fundamental problem at Animal Farm is the constant rift between its two leaders, Napoleon and Snowball. When Snowball comes up with the idea of building a windmill, and therefore improving the quality of life on the farm, Napoleon does everything he can to disparage it. The day comes to put the matter to a vote. When it appears that Snowball is going to win, Napoleon calls in a cadre of ferocious dogs that he has raised in secret. The snarling dogs attack Snowball, who flees for his life and is never seen again on Animal Farm.

In Snowball's absence, Napoleon seizes absolute power, and things begin to deteriorate at a rapid rate. Snowball is declared a traitor to Animal Farm, and it is announced that there will be no more debates. Squealer, the propaganda pig, explains that construction of the windmill will begin as soon as possible, that it only seemed like Napoleon was against the idea, when in fact he was cunningly rooting out the traitor Snowball.

This incident marks the beginning of a long line of marginal transgressions by Napoleon and his inner circle of pigs, who incrementally alter the Seven Commandments to suit their own increasingly humanlike behavior. Squealer's propaganda is used at every turn to divert the suspicions of the animals. When the windmill is destroyed by natural causes, Squealer attributes the destruction to Snowball's subterfuge. The pigs move into Mr. Jones's farmhouse and begin to drink alcohol, just like their former master. When a group of pigs take issue with Napoleon's leadership, they are murdered by Napoleon's dogs. This sets off a series of massacres, in which animals of every kind make one improbable confession of sedition after another and each is slain on the spot, until the barn is filled with corpses.

Through a man named Mr. Whymper, they conduct trade with neighboring farmers, even though dealing with humans had once been regarded as unthinkable. When the pigs doublecross farmer Pilkington by agreeing to sell some valuable lumber to farmer Frederick, the move backfires: Frederick storms the farm with a group of armed men. The animals eventually succeed in driving off the attackers, but at a heavy cost. The windmill, rebuilt after the natural disaster, is destroyed once again, and years of work have been lost.

As the years pass, the animals forget about Jones and the revolution, and come to accept Napoleon and the pigs as absolute masters. Then, one day, a pig is seen walking on its hind legs carrying a whip. The transformation is complete-the pigs have become men. The last of the original commandments in the barn is changed from "all animals are equal" to "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" (Animal Farm, p. 90). That night, loud voices are heard from inside the farmhouse. The pigs are feasting and exchanging toasts with other farmers, one of whom compliments Napoleon on his efficient leadership, as his animals seem to do more work and receive less food than any animals in the country. Strangely, the faces of the pigs seem to have changed, and it is now impossible to tell them apart from the humans.

The philosophical foundations of Marxism. Aside from their similarities to actual political events, the circumstances of the revolution in Animal Farm and the rhetoric that accompanies it offer a surprisingly accurate portrait of Marxist-Leninist dogma. In Old Major's incendiary speech at the beginning of the novel, he says, "Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings" (Animal Farm, p. 4). This is a direct reference to Karl Marx's notion of "estranged labor," which holds that in a capitalistic society, "the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object" (Marx in Tucker, p. 72). The old boar in Animal Farm, Old Major, goes on to say the following: "Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs... yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum... and the rest he keeps for himself"(Animal Farm, p. 4). This is a reflection of the Marxist concept of the "exploitation of the many by the few," and is essentially a paraphrase of Marx, who said that "It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things-but for the worker it produces privation" (Marx in Tucker, p. 73). In fact, the tone and content of Old Major's call to arms is very close to that of Marx in his Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and of Lenin in his 1932 book State and Revolution. In the blissful period immediately following the liberation of the animals, the farm work is completed as it was before, except now "everyone worked according to his capacity" (Animal Farm, p. 18). This is a direct allusion to Marx's famous characterization of life in a fully developed communist society: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" (Marx in Lenin, p. 79).

Sources. In a preface on censorship that he wrote for Animal Farm (but did not publish until years later), Orwell indicates how the central idea for the book came to him. In 1937, when he fought on the side of the PODUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista) militia, or the "Spanish Trotskyists," during the Spanish Civil War, he and his wife witnessed the communist purges of the Spanish leftists firsthand. "Yet on our return to England we found numerous sensible and well-informed observers believing the most fantastic accounts of treachery and sabotage which the press reported from the Moscow trials. And so I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement" (Orwell, Appendix II in Animal Farm, p. 108).

Animal Farm is an allegory. This means in part that its characters and events are representative of something more than what they appear to be. What follows is a partial list of what the characters are commonly understood to represent:

Fiction	Reality
Farmer Jones	Czar Nicholas II
Napoleon the pig	Joseph Stalin
Snowball the pig	Leon Trotsky
Mollie the cart-horse	A White Russian (non-Bolshevik)
Boxer the cart-horse	The Proletariat
Moses the raven	Russian Orthodox Church
Squealer the pig	Pravda (newspaper organ of the Ministry of Propaganda)
Pigs in general	The Party
Farmer Pilkington	Churchill's England
Farmer Frederick	Hitler's Germany
Animal Uprising	1917 Revolution
Animal massacres	Moscow purge trials of the 1930s
Windmill construction	Stalin's Five-Year Plans for industrialization

Publication and reviews. By the time Orwell completed Animal Farm, he was an established, if relatively unknown, novelist. Nevertheless, no one seemed interested in publishing it. Stalin was an ally of Britain, and the Russian military was keeping large numbers of German forces occupied on the Eastern front. Most British did not want to offend the Soviet despot at this crucial period of the war. Orwell's regular publisher, Victor Gollancz, who was not known for taking political risks, rejected the book immediately. It was then rejected by three more publishing houses. One editor, enamored of the novel but wary of the effect its political message might have, sought advice from the British Ministry of Information and was warned not to take the book. He heeded the advice. When the manuscript was submitted to T. S. Eliot at the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he rejected the book, adding the following in his letter: "Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm... what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs" (Eliot in Sheldon, p. 368).

Even after the book was accepted at the Fredric Warburg publishing house, its publication was hampered by a severe shortage of paper and the politics of war. Animal Farm did not appear until after Hitler had been defeated and Stalin's importance as a British ally had ended. The delay may have taken some of the immediacy out of the anti-Stalinist message, but that didn't seem to affect the book's sales. It sold more than 25,000 hardcover copies in the first five years in England, and when the American edition appeared in 1946, its sales there reached 590,000 within four years.

The New Yorker's Edmund Wilson called Animal Farm "absolutely first-rate" (Wilson in Sheldon, p. 396). His review of September 7, 1946 was seconded by others, but the novel was also disparaged by a few. While some called it entertaining, others dismissed it as "on the whole dull" (Soule in James, p. 628). A reviewer for the Nation complained that its timing was off; the novel should have been written years earlier.

Others dissented. Animal Farm caught the popular imagination just when the Cold War was beginning to make itself felt. In subsequent years it was used by many as a propaganda weapon in that war, but this was a misinterpretation of the book's message. Orwell was not anti-Soviet, nor did he categorically condemn socialism. On the contrary, Orwell considered himself a democratic socialist. As one critic has pointed out, although Animal Farm is primarily "an attack on Stalinism....[I]t is an attack from the Left" (Atkins in Smyer, p. 14). According to Orwell, Animal Farm was intended as an attack on all revolutions gone wrong. His real world view was that people must build their own socialist movement without Russian interference and without using Russia as a model.