15. Beastly Men and Humanlike Beasts in Animal Farm

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Edition used: George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945), ed. Peter Davison and introd. Julian Symons (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993). Hereafter referred to as AF. Note: this discussion assumes you’ve read the book.

Orwell’s work is full of beasts. Animal Farm (1945) is the most obvious instance of this, but beasts of many descriptions appear throughout his fiction and non-fiction alike. Historically used to refer to living beings, humans and animals both, the word has increasingly come to be applied to animals in order to differentiate them from humans, and to emphasize the so-called ‘lowness’ of animals in relation to their human neighbours. Joining this sense of the word is the connected insult: naming someone as a beast means naming them, supposedly in a humiliating way, as an animal. To call someone a beast in the modern world is to imagine them as a despicable creature—something disgusting, offensive, or terrifying. Think of Isabella addressing Claudio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: ‘O you beast! / O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!’[1] There’s also the lamenting Cassio, in Othello, who thinks of his drunken self as beastly, and can’t bear the thought of it: ‘O God, that men / should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away / their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance / revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!’[2] Or, to take an example from Orwell’s work, think of John Flory in conversation with Dr Veraswami in Burmese Days (1934), talking disparagingly about the racist Ellis as a ‘little beast’.[3] At times the word has been used to signify transcendental kinds of evil. Hence the nickname of Reinhard Heydrich, chief Nazi architect of the Holocaust, as the ‘Blond Beast’. A hierarchy runs through these descriptions, in which the animal is a sign of the lowly and the abject, or the repellent.

Burmese Days not only shows how the terms of this hierarchy run through the views of some of Orwell’s most prejudiced characters, but also how they shape the narrative language of the novel itself, which sits in an uneasy grey area combining sympathy with disgust. Douglas Kerr notes that in Orwell’s ‘mature writing, and particularly in the Burmese material, the world of “nature”—of animals and growing things and the landscape—moves in to fill a gap, to supply a want, and becomes a way of seeing and talking about what it is hard to see and talk about in simply human terms.’[4] In the case of animals, very often the gap to be filled is a sense of horror that can’t be accounted for in relation to customary standards of likeness. One of the most awful moments in Burmese Days is when Flory rejects his mistress, Ma Hla May, causing her to collapse abjectly in front of him with ‘face hidden, arms extended, as though before a god’s altar’, and creeping ‘wormlike’ across the floor.[5] Kerr suggests elsewhere that this has a good chance of being considered by many readers as ‘the most powerful and most distressing scene in the novel’.[6] The power and distress comes from the novel’s satire. This is abjection at the expense of Flory, whose inability to bear the sight of Ma Hla May’s submission tells us rather more about him than about her. Yet we might also consider how in a scene like this the novel itself is working within the terms of a certain set of hierarchical assumptions. Rosinka Chaudhuri has written about how Burmese Days indulges regularly in ‘the common colonial trope of finding equivalence between the colonized races and animals’, this being ‘common parlance among the British’ officials who occupied the subject territories.[7] Is Ma Hla May’s ‘wormlike’ pose a quality that Flory finds in her, with Burmese Days privileging his perspective as it does throughout the novel? Or is the ‘wormlike’ nature of her crawling something that the novel ‘objectively’ assigns to her, as it were—something that the narrative authoritatively sees as ‘there’ in her posture, and therefore in her as a person?

Grey areas like this can be traced back to Orwell’s equivocal relationship with empire. Insider and critic, he saw through even as he made use of colonial discourse. There’s also the simple fact that Orwell tended to write and speak the language of beastliness in his use of slang. A good many things are ‘beastly’ in Orwell’s view because they’re silly, or repellent, or one-sided, or useless, or defiled, or glacial, or horrible, or any number of other things that irritate or nauseate him. Sometimes a particular novel associates beastliness with a particular emphasis. Coming Up for Air (1939), for example, tends to connect the beastly, in this slang sense, with freezing temperatures, whereas A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) tends to link it to nonsense, to propaganda and falsity. Margaret Drabble reminds us that the word ‘beastly’ was ‘typical English slang of the period and was long to remain popular—it was used by both boys and girls at school, and was still current in [her] own childhood. It featured a great deal in the schoolboy comic and magazines about which Orwell was to write so well, and which he simultaneously dismissed and celebrated.’[8] Take Homage to Catalonia (1938), in which the word ‘beastly’ is applied to cold temperatures, milky water, a rifle prone to jamming, a hole in the ground, the heaviness of sandbags, the experience of being on the front lines of a war, crude types of bombs that have a tendency to explode without warning, and the awful stench of a jail without proper sanitary arrangements.[9] The range of uses points to the word’s commonplaceness. And it runs through Orwell’s writing. Zachary Leven traces ninety instances of it across the nine main book-length works that Orwell produced.[10] If at one level this simply attests to Orwell’s idiomatic, slang-filled register, at another it hints at the omnipresence of the beastly and the creaturely in his thought.

A more direct way of making this same point would be to say that beasts are everywhere in Orwell’s work because he continually focuses on the lives and suffering of animals. The essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936) depicts the animal of the title as a ‘great beast’ with terrifying strength that allows it to strip the skin from a man’s back ‘as neatly as one skins a rabbit.’[11] The power of the elephantine beast in this instance is intensified through further animalistic comparison: with the skinning of a bunny. Plenty of evidence exists to show that Orwell adored animals, but a comparison like this also hints at the ease and skill with which he could kill them and then deal with their corpses. Drabble points out that Orwell was ‘fond of animals and had far more day-to-day dealings with them throughout his life than many writers have had’, yet notes that he was also, like a certain kind of ‘typical’ Englishman, fond of killing animals. ‘He killed many snakes on Jura’, where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘and if witnesses are to be believed, he seemed to kill them with excessive brutality and some pleasure in that brutality. He also shot and fished and hunted.’[12] This is the pragmatism of someone used to living among animals with compassion but not sentiment. He could write as easily, and with tenderness, about finding a dead rabbit in a lane, ‘newly killed, with the back of its neck torn out & backbone exposed’, as he could about shooting ‘a very young rabbit in the garden’ and throwing its corpse into a trench, from where it disappeared overnight. ‘Presumably cats’, he adds.[13]

Animal Farm turns all of this animal knowledge and experience into a narrative device. ‘Children’s literature’, writes Jonathan Bate, ‘frequently imagines animals behaving like humans, whereas adult literature frequently shows humans behaving like animals.’[14] Animal Farm has it both ways. The pigs on Manor Farm, eventually renamed as Animal Farm before being rechristened as Manor Farm, increasingly behave like the humans they initially oppose (or seem to oppose), whereas the humans—Mr Jones and his associates—frequently act animalistically in the sense that they seem to abandon human niceties in favour of the bestial. Here we get a strong deployment, through metaphor, of the idea that naming or seeing someone as a beast means naming or seeing them, humiliatingly, as an animal. Two interesting dimensions of the novella come to the fore here. The first is that it combines emphases: it’s a children’s book in the guise of something mature, grown-up, and political; a book for adults written in a childish mode. Orwell described it to his literary agent, Leonard Moore, as ‘a fairy story’ that was ‘also a political allegory’.[15] The second is that Animal Farm signals from the outset its most famous thought, which is that on Manor Farm there is no choice between animal and human—no man or farm, in other words—only animal and human together, throughout. There is no either/or scenario: only the inexorable, inevitable return of the ‘reign’ (AF, p. 13) of the human tyrant in beastly disguise.

Orwell’s chief means of signalling this inexorable equivalence of man and beast is the allegorical form of the beast fable itself. Long before the creatures on the farm look ‘from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again’, finding it ‘impossible to say which was which’ (AF, p. 93), Animal Farm has already signalled at a certain level the impossibility of differentiating between man and beast more generally. Old Major, quote-unquote, ‘is’ a combination of Marx and Lenin; Napoleon, quote-unquote, ‘is’ Stalin; Snowball, quote-unquote, ‘is’ Trotsky; Moses the raven ‘is’ the Russian Orthodox Church; Boxer ‘is’ the proletariat, and all the rest of it. I put all these ‘is’s in scarequotes because the allegorical structure of Animal Farm demands it. At the level of the story ‘itself’, Animal Farm is a fantasy about a group of animals on a farm obtaining their freedom from overlords whose tyranny gradually comes back into the very structures of their so-called ‘liberty’. Yet the political allegory from which the story of Animal Farm is inseparable means that this story operates at multiple levels simultaneously. It tells a story in a fantastical mode that can be traced back to such precedents as Aesop’s fables and possibly even to The Wind in the Willows (1908).[16] It articulates Orwell’s criticisms of Stalinist Communism via the beast-fable structure, ‘a satiric form’, Valerie Meyers reminds us, ‘in which animals are used to represent human vice and folly.’[17] And as Orwell himself pointed out, it also has ‘a wider application’ to the question of revolution more broadly, an applicability that allows for very different constituencies of interest to appreciate its tale of rebellion ‘gone wrong’.[18]

At this point I want to focus on how Animal Farm develops the equivalence between animal and men on its own terms, rather than in the terms of the allegory it sustains. Beasts are men, in Animal Farm, and men are beasts. The connection and sameness between the two is there not only at the end of the book, when the animals can’t tell the difference between the pigs and the other assembled farmers, but also in the telling of the story as a whole, which is filled with subtle indications of man’s closeness to the animals and the animals’ closeness to man. We might consider the opening of the novella, which runs as follows:

Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring. (AF, p. 1)

Although a first-time reader wouldn’t know it, already we have anticipations here of how things are going to go. Jones’s beer habit eventually returns in the drinking habits of the pigs, who after a certain amount of time start giving themselves a daily ration of beer (AF, p. 74), alongside their fondness for whisky (AF, pp. 70, 82). Jones’s drunkenness, which eventually leads to him dying in a home for inebriates in another part of England (AF, p. 83), is mirrored in the pigs’ insobriety, which leads Squealer to announce that Napoleon, suffering from a hangover, is in fact ‘dying’ (AF, p. 70).

To say all this is to say little more than the fact that Animal Farm is based on a premise of sameness: the end of Mr Jones’s tyranny is merely the beginning of another, very similar tyranny in changed outward form. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of skill in the carrying through of the sameness. The famous list of the seven commandments that is gradually travestied until all that remains is all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others (AF, p. 88) reflects, numerically, the Shakespearean idea of the seven ages of man, and evokes a process of turning into man—the seven ages of becoming like men. In becoming like men, the pigs gradually undermine Old Major’s opposition to a farm-bound life that is ‘miserable, laborious and short’ (AF, p. 3). He notes that when an animal is no longer useful it will be ‘slaughtered with hideous cruelty’ (AF, p. 3) by Mr Jones, adding: ‘no animal escapes the cruel knife in the end’ (AF, p. 5). And so it proves with poor old Boxer, who is taken off in old age and sold to a horse slaughterer and glue boiler (AF, pp. 79-80). In among all this is the figure of the gloriously self-serving cat, whose playing of both sides in the vote as to whether rats are comrades (AF, p. 6) reveals not only a cattish self-interestedness but also the fluidity of oppositions in a scenario that persistently questions the ease with which animals can be told apart from men, and vice versa.

The farmers, and the wider world of humankind they represent, are carefully shown to be characterized by different kinds of animalistic traits. The pub in Willingdon in which Mr Jones drowns his sorrows, for example, is called the Red Lion, and the names of the other farms close by to Animal Farm similarly announce themselves in terms of animalistic echo and resemblance: Foxwood and Pinchfield (see AF, p. 24). Mr Whymper, the solicitor who acts as the intermediary between Animal Farm and the outside world, has a surname that evokes the sounds made at various points in the story by the whimpering pigs.[19] He also has ‘whiskers’ (AF, p. 43). Mr Jones tends to lounge about in a windsor chair in his kitchen, but he also owns a ‘horsehair sofa’ (AF, p. 14), which yet again signals the inter-involvement of human and animal phenomena. The same point, this time in reverse, might be made about Mollie’s decision to take some blue ribbon from Mrs Jones’s dressing-table (AF, p. 14). Old Major’s former name, Willingdon Beauty (AF, p. 1), signals the presence of the human realm (i.e. Willingdon, where Mr Jones spends so much time in a drunken stupor) in farm and far-sighted prophet alike. Old Major, theorist of the revolution, evokes in the very ancestry of his name the inevitability of Animalism turning into just another expression of ‘tyrannical human beings’ (AF, p. 86) and their cruelties.

Napoleon’s name indicates a humanlike ancestry along with a hidden propensity for perverting the course of revolution. Sarah Cole has argued that Orwell’s choice of the name ‘Napoleon’ for chief pig shows that he was ‘drawn to the charismatic figure of an earlier epoch’, who he saw as ‘entirely willing to sacrifice the good of the community […] for [his] own gratification.’[20] Snowball is put in charge of defensive operations when Jones and his associates try to recapture the farm, having ‘studied an old book of Julius Caesar’s campaigns which he had found in the farmhouse’ (AF, p. 26). This doesn’t save him from being betrayed by Napoleon, who increasingly takes on the forms and habits of the human masters whose yoke he helped to overthrow. The puppies he trains up as his personal guards wag ‘their tails to him in the same way as the other dogs had been used to do to Mr Jones (AF, p. 35), and when they slaughter a group of supposedly disloyal animals for being ‘secretly in touch with Snowball ever since his expulsion’ (AF, pp. 54-5), the air smells thickly of ‘blood, which had been unknown’ on Animal Farm ‘since the expulsion of Jones’ (AF, p. 55). Mr Jones’s violent tendencies recur in Napoleon, who comes close to impersonating his human master when he wears one of his old bowler hats (AF, p. 70)—a detail that anticipates the ‘low-crowned bowler hat’ (AF, p. 79) worn by Alfred Simmonds, who takes Boxer away to his death. There is very little in Napoleon’s characterization, in other words, that doesn’t signify continually his closeness to the human world he seemed originally to scorn.

Animalism, according to Old Major, strives for decency, freedom, and justice, but it ends, under the pigs’ control, in blood and ‘terror’ (AF, p. 58). ‘All men are enemies’ and all ‘animals are comrades’ (AF, p. 6), Major insists, but this arrangement lasts only until it works against the pigs’ designs. When Napoleon announces that the animals’ ‘rather foolish custom of addressing one another as “Comrade”’ is to be ‘suppressed’ (AF, p. 91), we know that the revolution is well and truly over. An earlier sign of the inevitability of this decision comes in the form of the pigeons dropping their ‘former slogan of “Death to Humanity” in favour of “Death to Frederick”’ (AF, p. 63), thereby repurposing Old Major’s anti-human politics towards a more focused strategy of opposing one farmer over another (as opposed to all farmers in all cases). The gesture makes room for the pigs’ increasingly close dealings with their human neighbours, whom as we’ve seen they come to resemble so exactly that the animals are unable to tell them apart. The animals take over Manor Farm and make it run ‘like clockwork’ (AF, p. 18), but this—a common motif in dystopian writing throughout the twentieth century—only sets the clock ticking for an ever more mechanical way of life. In time, Animal Farm comes to resemble a slave state (AF, pp. 38, 76), the pigs lording it over their fellow creatures with all the privileges that come from tyrannical ‘superintendence’ (AF, p. 40). They are the ‘brains’ (AF, p. 44) of the farm, but they’re also its oppressors.[21] Far from ending the tyranny of ‘worthless parasitical human beings’ (AF, p. 18), they simply reintroduce their parasitism in another guise.

All of this carries with it a great deal of imaginative strength and persuasiveness. In its own terms, Animal Farm remains one of our most powerful fables warning of the ease with which power corrupts, and of how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Its longevity stems, I think, from the straightforwardness of the premise, which Orwell explained in his ‘Preface’ to the Ukrainian edition of the book as follows:

On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages. However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse 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 the animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. (AF, p. 112)

A boy whipping a horse. A horse unaware of the ease with which it could stop the whipping. The possibility that the horse might one day become aware of its strength, and rise up against its master. Animal Farm builds its own strongly imagined mythic structure out of a strongly felt, anti-mythic premise.

In his 1966 ‘Foreword’ to the second edition of the fantasy novel-sequence The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), J. R. R. Tolkien makes a very clear distinction between allegory and what he calls ‘applicability’. His work, as he puts it, ‘is neither allegorical nor topical’—neither freighted with a hidden message nor meant to reflect, in any direct sense, the concerns of its immediate historical context.[22] It’s not, Tolkien stressed, a work ‘about’ the Second World War:

It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels.[23]

Tolkien then insists that he ‘cordially dislike[s] allegory in all its manifestations’, preferring ‘history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.’ As he puts it: ‘I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.’[24] So The Lord of the Rings is not, to quote Orwell out of context in Homage to Catalonia, an ‘allegorical picture of war’.[25] It’s more accurate to think of The Lord of the Rings as a picture of war in the terms it sets up for itself—Sauron against the free peoples of Middle Earth—and as a picture that can be related to, but is not in any simple sense derived point-for-point from, the world war of 1939 to 1945.

Animal Farm occupies a more muddied space, combining allegory with applicability, schematism with looseness. It tends to be thought of as a ‘precise allegory’, to use Dorian Lynskey’s phrasing, ‘where every element slots into the real world with a neat click’, but it’s also clearly a book that uses the imprecise formula of applicability to investigate the vulnerability of citizens in power structures designed to speak in their interest even as they work against them in practice.[26] The beastliness of men and the humanlike failings of beasts is a neatly greyed and greying opposition through which to investigate such matters, and Orwell exploited it to the full. Animal Farm deals with questions about political authority, truth, and propaganda against the backdrop of Soviet Russia, but it does this through the innocent guise of a fairy tale. In doing so, it reiterates what every child knows, or suspects—namely, that fairy tales aren’t so innocent, that they reveal scary truths about the world, and about how the child’s protections against an unsympathetic universe out to convince us that it’s on our side can be paper-thin. It remains Orwell’s most animal-focused work. At the same time, in its very focus on animals, it emphasizes the ease with which human civility can be put under pressure, and so easily fail.

[1] http://shakespeare.mit.edu/measure/measure.3.1.html

[2] http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/full.html

[3] George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011), p. 38.

[4] Douglas Kerr, ‘Orwell, Animals, and the East’, Essays in Criticism, 49.3 (1999), pp. 234-55, at p. 235.

[5] Orwell, Burmese Days, p. 133.

[6] Douglas Kerr, George Orwell, Writers and their Work Series (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003), p. 18.

[7] George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934), ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. xxv.

[8] Margaret Drabble, ‘Of Beasts and Men: Orwell on Beastliness’, in Abbott Gleason, Jack Goldsmith, and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds), On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 38-48, at p. 39.

[9] See George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), ed. Peter Davison and introd. Julian Symons (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 14, 32, 36, 43, 77, 89, 112, 181.

[10] https://zacharyleven.medium.com/george-orwells-beastly-obsession-505e785a8d27

[11] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/

[12] Drabble, ‘Of Beasts and Men’, p. 41.

[13] George Orwell, Diaries, ed. Peter Davison and introd. Christopher Hitchens (New York and London: Liveright, 2009), pp. 447, 491.

[14] Jonathan Bate, English Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 9.

[15] George Orwell, The Complete Works—Volume 16: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth, 1943-1944, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, revised edition (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), p. 59.

[16] For the link between Animal Farm and The Wind in the Willows, see Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Life and Art (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 106-13.

[17] Valerie Meyers, George Orwell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 103-4.

[18] George Orwell, The Complete Works—Volume 18: Smothered under Journalism, 1946, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, revised edition (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), p. 507.

[19] Here I have in mind Snowball whimpering in excitement as he plans the construction of the windmill (AF, p. 32); Napoleon whimpering at Snowball just before he expels him from the farm (AF, p. 34); and Napoleon, again, whimpering an order to his dogs to drag a group of traitorous pigs by the ear to his feet (AF, p. 54).

[20] Sarah Cole, ‘Wells, Orwell, and the Dictator’, in Nathan Waddell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 109-22, at p. 117.

[21] Orwell tended to use this image of ‘brains’ directing society in his work (e.g. in Nineteen Eighty-Four) to evoke the thought of hidden agencies controlling things from elsewhere.

[22] J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Foreword’, The Lord of the Rings, illustrated by Alan Lee (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 9-12, at p. 10.

[23] Ibid., p. 11.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p. 152.

[26] Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (London: Picador, 2019), p. xviii.