Animal Farm's Utopian Society
Animal Farm’s Utopian Society
Animal Farm by George Orwell is a novel detailing a farm’s revolution as the animals fight to take back what is theirs and keep it for themselves rather than supply a farmer and his needs. The animals succeed in recapturing their farm, and one of the first things they do is set up a list of seven commandments to provide structure to their utopian society. By the end of the book, one realizes that the utopian society the animals set up was riddled with holes, and this leads one to wonder if a utopian is ever really achievable. The purpose of this essay is to discuss Animal Farm’s flaws in its utopian society and the idea of the utopian society as a whole. To begin, one of the main flaws of the animals’ society is the fact that they wanted to be completely self-sufficient without any help from the outside world. A farm cannot sustain on its own: tools break, you can run low on fuel, and things need to be modernized. Orwell wrote the first commandment as “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.” (24). With this as its first and primary thought, the pigs ultimately set their society up for failure. One crucial example of this failure is when the animals tried to construct a windmill to provide electricity for the farm. The animals couldn’t break up the stone to build the windmill, because as Orwell put it, “There seemed no way of doing this except with picks and crowbars, which no animal could use, because no animal could stand on his hind legs.” (60) The animals were not men and were foolish to think that they could achieve everything just as easily as man could. The windmill took several years to finish, and in the end wasn’t used to provide electricity to the farm, but to grind corn. The belief that all humans are the enemy and should be avoided was one of the nails in the coffin of Animal Farm’s utopian society, because they eventually did have to interact with the humans and trade with them. As well as the first
Animal Farm by George Orwell is a novel detailing a farm’s revolution as the animals fight to take back what is theirs and keep it for themselves rather than supply a farmer and his needs. The animals succeed in recapturing their farm, and one of the first things they do is set up a list of seven commandments to provide structure to their utopian society. By the end of the book, one realizes that the utopian society the animals set up was riddled with holes, and this leads one to wonder if a utopian is ever really achievable. The purpose of this essay is to discuss Animal Farm’s flaws in its utopian society and the idea of the utopian society as a whole. To begin, one of the main flaws of the animals’ society is the fact that they wanted to be completely self-sufficient without any help from the outside world. A farm cannot sustain on its own: tools break, you can run low on fuel, and things need to be modernized. Orwell wrote the first commandment as “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.” (24). With this as its first and primary thought, the pigs ultimately set their society up for failure. One crucial example of this failure is when the animals tried to construct a windmill to provide electricity for the farm. The animals couldn’t break up the stone to build the windmill, because as Orwell put it, “There seemed no way of doing this except with picks and crowbars, which no animal could use, because no animal could stand on his hind legs.” (60) The animals were not men and were foolish to think that they could achieve everything just as easily as man could. The windmill took several years to finish, and in the end wasn’t used to provide electricity to the farm, but to grind corn. The belief that all humans are the enemy and should be avoided was one of the nails in the coffin of Animal Farm’s utopian society, because they eventually did have to interact with the humans and trade with them. As well as the first