Summer Reading Assignment - Mrs. Boggio's English Page



Summer Reading Assignment 2017/2018

Over the summer students in Advanced Placement Literature must read Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God and George Orwell’s, Animal Farm.

NOTE: FAILURE TO COMPLETE THESE ASSIGNMENTS WILL RESULT IN YOUR REMOVAL FROM THE CLASS.

REQUIRED READS

• Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston

• Animal Farm George Orwell

SUGGESTED READ

• The Odyssey Homer

For each of the two pieces of reading students must write a critical analysis.

The essays may be based on the criticism packet provided at the end of the year. Each essay should be between 3 and 5 pages long, have a “Works Cited” page (completed correctly), be double spaced, 12 point font, and use at least 3 authored sources other than the book, (Cliffs Notes, Sparknotes, Classicnotes, student papers are not allowed). I HAVE ATTACHED ONE SOURCE FOR EACH PAPER SO THAT YOU MAY SEE WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE. YOU MAY USE THEM FOR YOUR PAPERS. The essay must also use current MLA guide lines, which you can find at, mla.html. Students who have questions may email me this summer at jboggio@

I. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Write a critical analysis based on social or historical criticism. This essay is due Friday, September 8, 2017 and is worth fifty points. Follow above guidelines.

II. Animal Farm. Write a critical analysis using any of criticisms from the packet. (Again, I suggest looking at historical or social criticism, as Animal Farm connects directly with the Russian Revolution. This essay is due Friday, September 22, 2017 and is worth fifty points. Follow the above guidelines

Note: Please, do not wrap yourself up in summary; it is not needed, just analyze and get right to your point.

MLA RESEARCH/INFORMATION:

• MLA will give you some information on this web site below:



• Good book purchase = MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

GOOD RESEARCH SITE:

• Go to my Weebly page; boggioenglish. and go to the link under AP, titled, “Find Criticism for your paper” and follow the directions. This is the BEST source I have found to date. Type in topic or book and you will find VALID/GOOD sources

SPECIFIC QUESTIONS OR HELP:

• Students who have questions may email me this summer at jboggio@. (Attach your paper for specific help.)

[pic]Resistance, Rebirth, and Renewal in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Date: 2009

On Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Author: Deborah James

From: Rebirth and Renewal, Bloom's Literary Themes.

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These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now the sun and the bossman were gone so the skins felt powerful and human. (1)

Zora Neale Hurston's writing—anthropological and literary—aimed at giving voice to a community which society often rendered as "tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences." Within her texts, African Americans, particularly ordinary working people, live and breathe. That gift of life in her texts is perhaps her most important contribution to American letters. And nowhere is that talent displayed more ably, more poetically, than in her most celebrated work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. While its major focus is the life of its main character, Janie, it also brings to life again a community that is vital despite the enforced enclosure of race. Within the communities she constructs, African Americans have agency; they have lives full of laughter, work, envy, love, resentment, sometimes violence, pride, curiosity—a whole range of human activity and concerns. They also have a lively, expressive language augmented by Hurston's own gifts of poetic expression. This novel demonstrates how people, collectively and individually, create their lives—resisting external categories and achieving renewal. Janie, the protagonist of the novel, is Hurston's most significant portrait of an individual who achieves renewal through her ability to resist the definitions of others and her openness to the sometimes-painful process of rebirth.

Since its reappearance on the American literary landscape in the 1970s, critics and readers of Their Eyes Were Watching God agree that the novel chronicles Janie's self-discovery. She has several key relationships within the story—first with her grandmother, the other three with each of the men she marries. Discussions of the text identify Janie's marriages as crucial junctures for her—the moments when her discoveries about herself are most apparent and intense. From this vantage point, her most important lessons would seem to be lessons about love—understanding what love is not through her first two marriages, initially to Logan Kellicks, then to Joe Starks (or Jody as Janie called him). Janie finally learns what love is during her last relationship with Tea Cake (Vergible Woods). If, however, this is the only concern of the novel, all that it offers its readers, it would have ceased to be of critical interest some time ago. In fact, some early reviewers, Richard Wright and Sterling Brown for example, dismissed her tale as worthless because it seemed to ignore the political and social realities of the times and to be limited to only these domestic concerns. What these readers missed was Hurston's implicit challenge to the stereotype of the day that said black people were incapable of true romance because, as a race, they were limited in human feelings and understanding. Fortunately, this issue has virtually vanished for contemporary readers.

But there is more to the novel than this exploration of romantic love. As eminent African American literary critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates observes, a wide range of critics continue to discover new aspects of the novel that they contemplate and discuss with delight if not always in agreement (Gates, Their Eyes 164). For example, while most contemporary readers agree that Janie does gain valuable knowledge about the nature of love through her experiences with the men in her life, some critics, such as Mary Helen Washington (Washington, "I Love …") argue that Janie's self-discoveries are limited by her relationships with men. While Janie's relationships provide experiences through which she learns and grows, they are not the full measure of that growth. Janie's discoveries result in renewal because of everything she learns about life and the courage with which she seeks to live it on her own terms. On her return to Eatonville, she shares her tale and her hard-won understanding with her best friend, Pheoby.

It's a known fact Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there.

Yo' papa and yo' mama and nobody else can't tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves." (192)

Through her experiences, Janie discovers that in order to achieve real knowledge she must resist external limitations and expectations, becoming a full participant in shaping her own life. Thus she is reborn as a whole person.

Early on, Janie demonstrates her resistance to external definition in the episode where she fails to recognize herself in a photograph as the one black child among the other children who live on the estate. Although that failure has some troubling connotations (i.e., is Hurston suggesting some negative response to being identified as black?), it actually signals her resistance to the stigma associated with the racial stereotypes of the day. As she relays this incident to Pheoby, she explains her response in terms of the freedom and equality she experienced as a child and how it differed from the typical experience of blacks in the pre-civil rights era. Her surprise about her racial identity does not seem linked to any personal negative feelings about it. Rather, as the rest of the novel attests, it indicates the difference between how Janie thinks of herself (not limited in terms of race and class) and how other people see her and expect her to respond. Janie's resistance to the facts of her poverty and race, to what those should mean in terms of her feelings about her "place," forecast her reaction to her grandmother's efforts to provide security for her by way of marriage. From the beginning, Janie's judgments and desires are shaped by her own feelings about the circumstances of her life rather than by others' expectations. This leads to a deep rift between Janie and her grandmother.

When Nanny observes Janie's sexual awakening (kissing Johnny Taylor across the fence), she is catapulted into action for Janie's safety. Janie, however, understands neither how she is endangered nor what the nature of the danger is. Everything seems to be happening too abruptly. Like a dreamer awakening, Janie is temporarily blinded by the glories of a new world, in which sensuality, sexuality, and love seem to equal marriage. But Nanny, born into slavery, victim of her master's lust and her mistress's rage, knows how vulnerable Janie is from this moment on. She argues that Janie must have the protection of marriage and the security of possessions to prevent what Nanny believes will otherwise be her inevitable fate.

Ah don't want yo' feathers always crumpled by folks throwin' things in yo' face. And Ah can't die easy thinkin' maybe de menfolks white or black is makin' a spit cup outa' you … (20).

These terrors have no reality for Janie though. In her mind, Nanny has transformed almost unaccountably into someone forcing Janie to submit to her will against Janie's own instincts. And while she tries to accept Nanny's vision as her own, it does not fit. But Nanny does not comprehend Janie's view, dismissing it as insubstantial and naïve. Janie longs for "things sweet wid mah marriage …" (24). Nanny instead insists that marriage to Logan Kellicks is the perfect protection. He is an older man—settled, a widow, and, most importantly, a landowner (sixty acres). While Nanny's fears for Janie are real and her efforts to provide for her are loving, her refusal to take into account Janie's feelings confuses and angers Janie. In Janie's view, her marriage to Kellicks diverts her from her own fledgling attempt to explore her world and herself. In marrying Logan, Janie allows her life to be dictated by Nanny's view, with negative consequences. Later in life Janie even decides that,

She hated her grandmother and had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity. She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people…. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things (89).

To Janie, Nanny's well-intentioned protection, in fact, aborts her first attempts to achieve womanhood.

While Janie's resistance to Nanny's plan for her life has been almost entirely intuitive (she has little experience on which to base her fears), in her union with Logan, she begins to acquire lived experience on which to base her growing understanding. First, however, she must resist Logan Kellicks himself, the next threat to her development.

Like Nanny, Logan tries to impose his view of what she should be on Janie. Though he initially seems smitten with her (i.e., chopping wood for her, etc.), when she fails to immediately reciprocate, he becomes angry. He thinks she should be grateful that he has rescued her from what he sees as the humiliation of her poverty. When she refuses to behave with gratitude, he begins to demand servitude, first demanding that she chop her own wood, then purchasing a mule specifically for her to help him plow the field. Ironically, this is the fate that Nanny thinks she has protected Janie from.

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly…. She knew things nobody had ever told her…. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked down the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Jamie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman. (25)

Janie begins to understand through her own experience with Logan what she does not want. Moreover, she has proof that she should follow her own instincts, so when Joe Starks arrives, representing the horizons she wants to explore, it takes very little time for her to decide to leave Logan. Thus she embarks on her first reinvention of herself. But she does not simply leave Logan to attach herself to Joe. In fact, the morning she walks off, she is poised on the brink of self-discovery: "A feeling of sudden newness and change came over her…. Even if Joe was not there waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good." (32)

Joe's arrival has reawakened Janie's previous yearnings, especially her desire for a relationship in which she can know and be known more fully. Once again she is disappointed. Like Nanny and Logan, Joe is intent on Janie enacting the role he has assigned her. He is unwilling to consider her concerns or feelings in any real way. He is convinced that he knows best. Janie must again resist someone else's idea of who she should be in order to derive a clearer understanding of who she is.

In fact, Janie's most sustained resistance occurs within the boundaries of her marriage to Joe. In the beginning, she thinks she has found a partner with whom to share her exploration of the world. Joe Starks is a man with a vision; he is heading to a black town in its infancy to be part of its growth and development from the ground up, and he is taking Janie with him. But Joe believes he must tell her what she should think, what she should feel despite Janie's assertions that women think too. In a heated exchange, he tells her that women "just thinks they's thinking." (71) Janie retreats into silence—but silent resistance rather than submission.

She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody [Joe] know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them…. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them. (72)

So Janie's first response to Joe's domination is to preserve her true self from him in silence. Her outside self does what Joe demands, while her inside self remains hidden from him. It is during this sustained silence that she begins to observe more carefully the contrast between this outside, which conforms in some measure to expectation, and the inside, which harbors her real feelings. In this silence, the gap between the two states of being grows.

But such a split cannot be maintained forever. One day, when Joe derides her in front of the usual crowd in the store, something snaps. She retaliates by scorning him publicly, describing his impotence: "When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life" (79). Janie moves from passive resistance to open rebellion, using the voice she has discovered to devastating effect. But even when Joe faces death, he will not hear Janie.

"Listen, Jody, you ain't de Jody ah run off down de road wid. You'se whut's left after he died. Ah run off tuh keep house wid you in uh wonderful way. But you wasn't satisfied wid me de way Ah was. Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me."

"Shut up. Ah wish thunder and lightnin' would kill you" (86).

Though her attempts at reconciliation fail, she has her say. More than that, though, in the aftermath of Joe's death, she once again takes stock. Janie achieves one level of self-knowledge when she left Logan. At Joe's death, she gains another. The young girl is now completely gone, replaced by a handsome, confident woman, able to present her "starched and ironed face, forming it into just what people wanted to see" (87). This mask becomes a protective cover while a new Janie develops within this cocoon.

The community sees from her what it expects to see, while Janie enjoys her first real freedom. She begins this process of renewal by first divesting herself of the head rags that symbolized Joe's domination. But she continues by questioning herself deeply. She asks herself what she really wants, then listens in stillness for the answer. It is in this process that she discovers her antipathy toward Nanny. In this stillness, she discovers "… a jewel down inside herself" seeking its mate in some undiscovered other (90). In this state of contemplation, Janie also discovers how much she enjoys her own freedom. Although the first two relationships in her life had looked like freedom, each became a different kind of bondage. So Janie is very cautious about avoiding that mistake again. She is also coming to the end of her willingness to even provide the outside demanded by others. When Pheoby presses her to consider remarrying, Janie responds:

    "Tain't dat Ah worries over Joe's death, Pheoby. Ah jus' loves dis freedom."

"Sh-sh-sh! Don't let nobody hear you say dat Janie. Folks will say you ain't sorry he's gone.

    "Let 'em say whut dey wants tuh, Phoeby. To my thinking mourning oughtn't tuh last no longer than grief" (93).

Thus between Jody's death and her next relationship, Janie emerges as a new woman, ready and able to make her own decisions about her life. She knows the consequences of allowing other people to dictate the terms of one's own life. It is in that state of readiness that she has her most life-altering encounter. She meets Tea Cake, her mentor and the other whose internal jewel matches hers.

From the beginning, Janie's relationship with Tea Cake is unlike the previous ones. This relationship is marked by play, a level of mutual honesty and self-disclosure that Janie's previous relationships lacked. Though she's cautious about her new freedom, her banter with him during their first meeting is easy and relaxed. It is Janie who sets the boundaries of their relationship early on. She decides when and where she engages with him. Even her efforts to avoid the eyes of the town at first give way very soon to their evolving relationship. Janie's anxiety that he is a young man out to make a fool of her is quelled by Tea Cake's accurate reading of her fear. He sets out then to prove that his interest in her is genuine and not limited to either property or sex.

A turning point in their relationship comes after he has returned to her after having disappeared earlier with the two hundred dollars she had hidden as security in case he abandoned her on the road. Upon his return, he describes to her in detail what he has done with the money; she asks why he did not take her with him. Like Logan, but especially like Joe, he voices the idea that she is too refined to be exposed to low life. Not only does she resist this view openly, but she also tells him that from that moment on she expects to "partake wid everything…." (124). Tea Cake accepts this idea and tells her, "Honey since you loose me and gimme privilege tuh tell yuh about mahself, Ah'll tell yuh …" (125). Thus Tea Cake begins his role as guide for Janie, sharing all the dimensions of his life with her and thus inviting her to do the same. Janie participates in everything as much as she chooses to. Tea Cake does ask her to do things for him: to go with him "on the muck" (work in the Florida Everglades), to live on only what he can provide for them, to work side by side with him in the fields. The difference is that he invites her into his life, the better to know him. In fact, he presents the idea of working the fields together as a way for them to spend even more time together. Janie accepts. When Mrs. Turner befriends Janie only to try to turn her against Tea Cake, he asks Janie to keep her away from the house, but he does not blame her when she is not completely able to avoid the association. It is a sign of the severity of his illness toward the end of the novel when he demands that she stay in his sight and begins to accuse her of disloyalty.

With Tea Cake Janie tries to inhabit a new identity, one not limited by class or external expectations. In fact, at one point she thinks,

… of the old days in the big white house and the store and laugh(ed) to herself. What if Eatonville could see her now in her blue denim overalls and heavy shoes? The crowd of people around her and a dice game on her floor! She was sorry for her friends back there and scornful of the others. The men held big arguments here like they used to do on the store porch. Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some if she wanted to. She got so she could tell big stories herself from listening to the rest (134).

She learns other skills besides—she can fish and hunt and shoot. She is also a good cook. But most of all, she feels free to be herself—without constraint, without pretense.

Her relationship to Tea Cake can be said to be problematic, especially to the contemporary eye. Tea Cake "slaps her around" when he finds out that Mrs. Turner is trying to set Janie up with her brother. He tells the other men that he does this not because of Janie's behavior but to show Mrs. Turner that he controls his home. So even within this love match, Janie is not altogether free of the violence and controlling behavior that some men consider their right where women are concerned. Yet, on the muck, she is free to work or not, to dance, laugh, fight, cry, think, make love—to give expression to a full range of emotions. This freedom stems from Janie's sense of self-sufficiency, from her confidence in her ability to take care of herself. She still has the home and store that Joe's death has left her and money in the bank. She returns to this place readily after losing Tea Cake. But in her life with him she experiences a sense of completion, of being deeply loved and of loving deeply.

At the end of the day, however, Janie has only herself and her hard-won knowledge to rely on. In the last view of Janie that Hurston provides, she is again taking stock. But this time when she looks inside, she thinks, "Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes. She called in her soul to come and see" (193). Janie is unafraid of the journey. She knows who she is now for sure.

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[pic]Further Information

Works Cited and Selected Critical Readings

Gates, Henry Louis. "Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston and the Speakerly Text." Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993. 154–203.

–––––––. "Zora Neale Hurston: 'A Negro Way of Saying.'" Afterword. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. 195–205.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998.

Wall, Cheryl A. "Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words." Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993.

Washington, Mary Helen. "Introduction." Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. ix–xvii.

–––––––. "'I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands': Emergent Female Hero." Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds. New York: Amistad Literary Series, 1993.

James, Deborah. "Resistance, Rebirth, and Renewal in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." In Bloom, Harold, ed. Rebirth and Renewal, Bloom's Literary Themes. New York: Chelsea Publishing House, 2009. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 29 May 2015. .

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Animal Farm: An Allegory of Revolution

Date: 1991

On Animal Farm by George Orwell

Author: Valerie Meyers

From: Animal Farm, New Edition, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations.

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So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

                                   —Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson

In spite of Orwell's well-known opposition to continued British rule in India (where Burmese Days was banned) he was hired in August 1941 to produce programmes for the Indian section of the BBC's Eastern Service, to counter Japanese and German radio propaganda. Two million Indian volunteer troops were fighting on the British side, and the BBC's task was to maintain Indian support. For more than two years Orwell prepared weekly news bulletins, commissioned cultural talks and discussions, adapted stories, wrote dialogues and reviews. Because paper was in short supply, newspapers and magazines, the outlets for Orwell's work, were very restricted. Broadcasting allowed him to keep up his political comment and literary journalism. W. J. West has convincingly suggested that Orwell's experience in radio adaptation and in condensing, simplifying and arranging information for propaganda purposes largely accounts for the success of Animal Farm—its speed of composition (Orwell completed it in three months, after leaving the BBC in November 1943), its clarity and conciseness, its universality of appeal, its radically different form from any of Orwell's previous work.49

'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' (CEJL, 1.7). In his preface to the Ukrainian edition, published in 1947, Orwell said that he wanted to write the book in a simple language because he wanted to tell ordinary English people, who had enjoyed a tradition of justice and liberty for centuries, what a totalitarian system was like. His experience in Spain had shown him 'how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries' and he wrote the book to destroy the 'Soviet myth' that Russia was a truly socialist society (CEJL, 3.404).

In the 1930s European intellectuals idealised the Soviet Union. Even E. M. Forster, a relatively non-political writer, commented in an essay of 1934, 'no political creed except communism offers an intelligent man any hope'.50 Throughout the 1930s Orwell had been sceptical about the Soviet version of current events in Russia; in Spain he saw Spanish Communists, directed by Moscow, betray their allies. In the late 1930s news reached the West of the infamous Purge Trials, which took the lives of three million people and sent countless others to forced labour camps in order to make Stalin's power absolute. In 1939 Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, which allowed the Germans to overrun Poland and Czechoslovakia. Orwell's indignant reaction to these events provoked him to write this powerful pamphlet.

The Genre of Animal Farm

Orwell particularly valued the vigorous, colourful and concrete style of pamphlets and wanted to revive the genre. Animal Farm was his contribution to the English tradition of Utopian pamphlets, which originated in Thomas More's Utopia (1516). Like Utopia, Animal Farm is brief, light and witty, but has a serious purpose. More's pamphlet attacked the monarch's excessive power and the cruel dispossession of tenant-farmers by the lords who enclosed lands for sheep-grazing; Orwell's attacks the injustice of the Soviet regime and seeks to correct Western misconceptions about Soviet Communism.

More invented the device of satirising contemporary society by contrasting it with a traveller's account of a distant country. His narrator talks to Raphael Hythloday, who has just returned from Utopia (a name derived from the Greek, meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'). In contrast to the majority of Englishmen, who suffer poverty and constant war, the Utopians are rational and kind, own everything in common and share everything equally. War, envy, greed and pursuit of personal riches or power are unknown.

More's narrator remarks sceptically that he 'cannot conceive of authority among men that are equal to one another in all things'.51 He cannot imagine a world where no one has greater status or wealth than anyone else. More raised the fundamental question, which Orwell took up centuries later, of whether it is possible for men to live together fairly, justly and equally. More's answer is ethical: that there is no point in changing our social system unless we change our morality; his pamphlet urges us to take responsibility for improving our society. While More's Utopia is totally imaginary, Orwell's Animal Farm is based on the first thirty years of the Soviet Union, a real society pursuing the ideal of equality. His book argues that this kind of society hasn't worked, and couldn't.

Orwell said that Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) 'has meant more to me than any other book ever written'.52 Far longer and more complex than Utopia, it uses the same device of a traveller's tales to attack contemporary society, but the various places Gulliver visits are satiric renderings of aspects of English society. Orwell's Animal Farm, like Swift's Lilliput and Blefuscu, is a coded satiric portrait of a real society, an anti-utopia which, by castigating real evils, suggests what society ought to be like.

Orwell probably took a hint from the final part of Gulliver's Travels, Book IV, where Gulliver encounters a society formed by a superior species of horse, the Houyhnhnms, who are able to talk and conduct their lives rationally (in contrast to the savage Yahoos nearby, who, to his horror, turn out to be ape-like humans). This comparison between men and animals, in which animals are superior, may have suggested the form of Orwell's pamphlet. Orwell was also familiar with Wells's Island of Dr Moreau, a science-fiction novel about a doctor who turns animals into men. But this novel uses the natural goodness of animals as a contrast to the evil of modern scientific man. Unlike Swift and Wells, Orwell uses animals to symbolise human characters.

The Political Allegory

Orwell's critique of Soviet Communism is a beast-fable, a satiric form in which animals are used to represent human vice and folly. Chaucer's 'Nun's Priest's Tale', one of the Canterbury Tales, is an early example in English. On one level Chaucer's tale is a comic farmyard tale of a proud cock, Chanticleer, who falls prey to the fox and manages to escape; on another it is a witty and learned essay on the significance of dreams; on another, and more serious, level it is an allegory of the Fall of Man, in which Chanticleer represents Adam being tempted by the Devil. 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 events and characters in Russian history since 1917,53 in which 'the interplay between surface action and inner meaning is everything'.54 Orwell's deeper purpose is to teach a political lesson.

As he noted in his Ukrainian preface, Orwell used actual historical events to construct his story, but rearranged them to fit his plot. Manor Farm is Russia, Mr Jones the Tsar, the pigs the Bolsheviks who led the revolution. The humans represent the ruling class, the animals the workers and peasants. Old Major, the white boar who inspires the rebellion in the first chapter, stands for a combination of Marx, the chief theorist, and Lenin, the actual leader. Orwell makes Old Major a character whose motives are pure and idealistic, to emphasise the positive goals of the revolution, and makes him die before the rebellion itself. In actuality Lenin died in 1924, well after the revolution. Lenin himself set up the machinery of political terror which Stalin took over. The power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky (which Orwell satirises in chapter 5) happened after Lenin's death, not immediately after the revolution, as Orwell's account suggests.

The Communist Manifesto (1848) of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided a theoretical basis for the revolutionary movements springing up in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Marx interpreted all history as the history of class struggle, arguing that the capitalist classes, or bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production, are inevitably opposed to the interests of the wage-earning labourers, or proletariat, whom they exploit. This eternal conflict can only be resolved by revolution, when workers take over the means of production, share the fruits of their labours equally, and set up 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'. Marx's ideal was an international brotherhood of workers (for he believed that the interests of the working classes of all nations would unite them, causing them to cross barriers of race and culture, against the common enemy) and a future classless society. Old Major's speech in the first chapter parodies the ideas of the Communist Manifesto. He says: 'Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own.' Their goal should be the 'overthrow of the human race': in the coming struggle 'All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.' In chapter 3 'everyone worked according to his capacity', an echo of the Marxist slogan, 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.'

Each animal stands for a precise figure or representative type. The pigs, who can read and write and organise, are the Bolshevik intellectuals who came to dominate the vast Soviet bureaucracy. 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 (special food, shorter working hours), but also suffer the consequences of questioning Napoleon's policies.

The other animals represent various types of common people. Boxer the carthorse (whose name suggests the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, when 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, 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; 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' 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 (or 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 party 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. The poem in praise of Napoleon imitates the sycophantic verses and the mass of paintings and sculptures turned out to glorify Stalin. In chapter 8, Squealer's presentation of impressive figures to show that food production had gone up, and the thin layer of grain sprinkled over the sacks to deceive Whymper, the agent, correspond to the well-known practice in totalitarian regimes of falsifying figures to project a positive image abroad.

Each event of the story has a historical parallel. The Rebellion in chapter 2 is the October 1917 Revolution, the Battle of the Cowshed in chapter 4 the subsequent Civil War. Mr Jones and the farmers represent the loyalist Russians and foreign forces who 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, 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 Rapallo with Germany. Orwell emphasises Napoleon's decision to trade because it breaks the First Commandment, that 'whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy'. Official Soviet policy was hostile to Germany, a militaristic, capitalist nation, but the Treaty revealed that the Communist regime had been trading arms and heavy machinery, and would continue to do so.

Mr Frederick of 'Pinchfield', renowned for his cruelty to animals and for appropriating others' land, represents Hitler, though his name also suggests the despotic eighteenth-century Prussian king Frederick the Great. Mr Pilkington of 'Foxwood' stands for Churchill and England, a country dominated by the fox-hunting upper classes. The Windmill stands for the first Five-Year Plan of 1928, which called for rapid industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture. Its destruction in a storm in chapter 6 symbolises 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 Frederick for the corn represent Hitler's betrayal of the Nazi—Soviet Pact of 1939, and the second destruction of the Windmill, by Frederick's men, is the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. The last chapter brings Orwell up to the date of the book's composition. He ends with a satiric portrait of the Teheran Conference of 1943, the meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, who are now allies. The quarrel over cheating at cards predicts the falling-out of the superpowers as soon as the war ended.

Animal Farm's apparent simplicity disguises Orwell's ingenuity in fitting all these complex historical events into a simple and persuasive plot. Like the three wishes of a fairy tale, the Seven Commandments are an effective structural device. Their stage-by-stage alteration charts the pigs' progressive rise to power and lends the narrative a tragic inevitability. This change also symbolises a key theme of the book: the totalitarian falsification of history. The pigs' gradual acquisition of privileges—apples, milk, house, whisky, beer, clothes—leads to the final identification of pig and human, Communist and capitalist.

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 labour 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 knacker, and in chapter 9 Napoleon fulfils the 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 with the smell of blood, which had been unknown there since the expulsion of Jones'. These ironies all emphasise 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' (ch. 5).

Though all the characters are 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 characterisation and in their two major disagreements. Like Stalin, Napoleon 'has a reputation for getting his own way' (ch. 2), takes charge of indoctrinating the young, sets up an elaborate propaganda machine, cultivates an image of omnipotent, charismatic power (a 'personality cult'), surrounding 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 wrest 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 collectivise agriculture, Trotsky was for developing industry. Ultimately Stalin adopted both programmes in his first Five-Year Plan, 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. Napoleon argues for the latter, saying that the animals must arm themselves to protect their new leadership, Snowball that they must send more pigeons into neighbouring farms to spread the news about the revolution. Just as Stalin abandoned the idea of world revolution, so at the end Napoleon assures the farmers that he will not spread rebellion among their 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 he was assassinated in Mexico City by a Stalinist agent. 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. Orwell did not share the view (of Isaac Deutscher and followers of Trotsky) that the revolution would have turned out differently had Trotsky, and not Stalin, become the leader after Lenin's death. Orwell makes Snowball equally bloodthirsty and immoral. In chapter 4, as Boxer grieves over the apparent death of the stableboy whom he has kicked in the battle, Snowball urges him not to be sentimental, because 'the only good human being is a dead one'. Trotsky defended the killing of the Tsar's children, on the grounds that the murderers acted on behalf of the proletariat.55

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.56 Orwell turns elements of comedy into scenes of tragic horror. In chapter 5, for example, 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 horrifying. Boxer's characteristics are similarly double-edged. In chapter 3 his earnest dimwittedness contrasts amusingly with the pigs' sharpness: while he is labouring to master the alphabet, and can't get past D, Snowball is engaging in parody-dialectic, explaining that birds can be included in the rule that 'Four legs good, two legs bad', since 'A bird's wing … is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation.' But Boxer's trusting simplicity also leads to his death, in one of the most moving scenes in the book.

The beast-fable is not only a device that allows Orwell's serious message to be intelligible on two levels; the use of animal 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 ready to accept policies and repeat rumours as truth. We commonly believe pigs are greedy and savage, even to the point of devouring their young. Orwell also uses the natural animosity of cats to sparrows, dogs to rats, to suggest the social and ethnic conflicts which belie Marx's dictum that workers' common interests outweigh differences of race and nationhood. And, most central to his theme, their 'short animal lives' suggests the book's tragic vision: that the passivity and ignorance of ordinary people allows an evil leadership to stay in power.

Orwell wanted his central figure to typify the modern dictator, whose lust for power is pathological and inhuman. Napoleon's swift, secret cruelty makes the other animals seem all too human in comparison. In a review of Hitler's Mein Kampf, Orwell described Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin as the quintessential modern dictators, who stayed in power for similar reasons: 'All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples' (CEJL, 2.14). To create Napoleon, Orwell combines aspects of both Stalin and Hitler (just as the totalitarian society in Nineteen Eighty-Four shares characteristics of both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany). The animals make enormous sacrifices to complete the Windmill, only to find that it is used to grind corn (for trade), not to make their lives easier, as Snowball had promised. Napoleon 'denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally' (ch. 10). This maxim sounds an ironic echo of the Nazi slogan 'Arbeit macht frei' ('Work liberates'), which decorated the entrance to Auschwitz. The knacker's van which carries Boxer off to the slaughterhouse, and the deception used to induce him to enter it, recall the deportations of Jews to the death-camps, and the mobile extermination vans used to round up and murder small groups of villagers. By making Napoleon a boar Orwell also drew on the literary and historical associations of Shakespeare's Richard III, the literary archetype of the ugly, charismatic, absolutist schemer, whose heraldic emblem was the boar.57

The beast-fable form not only allowed Orwell to convey a complex message in simple terms, but was also admirably suited to his habits as a writer: his tendency to reduce characters to type, to see society as groups of competing economic interests; his narrator's detachment from the characters; his preference for grammatically simple sentences and unpretentious vocabulary. The prose succeeds brilliantly at balancing entertainment and argument because Orwell blends homely, even clichéd, language with sophisticated diction. In chapter 3, for example, 'the work of the farm went like clockwork' 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'. The context makes the word perfectly comprehensible to someone who does not know its meaning, yet if we know the word we can appreciate an additional layer of meaning—the suggestion that the animals have been indoctrinated with the Marxist view of capitalists as parasites, who own the means of production but do no work. The pleasure of reading Animal Farm lies in recognising the double meanings, the political and historical parallels, in the story.

In a book where distortion of language is an important theme, every word counts. Orwell's simple language points out the absurd contradictions between public political statements and private perceptions of their meaning. In chapter 6 all extra work is voluntary, but animals who refuse to do it lose half their rations; in chapter 9 Squealer announces a 'readjustment' of rations, instead of the more accurate 'reduction'. This doubletalk culminates in the last chapter, when the Commandments are reduced to one: 'All animals are equal' now has added to it 'but some are more equal than others'. The comic effect of these verbal distinctions does not diminish the tragedy of the revolution betrayed.

Orwell's Critique of Marx

Marx's most revolutionary idea is that no social form is unalterable. Since all monarchies, class systems, governments are made by man, they can be destroyed and replaced by a better, fairer system, in which men would no longer be exploited. Marx thought it historically inevitable that workers would revolt, seize the means of production, and set up a centralised government, which he termed, paradoxically, a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. The government of the Soviet Union, however, was ruled by a new elite, a collective oligarchy, some of whom were derived from the proletariat. Orwell described such governments as 'a sham covering a new form of class-privilege' (CEJL, 3.320).

Orwell had always been fascinated by the corrupting effects of power and the relative weakness of good and decent people in the face of evil intelligence. In Animal Farm Orwell argues that, however desirable the ideal, man's instinct for power makes the classless society impossible. In his allegory, a Marxist revolution is doomed to fail, because it grants power, once again, to a select few. Major's speech 'had given to the more intelligent animals … a completely different outlook on life'.

To oppose Marx, Orwell turned to a classic seventeenth-century work of political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). A fiercely anti-revolutionary writer, Hobbes presents views of man and politics diametrically opposed to those of Marx. According to Hobbes, the life of man is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short', and all human beings are inclined to 'a perpetual and restless desire after power, which ceaseth only in death' (Leviathan, Book 1, ch. 11). Far from seeing men as capable of creating a new society to ensure their equality, Hobbes thought that only fear of death made men control their lust for power sufficiently to band together to form a commonwealth, an artificial machine to protect them from their enemies. For Hobbes, the one requirement of government, of whatever kind, was that it be strong enough to hold warring factions in check. He considered it inevitable that society be divided into social classes.

There are several important echoes of Hobbes in Animal Farm. Ironically, Marx-Major paraphrases Hobbes in the first chapter, when he says, 'our lives are miserable, laborious, and short'. In the last chapter, when the animals can no longer remember the promises of the revolution, Benjamin expresses the Hobbesian opinion that 'hunger, hardship and disappointment … [are] the unalterable law of life'. Alone of all the animals, Benjamin refuses either to hope or be disappointed, and his commentary often suggests a Swiftian cynicism, such as when he refuses to read, on the ground that there is nothing worth reading. This choice turns out to be the wise one, when we consider how the written word has been manipulated by the pigs.

But we should not assume that Benjamin's voice represents Orwell's. Orwell did not agree with Hobbes's political philosophy, nor did he, like Swift, find mankind ultimately disgusting. He simply believed that the rise of Russian totalitarianism could best be explained by Hobbes's theory, rather than by Marx's. Orwell summed up his attitude to revolution in the preface to a collection of British pamphlets:

The most encouraging fact about revolutionary activity is that, although it always fails, it always continues. The vision of a world of free and equal human beings, living together in a state of brotherhood—in one age it is called the Kingdom of Heaven, in another the classless society—never materialises, but the belief in it never seems to die out.58

Orwell had great difficulty publishing Animal Farm, which he completed in February 1943, for Russia had become an ally in the war against Germany, and was suffering heavy losses. Though he praised the style and compared it to Swift, T. S. Eliot, a director of Faber, spoke for most publishers when he rejected it because 'we have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time'. He told Orwell that he found the ending unsatisfactory because 'your pigs are far more intellectual than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm', and that clearly all that was needed was 'more public-spirited pigs',59 though, as Orwell's book shows, revolutionary leaders are rarely public-spirited. Finally published in August 1945, Animal Farm was given the highest praise by Graham Greene and by Edmund Wilson, but some critics refused to accept the validity of Orwell's attack on Soviet Communism. Cyril Connolly defended Russia, asserting that 'despite a police system which we should find intolerable, the masses are happy, and … great strides in material progress have been made'.60 Northrop Frye considered the allegory superficial, and sneered at the ending, asserting that the moral of the book is 'the reactionary bromide' that 'you can't change human nature'.61 But Orwell's book does not pretend to be a probing analysis of Russian Communism. His purpose was to expose the totalitarian nature of the Russian government in as simple and effective a form as possible, and in this he succeeded. It is a cautionary tale, but what it suggests about power and revolution is not reducible to a formula.

As for the criticism that Orwell's satire is exaggerated, the book's continued popularity (in illegal editions) in Eastern Europe shows that his satire is as accurate as it is enduring. As recently as September 1987, customs officials at the Moscow International Book Fair cleared the British exhibitors' shelves of Animal Farm. There can be no better certification of its truth.

[pic]Meyers, Valerie. "Animal Farm: An Allegory of Revolution." George Orwell (Palgrave Macmillan: 1991): pp. 101–113, 149–150. Quoted as "Animal Farm: An Allegory of Revolution" in Bloom, Harold, ed. Animal Farm, New Edition, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2009. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 29 May 2015. .

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