Summary
As the novella opens, Mr. Jones, the proprietor and overseer
of the Manor Farm, has just stumbled drunkenly to bed after forgetting
to secure his farm buildings properly. As soon as his bedroom light goes
out, all of the farm animals except Moses, Mr. Jones’s tame raven,
convene in the big barn to hear a speech by Old Major, a prize boar
and pillar of the animal community. Sensing that his long life is about
to come to an end, Major wishes to impart to the rest of the farm
animals a distillation of the wisdom that he has acquired during
his lifetime.
As the animals listen raptly, Old Major delivers up the
fruits of his years of quiet contemplation in his stall. The plain
truth, he says, is that the lives of his fellow animals are “miserable,
laborious, and short.” Animals are born into the world as slaves,
worked incessantly from the time they can walk, fed only enough
to keep breath in their bodies, and then slaughtered mercilessly
when they are no longer useful. He notes that the land upon which
the animals live possesses enough resources to support many times
the present population in luxury; there is no natural reason for
the animals’ poverty and misery. Major blames the animals’ suffering
solely on their human oppressors. Mr. Jones and his ilk have been
exploiting animals for ages, Major says, taking all of the products
of their labor—eggs, milk, dung, foals—for themselves and producing
nothing of value to offer the animals in return.
Old Major relates a dream that he had the previous night,
of a world in which animals live without the tyranny of men: they
are free, happy, well fed, and treated with dignity. He urges the
animals to do everything they can to make this dream a reality and
exhorts them to overthrow the humans who purport to own them. The
animals can succeed in their rebellion only if they first achieve
a complete solidarity or “perfect comradeship” of all of the animals against
the humans, and if they resist the false notion spread by humans
that animals and humans share common interests. A brief conversation
arises in which the animals debate the status of rats as comrades.
Major then provides a precept that will allow the animals to determine
who their comrades are: creatures that walk on two legs are enemies;
those with four legs or with wings are allies. He reminds his audience
that the ways of man are completely corrupt: once the humans have
been defeated, the animals must never adopt any of their habits;
they must not live in a house, sleep in a bed, wear clothes, drink
alcohol, smoke tobacco, touch money, engage in trade, or tyrannize
another animal. He teaches the animals a song called “Beasts of
England,” which paints a dramatic picture of the utopian, or ideal,
animal community of Major’s dream. The animals sing several inspired
choruses of “Beasts of England” with one voice—until Mr. Jones,
thinking that the commotion bespeaks the entry of a fox into the
yard, fires a shot into the side of the barn. The animals go to
sleep, and the Manor Farm again sinks into quietude.
Analysis
Although Orwell aims his satire at totalitarianism
in all of its guises—communist, fascist, and capitalist—Animal Farm owes its structure largely to the events of the Russian Revolution
as they unfolded between 1917 and 1944,
when Orwell was writing the novella. Much of what happens in the
novella symbolically parallels specific developments in the history
of Russian communism, and several of the animal characters are based
on either real participants in the Russian Revolution or amalgamations thereof.
Due to the universal relevance of the novella’s themes, we don’t
need to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist Leninism or
Russian history in order to appreciate Orwell’s satire of them.
An acquaintance with certain facts from Russia’s past, however,
can help us recognize the particularly biting quality of Orwell’s
criticism (see Historical Background).
Because of Animal Farm’s parallels
with the Russian Revolution, many readers have assumed that the
novella’s central importance lies in its exposure and critique of
a particular political philosophy and practice, Stalinism. In fact,
however, Orwell intended to critique Stalinism as merely one instance
of the broader social phenomenon of totalitarianism, which he saw
at work throughout the world: in fascist Germany (under Adolf Hitler)
and Spain (under Francisco Franco), in capitalist America, and in
his native England, as well as in the Soviet Union. The broader
applicability of the story manifests itself in details such as the
plot’s setting—England. Other details refer to political movements
in other countries as well. The animals’ song “Beasts of England,”
for example, parodies the “Internationale,” the communist
anthem written by the Paris Commune of 1871.
In order to lift his story out of the particularities
of its Russian model and give it the universality befitting the
importance of its message, Orwell turned to the two ancient and
overlapping traditions of political fable and animal fable. Writers
including Aesop (Fables), Jonathan Swift (especially
in the Houyhnhnm section of Gulliver’s Travels),
Bernard Mandeville (The Fable of the Bees), and
Jean de La Fontaine (Fables) have long cloaked
their analyses of contemporary society in such parables in order
to portray the ills of society in more effective ways. Because of
their indirect approach, fables have a strong tradition in societies
that censor openly critical works: the writers of fables could often
claim that their works were mere fantasies and thus attract audiences
that they might not have reached otherwise. Moreover, by setting
human problems in the animal kingdom, a writer can achieve the distance
necessary to see the absurdity in much of human behavior—he or she
can abstract a human situation into a clearly interpretable tale.
By treating the development of totalitarian communism as a story
taking place on a small scale, reducing the vast and complex history
of the Russian Revolution to a short work describing talking animals
on a single farm, Orwell is able to portray his subject in extremely
simple symbolic terms, presenting the moral lessons of the story
with maximum clarity, objectivity, concision, and force.
