'Animal Farm: Reflections on the Fairy Story' - Maia Hamilton

'Animal Farm: Reflections on the Fairy Story' - Maia Hamilton

My college library recently ran a “Bibliotherapy” scheme. One could sign up and be assigned a recommended library book to take out, with the choice of fiction or non-fiction, and also receive a free chocolate bar. I was assigned Animal Farm, which amused my boyfriend given my position in the Labour Club. I ate the Cadbury bar weeks ago but waited until after my exams for the literary nourishment.

Upon reading Animal Farm I’ve had people ask me why I’ve picked up my GCSE syllabus again. In spite of the fact I actually studied Of Mice and Men, I understand the sentiment, as it has been many years since I first read the novel. At less than 200 pages, and a simple writing style, Animal Farm tends to be an early introduction into reading “classic novels”. The allegories are direct and clear, and if any enlightening is needed, BBC Bitesize has many analyses.

In the day and age where Animal Farm is so prized and distributed as essential reading, particularly by the Government to children, it is easy to forget how Orwell had struggled to find a publisher. The book was written in 3 months at the beginning of 1943, at the same time Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Teheran to work together against German forces. The novel was rejected 4 times, one rejection being from T.S Eliot, working for Faber & Faber at the time, who wrote “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.” In Orwell’s proposed original preface, which was eventually published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1972, he mentions a letter which he received from a publisher who had decided to consult the Ministry of Information, saying “I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think… I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time.”

Orwell died in 1950, never living to see the later interpretations of his book. It’s interesting to think of his reactions to how it has been used. Animal Farm is now one of the most praised books of the early 20th century, reaching heights Orwell could hardly have expected in 1943. However, because of this popularity, interpretations of the work and of Orwell himself vary wildly. In 1954 the CIA funded a full-length animated film of Animal Farm. All mentions of humans in the finale are removed and only the pigs are corrupt. In his essay “If Orwell were alive today” Norman Podhoretz claimed that Orwell would be a neo-conservative.

In “Why I Write” Orwell wrote, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” So how did Orwell understand democratic socialism? He described being conve rted to Socialism “more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.” Did Animal Farm fail at relaying this socialist message? Orwell certainly doesn’t claim that life was better under Farmer Jones, writing “Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse - hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.” Yes, Orwell chooses to use the book to focus on the tragedy of the Soviet regime, but he doesn’t validify the farmers’ rule either – Boxer was always going to be sent to the glue factory, the chicken’s eggs were always going to be stolen and sold.

This is not a eulogy to Orwell, whose long, complicated history would require a much longer essay, but an ode to the lost legacy of Animal Farm. In the preface to the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm Orwell wrote “Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Socialist myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.”

And yet at the time of publishing, and even today, the book has faced much criticism from the left. Perhaps the book could be easier understood if Orwell had laid out a solution, a system in which the animals can reach the justice they are promised. But to do so would be a Disneyfication of the fairy story Orwell wrote. Orwell does not want to play Moses, relaying tales of Sugarcandy Mountain to us readers.

Animal Farm is a socialist story without being utopian, its purpose is to showcase how a revolution can fail. As Orwell wrote in a letter to Dwight McDonald “I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves.” This is where interpretations of Animal Farm differ – Orwell did not intend the tragedy to be doomed from Old Major’s speech, but rather to take a sharp twist when our new leaders have been left in place for too long.

No socialist’s bookshelf is complete without a copy of Animal Farm. Socialism stems from a love for one’s fellow man, and Orwell was a Socialist because of this; his criticism of the USSR showcased his bravery in criticising a regime that nobody else would at the time, defending the oppressed and neglected workers rather than a political theory.

[Maia Hamilton is a second year Chemist at New College. She was OULC Co-Chair this term.]