The British author George Orwell, pen name for Eric Blair, achieved prominence in the
late 1940's as the author of two brilliant satires. He wrote documentaries, essays, and
criticism during the 1930's and later established himself as one of the most important and
influential voices of the century. Eric Arthur Blair (later George Orwell) was born in
1903 in the Indian Village Motihari, which lies near to the border of Nepal. At that time
India was a part of the British Empire, and Blair's father Richard, held a post as an
agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Blair's paternal grandfather,
too, had been part of the British Raj, and had served in the Indian Army. Eric's mother,
Ida Mabel Blair, the daughter of a French tradesman, was about eighteen years younger than
her husband Richard Blair was. Eric had an elder sister called Marjorie. The Blairs led a
relatively privileged and fairly pleasant existence, in helping to administer the Empire.
Although the Blair family was not very wealthy, Orwell later described them ironically
as "lower-upper-middle class (Gross, p.109)." They owned no property and had no
extensive investments; they were like many middle-class English families of the time,
totally dependent on the British Empire for their livelihood and prospects. Even though
the father continued to work in India until he retired in 1912, in 1907, the family
returned to England and lived at Henley. With some difficulty, Blair's parents sent their
son to a private preparatory school in Sussex at the age of eight. At the age of thirteen,
he won a scholarship to Wellington, and soon after another to Eaton, the famous public
school (Gross, p.112). His parents had forced him to work at a dreary preparatory school,
and now after winning the scholarship, he was not any more interested in further mental
exertion unrelated to his private ambition. "At the beginning of Why/Write, he
explains that from the age of five or six he knew he would be, 'must be,' a writer (Gross,
p.115)." But to become a writer one had to read literature. But English literature
was not a major subject at Eaton, where most boys came from backgrounds either
irremediably unliterary or so literary that to teach them English Literature would be
absurd. One of Eric's tutors later declared that his famous pupil had done absolutely no
work for five years. This was, of course, untrue: Eric has apprenticed himself to the
masters of English prose who most appealed to him, including Swift, Sterne and Jack London
(Gross, p.117).
However, he has finished the final examinations at Eaton as 138th of 167. He neglected
to win a university scholarship, and in 1922, Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police
(Gross, p.118). In doing so he was already breaking away from the path most of his
schoolfellows would take, for Eaton often led to either Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he
was drawn to a life of travel and action. He trained in Burma and served for five years in
the police force there. "In 1927,while home on leave, he resigned. There are at least
two reasons for this. First, his life as a policeman was a distraction from the life he
really wanted, which was to be a writer. And second, he had come to feel that, as a
policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in which he could no longer
believe (Stringer, p.412)." Even as early as this, his notions about writing and his
political ideas were closely linked. It was not simply that he wished to break away from
British Imperialism in India: ! he wished to "escape from ... every form of man's
dominion over man," as he said in Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and the social structure
out of which he came dependent (Stringer, 413). Back in London he settled down in a
gritty bedroom in Portobello Road. There, at the age of twenty-four, he started to teach
himself how to write. His neighbors were impressed by his determination. Week after week
he remained in his unheated bedroom, thawing his hands over a candle when they became too
numb to write. In spring of 1928 he turned his back on his own inherited values, by taking
a drastic step. For more than one year he went on living among the poor, first in London
then in Paris. For him, the poor were victims of injustice, playing the same part as the
Burmese played in their country. One reason for going to live among the poor was to over
come a repulsion which he saw as typical for his own class. At Paris he lived and worked
in a working class quarter. At the time, he tells us, Paris was full of artists and
would-be artists. There Orwell led a life that was far from bohemian. When he eventually
got a job, he worked as a dishwasher. Once again his journey was d! ownward into the life
to which he felt he should expose himself, the life of poverty-stricken, or of those who
barely scraped up a living (Stringer, p.415). When he came back to London, he again lived
for a couple of months among the tramps and poor people. In December 1929, Eric spent
Christmas with his family. At his visit he announced that he's going to write a book about
his time in Paris. The original version of Down and Out, entitled ^A Scullion^s Diary,^
was completed in October 1930 and came to only 35,000 words for Orwell had used only a
part of his material. After two rejections from publishers Orwell wrote Burmese Days,
published in 1934, a book based on his experiences in the colonial service. We owe the
rescue of Down and Out to Mabel Firez: she was asked to destroy the script, but save the
paper clips. Instead, she took the manuscript and brought it to Leonard Monroe, literary
agent at the house Gollancz, and bullied him to read it. Soon it was accepted - on
condition that all curses were deleted and certain names changed. ^Having completed this
last revision Eric wrote to Victor Gollancz: ^I would prefer the book to! be published
pseudonymously. I have no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any
kind of success I can always use this pseudonym again' (Stringer, p.419).^ But Orwell's
reasons for taking the name Orwell are much more complicated than those writers usually
have when adopting a pen name. In effect it meant that Eric Blair would somehow have to
shed his old identity and take on a new. This is exactly what he tried to do: ^he tried to
change himself from Eric Blair, old Etonian an English colonial policeman, into George
Orwell, classless antiauthoritarian (Gross, p.131).^ Down and Out in Paris and London, was
not a novel; ^it was a kind of documentary account of life about which not many of those
who would read the book at the time would know very much about, and this was the point of
it: he wished to bring the English middle class, of which he was a member, to an
understanding of what life they led and enjoyed, was founded upon, the life under their
very noses (Gross, p.144).^ Here we see two typical aspects of Orwell as a writer: his
idea of himself as the exposure of painful truth, which people for various reasons do not
wish to look at; and his idea of himself as a representative of the English moral
conscience (Gross, p.148).
His next book was A Clergyman^s Daughter (1935) and Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936).
He opened a village shop in Wellington, Hertfordshire, in 1936, where he did business in
the mornings, and wrote in the afternoons. The same year he married Eileen O 'Shaughnessy.
In that year he also received a commission from the Left Book Club to examine the
conditions of the poor and unemployed. This resulted in The Road to Wilgan Pier. He went
on living among the poor about whom he was to write his book. Once again it was a journey
away from the comparative comfort of the middle class life. His account of mining
communities in the north of England in this book is full of detail, and conveys to the
reader what it is like to go down a mine. When the Left Book Club read what he had written
about the English class system and English socialism in The Road to Wigan Pier they were
not pleased, and when the book was published it contained a preface by Victor Gollancz
taking issue with many of ! Orwell's main points. The Left Book Club wasn't pleased
because in the second half of the book Orwell criticized the English socialism, because in
his eyes it was mostly unrealistic. Another fact criticized by Orwell was that most of the
socialists tended to be members of the Middle class (Stringer, p.438). ^The kind of
socialist Orwell makes fun of is the sort who spouts phrases like ^proletarian
solidarity^, and who puts of decent people, the people for whom Orwell wants to write
(Stringer, p.439).^ Having completed The Road to Wigan Pier he went to Spain at the end of
1936, with the idea of writing newspaper articles on the Civil War which had broken out
there. The conflict in Spain was between the communist, socialist Republic, and General
Franco's Fascist military rebellion. When Orwell arrived at Barcelona he was astonished at
the atmosphere he found there: what had seemed impossible in England seemed a fact of
daily life in Spain. Class distinction seemed to have vanished. There was a shortage of
everything, but there was equality. Orwell joined in the struggle, by enlisting in the
militia of POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacin de Marxista), with which the British Labor
Party had an association. For the first time in his life socialism seemed a reality,
something for which was worth fighting for. He was wounded in the throat. Three and a half
months later when he returned to Barcelona, he found it a changed city. No longer a place
where the socialist word comrade was! really felt to mean something, it was a city
returning to "normal." Even worse, he was to find that his group that he was
with, the POUM, was now accused of being a Fascist militia, secretly helping Franco.
Orwell had to sleep in the open to avoid showing his papers, and eventually managed to
escape into France with his wife. His account of his time in Spain was published in Homage
to Catalonia (1938). His experiences in Spain left two impressions on Orwell's mind.
First, they showed him that socialism in action was a human possibility, if only a
temporary one. He never forgot the exhilaration of those first days in Barcelona, when a
new society seemed possible, where "comradeship" instead of being just a
socialist was reality. Second, the experience of the city returning to normal, he saw as a
gloomy confirmation of the fact that there will always be different classes. He saw that
there is something in the human nature that seeks violence, conflict, and power over
others. ! It will be clear that these two impressions, of hope on one hand, and despair on
the other are entirely contradiction. Nevertheless, despite the despair and confusion of
his return to Barcelona, street fights between different groups of socialists broke out
again, Orwell left Spain with a hopeful impression (Stringer, p.441-446). In 1938, Orwell
became ill with tuberculosis, and spent the winter in Morocco. While there he wrote his
next book, a novel entitled Coming up for Air published in 1939, the year the long
threatened war between England and Germany broke out. Orwell wanted to fight, as he has
done in Spain, against the fascist enemy, but he was declared unfit. In 1941, he joined
the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as talks producer in the Indian section of the
eastern service. He served in the Home Guard, a wartime civilian body for local defense.
In 1943, he left the BBC to become literary editor of the tribune, and began writing
Animal Farm. In 1944, the Orwells adopted a son, but in 1945 his wife died during an
operation. Towards the end of the war Orwell went to Europe as a reporter (Stringer,
p.448-449). Late in 1945, he went to the island of Jura off the Scottish coast, and
settled there. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-four there. The islands climate was unsuitable for
someone suffering from tuberculosis and Nineteen Eighty-four reflects the bleakness of
human suffering, the indignity of pain. Indeed he said that the book wouldn't have been so
gloomy had he not been so ill. His wedding to Sonia Bronwell took place at his bedside in
University College Hospital. By the time of his death in January 1950, he had been judged
a major author by cities on both sides of the Atlantic, and his value as a cultural critic
has been increasingly widely recognized (Stringer, p.450).
Analysis
"Animal Farm", Orwell wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with
full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose
into one whole (Hopkinson, p.12)." Orwell's purpose of writing this book was to write
a book in simple language with concrete symbolism so that ordinary English people, who had
enjoyed a tradition of justice and liberty for centuries, would realize what a
totalitarian system, like Russia's government, was like. His experience in Spain had shown
him how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in
democratic countries. Orwell^s style in composing a cynical novel in simplistic manners
allows the reader to easily relate the plot and characters to the events and leaders of
the Russian government from 1917 to the middle 1940s.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm to destroy the Soviet myth that Russia was a true socialist
society. "He attacks the injustice of the Soviet regime and seeks to correct Western
misconception about the Soviet Communism. Orwell's Animal Farm is based on the first
thirty years of the Soviet Union, a real society pursuing the ideal of equality (Atkins,
p.120)." His book argues that a society where men live together fairly, justly, and
equally hasn't worked and couldn't work. Animal Farm, a brief, concentrated satire,
subtitled "A Fairy Story", can also be read on the simple level of plot and
character. It is an entertaining, witty tale of a farm whose oppressed animals, capable of
speech and reason, overcome a cruel master and set up a revolutionary government. They are
betrayed by the evil power-hungry pigs, especially by their leader, Napoleon, and forced
to return to their former servitude. Only the leadership has changed.
On another, more serious level, of course, it is a political allegory, a symbolic tale
where all the events and characters represent issues and leaders in Russian history since
1917, "in which the interplay between surface action and inner meaning is everything
(Atkins, p.125)." Orwell's deeper purpose is to teach a political lesson. Orwell uses
actual historical events to construct his story. Each animal stands for a precise figure
or representative type. The pigs, who can read and write and organize, are the
"Bolshevik intellectuals who came to dominate the vast Soviet bureaucracy (Iftinkar,
p.731)." Napoleon is Stalin, the select group around him the Politburo, Snowball is
Trotsky, and Squealer represents the propagandists of the regime. The pigs enjoy the
privileges of belonging to the new ruling class, which include special food and shorter
working hours, but also suffer the consequences of questioning Napoleon's policies. The
other animals represent various types of common people. Boxer, the name suggesting the
Boxer Rebellion of 1900 where revolutionaries tried to expel foreigners from China, is the
decent working man, fired by enthusiasm for the egalitarian ideal, working overtime in the
factories or on the land, and willing to die to defend his country. Clover is the eternal
motherly working woman of the people. Molly, the unreliable, frivolous mare, represents
the "White Russians who opposed the revolution and fled the country (Iftinkar,
p.732)." The dogs are the vast army of secret police who maintain Stalin in power.
The sheep are the ignorant public who repeat the latest propaganda without thinking and
who can be made to turn up to "spontaneous demonstrations (Orwell, p.108)" in
support of Napoleon's plans. Moses, the raven, represents the opportunist Church. He flies
off after Mr. Jones, but returns later, and continues to preach about the Sugarcandy
Mountain (heaven), but the pigs" propaganda obliterates any lingering belief.
Benjamin the donkey, the cynical but powerless average man, never believes in the glorious
future to come, and is always alert to every betrayal. Orwell's allegory is comic in its
detailed parallels: the hoof and horn is clearly the hammer and sickle, the Communist
party emblem. "Beasts of England" is a parody of the "Internationale"
the Communist party's song. The Order of the Green Banner is the "Order of Lenin, and
the other first- and second-class awards spoof the fondness of Soviet Russia for awarding
medals, for everything from exceeding one^s quota on the assembly line or in the harvest
to bearing a great many children (Iftinkar, p.732)." ^The poem in praise of Napoleon
(Orwell, p.90 - 91)^ imitates the sycophantic verses and the mass paintings and sculptures
turned out to glorify Stalin. Each event of the story has a historical parallel.
The Rebellion in chapter 2 is the October 1917 Revolution, and the Battle of the
Cowshed in chapter 4 is the subsequent Civil War. Mr. Jones and the farmers represent the
loyalist Russians and foreign forces that tried, but failed, to dislodge the Bolsheviks.
The hens^ revolt in chapter 7 stands for the brutally suppressed ^1921 mutiny of the
sailors at Kronstadt, (Iftinkar, 732)^ which challenged the new regime to release
political prisoners and grant freedoms of speech and the press. Napoleon^s deal with
Whymper, who trades the farm^s produce at Willingdon market, represents ^Russia^s 1922
Treaty of Rapollo with Germany (Iftinkar, p.733).^ Orwell emphasizes Napoleon^s decision
to trade because it breaks the First Commandment, that ^whatever goes upon two legs is an
enemy^(Orwell, p.33). ^Official Soviet policy was hostile to Germany, a militaristic,
capitalist nation, but the Treaty revealed that the Communist regime h! ad been trading
arms and heavy machinery, and would continue to do so (Iftinkar, p.734).^ The Windmill
stands for ^the first Five-Year Plan of 1928, which called for rapid industrialization and
collectivization of agriculture (Iftinkar, p.734).^
In chapter 6 a terrible storm caused ^the windmill to fall to ruins^ (Orwell, p.71),
which symbolizes the grim failure of this policy. Chapter 7 describes in symbolic terms
the famine and starvation which followed. The hens^ revolt stands for the peasants^ bitter
resistance to collective farming, when they burned their crops and slaughtered their
animals. The animals^ false confessions in chapter 7 are the Purge Trials of the late
1930s. The false banknotes given by Mr. Frederick for the corn represent Hitler^s betrayal
of ^the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 (Iftinkar, p.735),^ and the second destruction of the
Windmill, by Mr. Frederick^s men, is ^the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941 (Iftinkar,
p.735).^ The last chapter brings Orwell up to date of the book^s composition. He ends with
a satiric portrait of the Teheran Conf! erence of 1943, the meeting of Churchill,
Roosevelt, and Stalin, ^who were planning to divide the world among themselves (Atkins,
p.163).^ The quarrel over cheating at cards predicts the downfall of the superpowers as
soon as the war ended. The plot^s circular movement, which returns the animals to
conditions very like those in the beginning, provides occasions for vivid irony. In the
first chapter they lament their forced labor and poor food, but by chapter 6 they are
starving, and are forced to work once more. In chapter 1 Old Major predicts that one day
Jones will send Boxer to the butcher, and in chapter 9 Napoleon fulfills this prophecy by
sending him to the slaughterhouse.
In chapter 7, when various animals falsely confess their crimes and are summarily
executed by the dogs, ^the air was heavy and the smell of blood, which had been unknown
there since the expulsion of Jones (Orwell, p.83).^ These ironies all emphasis the tragic
failure of the revolution, and support Benjamin^s view that ^life would go on as it had
always gone on ^ that is badly (Orwell, 56).^ Though all the characters are representative
types, Orwell differentiates the two most important figures, Napoleon and Snowball, so
that they resemble their real-life counterparts both in the broad lines of their
characterizations and in their two major disagreements. Like Stalin, Napoleon, having ^a
reputation for getting his own way (Orwell, p.25),^ takes charge of indoctrinating the
young, sets up an elaborate propaganda machine, cultivates an image of omnipotent
portraying charismatic power, and surrounds himself with bodyguards and fawning
attendants. Like Trotsky, Snowball is an intellectual, who quickly researches a topic and
formulates plans. He is a persuasive orator, but fails to extort the leadership from
Napoleon. Napoleon and Snowball^s quarrel over the Windmill represents their dispute over
what should take priority in developing the Soviet Union. ^Stalin wanted to collectivize
the agriculture; Trotsky was for developing industry. Ultimately Stalin adopted both
programs in his first Five-Year Plan (Iftinkar, p.736),^ just as Napoleon derides
Snowball^s plans, then uses them as his own. ^Their most fundamental disagreement was
whether to try to spread the revolution to other countries, as classical Marxism dictated,
or confine themselves to making a socialist state in Russia (Meyers, p.137).^ Napoleon
argues for the latter, saying that the animals must arm themselves to protect their new
leadership. Snowball says that they must send more pigeons into neighboring farms to
spread the news about the revolution, so at the end Napoleon assures the farmers that he
will not spread the rebellion among the animals.
^Expelled from the Politburo in 1925, Trotsky went into exile in 1929 and was
considered a heretic. His historical role was altered; his face cut out of group
photographs of the leaders of the revolution. In Russia he was denounced as a traitor and
conspirator and in 1940 a Stalinist agent assassinated him in Mexico City (Iftinkar,
p.737).^ Similarly, Snowball is blamed for everything that goes wrong in Animal Farm, and
the animals are persuaded that he was a traitor from the beginning. It has been said that
the very act of reducing human characters to animals implies a pessimistic view of man,
and that in Animal Farm the satiric vision is close to the tragic. ^Orwell turns elements
of comedy into scenes of tragic horror (Connolly, p.176).^ In chapter 5, Napoleon
comically lifts his leg to urinate on Snowball^s plans. But shortly afterwards, he summons
the dogs and orders them to rip out the throats of those who confess their disloyalty. In
one instance Napoleon^s contempt is amusing, in the next it is horrifying. The beast-fable
is not only a device that allows Orwell^s serious message to be intelligible on two
levels; the use of animals to represent man is basic to his whole theme.
We can readily grasp that animals are oppressed and feel it is wrong to exploit them
and betray their trust. Orwell counts on our common assumptions about particular species
to suggest his meaning. The sheep and their bleating are perfect metaphors for a gullible
public, ever read to accept policies and repeat rumors as truth. We commonly believe pigs
are greedy and savage, even to the point of devouring their young, which describes the
power-hungry government officials of the 1917 ^ 1945 interval. In chapter 3, ^the work of
the farm went like clockwork (Orwell, p.36)^ when the animals were in charge; into this
simple fabric Orwell inserts a word with Marxist overtones: ^with the worthless
^parasitical^ human beings gone, there was more for everyone to eat (Orwell, p.36).^ The
simplicity of his vocabulary adds to the creativeness and ingenuity Orwell displays
through the double meanings in his writing. The political allegory of Animal Farm, whether
specific or general, detailed or allusive, is persuasive, thorough and accurate, and the
brilliance of the book becomes much clearer when the satiric allegory is compared to the
political actuality of Russia^s historic government. Critics who write, ^It makes a
delightful children^s story^ are completely oblivious to the sophisticated, underlying
meanings the parable satires. The pleasure of reading Animal Farm lies in recognizing the
double meanings, the political and historical parallels, in the story that George Orwell
cleverly disguised through creative symbolism. Some critics say that Orwell^s satire is
over-exaggerated. But to those critics I would ask then why did ^customs officials at the
Moscow International Book Fair in 1987 clear the British exhibitors^ shelves of Animal
Farm (Meyers, p.241).^ I believe there is no better certification of the book^s truth.
Bibliography
Ahmad, Iftinkar, Herbert Brodsky, et al., World Cultures: A Global Mosaic. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1993.
Atkins, John. George Orwell. London: Calder and Boyers, 1954.
Connolly, Cyril. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 31. Detroit, Michigan: Gale
Research Inc., 1986.
Gross, Miriam. The World of George Orwell. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.
Hopkinson, Tom. George Orwell. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1953.
Meyers, Jeffery. A Reader's Guide to George Orwell. London: Thanes and Hudson, 1975.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York, New York: New American Library, 1946.
Stringer, Jenny. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English.
Oxford: New York, 1996.
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