Animal Farm
Stephen Sedley, in a 1984 article in Inside the Myth: Orwell, Views from the Left attacks George
Orwell's Animal Farm as both politically and artistically lacking. Sedley points to the fact that his
thirteen-year-old daughter was bored stiff by the novel because she, like most students today, was too new to
political ideas to have any frame of reference for the story (28). In this, Sedley has a point: in the early 1980s,
many high school students were given Animal Farm to read for the first time, along with the simple (indeed,
simplistic) advice that this novel was an allegory of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent decline of
Soviet Communism. The political environment in the United States being what it was in the early 1980s,
coupled with a lack of awareness of the circumstances of the Russian Revolution and the principles of
Marxist-Leninist Socialism which the Revolution at first fought for and then lost sight of, most students'
interpretation of the novel resembled in both content and complexity the following statement: George Orwell
thought Communism was Bad. Animal Farm is in fact one of the most studied and most readily
misinterpreted novels of the twentieth century.
Given the distance from the events which Animal Farm allegorizes and from the ideas it
counterposes, it has only become easier to misinterpret since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The pigs have at last
been vanquished, and Mr. Jones has returned to the farm, as we knew he would all along. But in 1984, when
Stephen Sedley was writing, there was no end to the Cold War in sight. The atmosphere on the Right was
one of suspicion of all things Communist -- the Soviet Union was, after all, the Evil Empire, and the
anti-Communist forces in the...
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