
Animal
Farm EssayThe animals are differentiated not only according to gender but also by intelligence, the pigs being described as both intelligent and piggish even at an early stage in the revolution, when they appropriate the cows' milk for their own use. The other animals, with only a few exceptions, are generous, hardworking, and stupid by contrast. It is not power that corrupts the pigs; power simply provides them with the means to realize their "nature." The betrayal of the revolution in Animal
Farm, though it occurs over a period of time, is not, in fact, described as a process. This is why Animal
Farm, beyond what it has to say concerning Stalin and the Soviet Union, has a profoundly dispiriting message. Orwell presents a static picture of a static universe in which the notion of the pigs' animal nature explains what happens. The final tableau, with the pigs and the men indistinguishable, is the actualization of the potential inherent in the pigs from the beginning. Unlike what he does in Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, Orwell gives the pigs specific material motives for the exploitation of the other animals: better food, more leisure, and a privileged life, all acquired partly by terrorizing and partly by gulling the others into thinking that because the pigs are more intelligent they alone can manage the
farm.