George Orwell & Animal Farm

Allegory of Animal Farm

Animal Farm begins with Old Major, a prize-winning pig, having had a dream which has inspired him to give a speech to the rest of the animals on Manor Farm to rise up against the humans. Old Major points out that all the animals work harder than Mr. Jones but they are neglected: Jones forgets to feed them, and they aren’t taken care of.

The animals do rise up against Jones and successfully kick him out of Manor Farm led by pigs Napoleon & Snowball.

Napoleon & Snowball lead the farm & things start to go �awry.

Napoleon turns into a tyrant, treating the animals no �better than Mr. Jones did.

George Orwell

• Real name: Eric Arthur Blair
• Born in 1903 in British India
• Middle Class
• Joined the Imperial Police
• took a post in Burma
• Fought in the Spanish Civil War
• “I’ve come to fight against Fascism”
• Fought against the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (a wing of the Spanish Communist Party)
• Unable to serve in WWII because of weak lungs, Orwell applied for civilian work, but was denied.

anti-Stalin

• Orwell began writing for the American Partisan Review which connected him to other anti-Stalinists.
• Orwell disliked the idea that people supported Stalin despite his crimes against Russia and the greater world.
• “One could not have a better example of the moral and �emotional shallowness of our time, that the fact that �we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This �disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, �and so the purges, etc./ are suddenly forgotten.”
• Orwell’s in his war-time diary in July 1941

Writing Animal Farm

• Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War initially triggered the idea for the novel.
• In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of the novel, he explains how escaping the communist purges in Spain showed him “how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.”
• Orwell described the idea of setting the book on a farm:
• “... I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge�carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it�tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became�aware of their strength we should have no power over�them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way�as the rich exploit the proletariat.”

Publishing Animal Farm

• Orwell was prepared to publish Animal Farm: A Fairy Story in 1944 but no publishing company would take it because the Soviets were a strong ally in WWII.
• One publisher who denied the manuscript said:
• “... the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. �Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant �caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs �as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many �people, and particularly to anyone who is bit touchy, as �undoubtedly the Russians are.”
• Animal Farm was eventually published in August �of 1945 shortly after the United States dropped the �atomic bomb in Japan ending all fronts of WWII.

Symbolism of Characters

• Old Major - Karl Marx & Lenin
• An aged prize boar provides the inspiration that fuels the Rebellion in the book. He is an allegorical combination of Karl Marx, & Lenin, the communist leader of the Russian Revolution & the early Soviet nation in that he draws up the principles of the revolution. His skull being put on revered public display recalls Lenin, whose embalmed body wa put on display.
• Napoleon - Joseph Stalin
• Napoleon is the main villain of the story.
• Snowball - Leon Trotsky
• Napoleon’s rival & original head of the farm after Jones’ �overthrow. He is mainly based on Trotsky but also combines �elements of Lenin.
• Squealer - The Soviet Press
• Napoleon’s second-in-command and minister of propaganda

• Mr. Jones - Tsar Nicholas II
• former owner of the farm, Jones ia an alcoholic. The animals revolt against him after he drinks so much that he does not feed or take care of them. He is an allegory of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who abdicated following the February Revolution of 1917 & was murdered, along with the rest of his family by the Bolsheviks.
• Mr. Frederick - Adolf Hitler
• the tough owner of Pinchfield, a small but well-kept neighboring farm, who briefly enters into an alliance with Napoleon. He is an allegory of Adolf Hitler who enters into a neutrality pact with Stalin only to later break it by invading the Soviet Union.
• Boxer - Working class
• A loyal, kind, dedicated, hard working, and respectable cart-horse, �although quite naive & gullible. Boxer does a large share �of the physical labor on the farming adhering to the �simplistic belief that working harder will solve all the �animals’ problems. He believes any problem can be solved�if he works harder. However he is betrayed by Napoleon �in the end.

• The puppies - KGB (Secret Police)
• taken away at birth by Napoleon and reared him to be his security force. They used force, often killed entire families for disobedience.
• Moses - Established Religion
• He regales the animals with tales of a wondrous place beyond the clouds called “Sugarcandy Mountain, that happy country where we poor animals shall rest forever from our labors!” Orwell portrays religion as “the black raven of priestcraft -- promising pie in the sky when you die, and faithfully serving whoever happens to be in power.”