by George Orwell(New York: Signet Classics, 1996)
Paperback, 139 Pages, Fiction
THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. What ever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.
From the Cover: A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned – a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.
My Review: So, somehow, I have made it to my senior year in college (as an English/Literary Studies major) after 31 years of life without having ever read George Orwell’s Animal Farm before. How this happened, I don’t know in the slightest. However, that has now been rectified. I decided this year to read Orwell’s allegory because in the curriculum of Core Knowledge (which the charter school at which I work uses) the eighth graders are supposed to read Animal Farm with their studies of the Cold War. However, last year, we decided that it would be more effective for the seventh graders to read the book because they are the ones who are studying the Russian Revolution, which is what Orwell’s book is all about. (They use these great sheets to help them understand who signifies what. They can be found here.) Having helped teach the Russian Revolution last year (and started it this year again) the symbolism that Orwell employs is fascinating and makes the novel even more interesting than simply “This book is about COMMUNISM.” When you consider the following, Orwell’s treatment of the Russian Revolution is engrossing:
Characters
Napoleon = Josef Stalin
Snowball = Leon Trotsky
Old Major = Karl Marx/ V.I. Lenin (depending on your point of view)
Squealer = Vyacheslav Molotov (editor of Pravda)
Minimus = Maxim Gorky
Mr. Jones/Manor Farm = Tsar Nicholas II/Tsarist Russia
Mr. Frederick/Pinchfield Farm = Adolf Hitler/Nazi Germany
Mr. Pilkington/Foxwood Farm = Western Powers (U.S./Britain)
Mr. Whymper = George Bernard Shaw (and other Westerners who sympathized with the Revolution)
Boxer = The devoted Proletariat
Clover = The uneducated Proletariat
Mollie = The Russian Aristocracy who fled after the Revolution
Moses = The Russian Orthodox Church
Benjamin = The Mensheviks
The Chickens = (Ukrainian) Peasant farmers
Muriel = The educated Proletariat
The Cat = The more “shady” members of Russian society (i.e. gypsies, Jews, etc.)
The Dogs = KGB/Secret Police/Stalin’s Bodyguards
The Sheep = The Russian masses at large
The Wild Animals (Rats, Rabbits, etc.) = Political opposition to the Bolsheviks
The Pigeons = Soviet propaganda to other countries
Events
The Animal Revolt = The Russian Revolution
The Battle of the Cowshed = Red October
The Hens’ Revolt = The Ukrainian peasant farmers’ resistance to collective farming
The Destruction of the Windmill = The Failure of the Five Year Plan
The Selling of the Wood to Frederick = The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact
The Battle of the Windmill = Battle of Stalingrad, German invasion of Russia during WWII
The Card Game = The Tehran Conference
Taking all of this in account, it shows that the novel is much deeper than the usual high school interpretation of “This is about COMMUNISM.” Orwell calls his novel “A Fairy Story” and I think that that is telling. Often we think of Fairy Stories as having happy endings, where Prince Charming comes riding in to save the Princess and they Live Happily Ever After. Animal Farm is a very dark allegory and one that shows what I fact non-Disney-fied fairy tales are like. Fairy tales from the Brother Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson and all the others are quite dark and more often than not good does not win out in the end. This is what Orwell is trying to say: when the people tacitly allow tyrants and despots into their midst, then it should be no wonder when those same tyrants and despots take over and … well … we all know how Stalinist Russia ended up. Unfortunately, as is often the case with literary prophets (like Orwell, like H.G. Wells, like Kurt Vonnegut) their message is ignored and we go blithely on making the same mistakes as the past (there’s not a lot of difference between Napoleon’s Animal Farm, Stalinist Russia, and George W. Bush’s America, if you were to ask me) and we wonder, like Clover, why the Seven Commandments are different than we remember them, until finally there is only one Commandment: All animals (or Russians or Americans) are equal – But some animals (or Russians or Americans) are more equal than others, and it gets hard to tell the pigs (or Communists or “Patriots”) from the humans (or Tsarists or “terrorists”).
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