Major's words take on a new meaning after the animals rebel against farmer Jones. Old Major advocates for the socialist animal uprising, then dies only days later. His utopian dream does not play out in reality when Napoleon rises to power. Napoleon displaces Snowball and steals his idea to build a windmill in order to generate electricity. Napoleon then orders the animals to engage in this manual labor, thus using them in the same way as farmer Jones had before. Thus, "produce for our labor" turns into producing for our labor, and the animals are once again subject to a dictatorship. This establishes irony in Old Major's words and demonstrates that rebellion, originally a popular idea, created oppressive conditions on the farm, just as before.
Major is the prize Middle White boar on Mr. Jones's farm. At the beginning of the novella he summons all of the animals on the farm to the barn for an important speech. He argues that life for farm animals in England is "misery and slavery" because the product of the animals' labor is stolen from them by human beings. He further argues that their labor would be sufficient to support many more animals if not for the fact that their hard work went to support humans who didn't produce anything. He tells them,
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plow, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits . . . Our labor tills the soil, our dung fertilizes it.
He goes on to note that the cows produce milk which is taken from them, and, likewise, hens lay eggs which go to the humans. He tells the horse Boxer that once he cannot work anymore he will be sent to the slaughterhouse to be turned into food or fertilizer. In fact, Major emphasizes, every animal is basically a commodity to be used or sold by the farmers.
If Animal Farm is looked at as an allegory, the words of Major can be linked to the communist philosopher Karl Marx or the Bolshevik revolutionary Lenin who believed that workers were simply the pawns of the rich and powerful. Workers, like the animals, did all of the work and gave all of the sacrifice while the upper classes lived off the production of the workers. Like Major, Marx and Lenin believed that revolution was the only way to change things.
No comments:
Post a Comment