“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
See Important Quotations Explained
Summary
The animals spend a laborious summer harvesting in the
fields. The clever pigs think of ways for the animals to use the
humans’ tools, and every animal participates in the work, each according
to his capacity. The resulting harvest exceeds any that the farm
has ever known. Only Mollie and the cat shirk their duties. The
powerful and hard-working Boxer does most of the heavy labor, adopting
“I will work harder!” as a personal motto. The entire animal community
reveres his dedication and strength. Of all of the animals, only Benjamin,
the obstinate donkey, seems to recognize no change under the new
leadership.
Every Sunday, the animals hold a flag-raising ceremony.
The flag’s green background represents the fields of England, and
its white hoof and horn symbolize the animals. The morning rituals also
include a democratic meeting, at which the animals debate and establish
new policies for the collective good. At the meetings, Snowball
and Napoleon always voice the loudest opinions, though their views
always clash.
Snowball establishes a number of committees with various
goals, such as cleaning the cows’ tails and re-educating the rats
and rabbits. Most of these committees fail to accomplish their aims,
but the classes designed to teach all of the farm animals how to
read and write meet with some success. By the end of the summer,
all of the animals achieve some degree of literacy. The pigs become
fluent in reading and writing, while some of the dogs are able to
learn to read the Seven Commandments. Muriel the goat can read scraps
of newspaper, while Clover knows the alphabet but cannot string
the letters together. Poor Boxer never gets beyond the letter D. When it becomes apparent that many of the animals are unable to
memorize the Seven Commandments, Snowball reduces the principles
to one essential maxim, which he says contains the heart of Animalism: “Four
legs good, two legs bad.” The birds take offense until Snowball
hastily explains that wings count as legs. The other animals accept
the maxim without argument, and the sheep begin to chant it at random
times, mindlessly, as if it were a song.
Napoleon takes no interest in Snowball’s committees. When
the dogs Jessie and Bluebell each give birth to puppies, he takes
the puppies into his own care, saying that the training of the young
should take priority over adult education. He raises the puppies
in a loft above the harness room, out of sight of the rest of Animal
Farm. Around this time, the animals discover, to their outrage,
that the pigs have been taking all of the milk and apples for themselves. Squealer
explains to them that pigs need milk and apples in order to think
well, and since the pigs’ work is brain work, it is in everyone’s best
interest for the pigs to eat the apples and drink the milk. Should the
pigs’ brains fail because of a lack of apples and milk, Squealer hints,
Mr. Jones might come back to take over the farm. This prospect frightens
the other animals, and they agree to forgo milk and apples in the
interest of the collective good.
Analysis
Boxer’s motto, in response to the increased labors
on Animal Farm, of “I will work harder” is an exact echo of the
immigrant Jurgis Rudkus’s motto, in response to financial problems,
in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Whereas Boxer exerts
himself for the common good, as his socialist society dictates he
must, Jurgis exerts himself for his own good, as his capitalist
society dictates he must. Both possess a blind faith that the key
to happiness lies in conforming to the existing political-economic system.
Committed to socialism, Orwell would almost certainly have read The
Jungle, which, published in its entirety in 1906, was
a searing indictment of capitalism and galvanized the American socialist
movement. His appropriation of Jurgis’s motto for Boxer implicitly
links the oppression of capitalism with that of totalitarian communism,
as, in each case, the state wholly ignores the suffering of those
who strive to be virtuous and work within the system.
The varying degrees of literacy among the animals suggest
the necessity of sharing information in order for freedom to be
maintained. To the pigs’ credit, they do try to teach the other
animals the basics of reading and writing, but the other animals
prove unable or unwilling. The result is a dangerous imbalance in
knowledge, as the pigs become the sole guardians and interpreters
of Animal Farm’s guiding principles. The discrepancy
among the animals’ capacity for abstract thought leads the pigs
to condense the Seven Commandments into one supreme slogan: “Four
legs good, two legs bad.” The birds’ objection to the slogan points
immediately to the phrase’s excessive simplicity. Whereas the Seven
Commandments that the pigs formulate are a detailed mix of antihuman
directives (“No animal shall wear clothes”), moral value judgments
(“No animal shall kill another animal”), and utopian ideals (“All
animals are equal”), the new, reductive slogan contains none of
these elements; it merely establishes a bold dichotomy that masks
the pigs’ treachery. The motto has undergone such generalization
that it has become propaganda, a rallying cry that will keep the
common animals focused on the pigs’ rhetoric so that they will ignore
their own unhappiness.
