852 Orwell, George
successful attack on the farmer, Jones, and his wife
and employees, all of whom they drive out.
Despite the humans’ cruelty spurring the Rebel-
lion, as well as the animals holding an end to cruelty
as one of their rebellion’s greatest goals, it is not long
before cruelty returns to the life of the farm. Napo-
leon, the lead pig and therefore the leader of the
newly communal farm, removes the recently born
dog pups from their parents, an unnecessary act that
deprives them of a loving upbringing and denies the
parents any relationship with their children. He then
uses his position as their sole caregiver (and indeed
sole contact) to distort the pups’ personalities such
that they become cold-blooded killers obeying only
his orders. In a related fashion, the pigs use their
superior intellect to confuse and bewilder the other
animals, specifically to assert control over them and,
later, to exploit that control for unfair gain, as when
they justify their exclusive access to luxury items like
apples and milk with contrived arguments that the
slower-witted animals cannot contest. Napoleon’s
dogs go on to serve his government as instruments
of control and oppression via physical cruelty, tear-
ing out their victims’ throats as a means of punish-
ment, terrorizing the other animals with physical
intimidation, and psychologically torturing them
through fear.
The pigs go on to readopt many of the humans’
routine tortures, including reducing food to near-
starvation levels and working the animals to early
graves with an ever-increasing workload. Toward
the end of the novel, these cruelties culminate in
gratuitous human practices such as the use of whips
and the final “hideously cruel” slaughter of former
“Animal Hero” Boxer, thus recreating the all-encom-
passing cruelty of the days before the Rebellion.
Other acts that may be considered cruel in the
book include the continual lying and deception on
the part of the governing pigs, deceit that makes the
animals suspicious of one another and traps them
into more and more work for less and less food,
the removal of the hens’ eggs (again a reinstatement
from Jones’s era), and the final irony that the rule of
the pigs is something the animals fought for in order
to free themselves of humans and their cruelty. As
the novel closes, the pigs are far closer to humans
than to the other animals, who are more abused
than ever, while the neighboring farmers applaud
the pigs for running the farm with more “efficiency”
than ever before, very largely based on the systematic
use of cruelty.
Michael AikenWork in Animal Farm
Work is a daily event, a key determinant of one’s
suffering or privilege and, by extension, the indica-
tor of one’s societal worth in Animal Farm. It is also
the factor driving specific events central to the plot
and a recurring theme. Notions about work—whom
it is required of and why, and for what purpose it
is undertaken—directly inform the rationale for
the Rebellion, and the failure to resolve conflicts
associated with these notions after the successful
establishment of the utopian Animal Farm serves
to perpetuate the inequalities that gave rise to the
Rebellion in the first place.
Characters are typically introduced with a
description of both their personality and their work-
ing function on the farm, such as Boxer’s “steadi-
ness of character and tremendous powers of work.”
Each animal’s capacity and willingness to perform
work on the farm directly affects his or her prestige
among the other animals, as illustrated by the total
veneration with which Boxer is regarded, in contrast
to the hatred felt for Moses because he “d[oes] no
work” or the dismissal of the vacuous Mollie because
her traditional role under Jones is simply to draw his
trap on special outings.
The exception to this principle, an exception
that throughout the novel creates an uneasy tension
due to its contradictory nature, is the position of
the pigs: Never seen to do any work (before or after
the Rebellion), they are nonetheless accorded the
highest office, maintaining the governance of the
farm, because of their greater intellectual capacities.
Furthermore, the pigs allot themselves more and
more food and contraband luxuries with the excuse
that they do the “brain work” and are therefore more
heavily taxed than other animals.
The fact that this situation remains constant
throughout the otherwise equitable Animal Farm’s
existence is the source of some of the novel’s greatest
riddles and conundrums, raising as it does questions
regarding the quantification and qualification of