850 Orwell, George
with a fragmented present. At the end of the play,
she seems to freeze into the past, and the present
becomes totally meaningless. She imagines she is
at the convent where she was raised and partially
remembers a discontinuous past: “Then in the
spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember.
I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy
for a time.”
Memory is the Tyrones’ secret companion, which
opens doors into their troubled past and wounds
that would not heal. It is both a soothing and a tor-
menting ghost that cannot, unfortunately, save them
from their personal tragedies.
Aloisia Sorop
orwELL, GEorGE Animal Farm
(1945)
In 1945 Eric Arthur Blair published Animal Farm
under the pseudonym George Orwell (a name he
had used when posing as a tramp in order to see
how the poorest of London’s inhabitants lived).
A socialist critical of socialism, Orwell (1903–50)
had fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco
(where he survived a bullet through the neck), and
had high hopes for the Russian Revolution in its
early days. Animal Farm represents, among other
things, his disappointment with the eventual reali-
ties of the Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin.
Through the allegorical tale of a group of animals
rebelling against their farmer and seizing control
of the goods they produce, Orwell investigates and
explicates the ways in which the implementation of
a revolution can undermine and distort the prin-
ciples from which that revolution originates.
In Animal Farm, the animals agree to a set of
maxims by which to live their lives and prosecute
their revolution, surmounted by the principle of “all
animals are equal.” Yet once their original plan of
throwing off the shackles of servility to humanity is
realized, their new utopian society quickly deviates
from the high ideals by which it was established. In
the name of efficiency and survival, many of the
cruel practices and deprivations they had rebelled
to escape are reimposed, and over time each of the
seven maxims are slowly eroded, altered, or deleted,
in order that the “official” version of the guiding
principles matches the behavior of the corrupt
animals now governing the farm. This distortion
and corruption comes to a final, ignoble end when
the ultimate principle is found to read “all animals
are equal, but some animals are more equal than
others.”
Michael AikencommunIty in Animal Farm
Notions of community constitute one of the driv-
ing themes in Animal Farm. The animals’ standard
means of determining what course of action to
take—a group meeting resolved by representative
voting—shows a clear consciousness of shared com-
munity among the animals. Similarly, in condemn-
ing Jones (and later Snowball) to exile, they reveal
the intrinsic value they place on being included in a
community; to be driven out is to be all but erased
from existence. The animals put a great deal of time
and discussion into determining who should be
included in their community and why, ultimately
deciding that anything human is essentially alien,
while all animals, even the wild rats and the shift-
less, lazy cat are recognized as “friends.” This last
point is perhaps the most fatal flaw of the Rebel-
lion, as it leads them to determine who is worthy of
their community by way of a generalization (“two
legs bad”), glossing over the counterproductive
behavior of individuals like the cat, qualified to
remain simply because it has four legs. This flaw is
particularly important as it undermines one of the
rebellion’s principle concerns namely, that Jones is
guilty because he “consumes without producing”:
He does not contribute to the community he profits
from. While this is the underlying crime by which
he is judged unfit to remain, animals who consume
without producing, such as the cat and the pigs,
escape any recrimination because of the “two legs
bad, four legs good” maxim, while the chickens and
ducks, who make some of the greatest sacrifices for
their community by selling their unborn eggs for
the good of the farm, are subject to an undefined
but pervading suspicion as a result of that same
maxim.
One of the overarching principles that guides
the way the animals govern their farm, as also one of
the key principles by which they judge Jones guilty,