Animal Farm: Overview (AQA GCSE English Literature)

Animal Farm: Overview

The Animal Farm question is Section A of your GCSE Paper 2. You are asked to complete one essay-length answer to one set question. This can seem daunting at first, but this page contains some helpful information, and links to more detailed revision note pages, that will enable you to aim for the highest grade. This page includes:

• Who was George Orwell?

• Animal Farm summary

• A brief overview of what is required in the exam

• Animal Farm characters

• Animal Farm context

• Animal Farm themes

• Animal Farm quotes

• Top tips for the highest grade

Who was George Orwell?

George Orwell was an Indian-born English journalist, essayist and writer of both fiction and non-fiction books. Orwell - whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair - was born in the Indian province of Bengal on the 25th June 1903, before moving to Oxfordshire in England at the age of one. He died at the age of 46 in London on the 21st January 1950. Coming from a modest middle-class family and not being able to afford the school fees, Orwell won a scholarship to study at Eton College before joining the Imperial Police force in Burma, then still part of the British Empire. Witnessing first-hand the brutality and oppression of Imperial British rule, Orwell resigned from the police force and returned to England to become a writer. Indeed, his subsequent writing focuses on themes such as imperialism, social injustice, freedom and identity. In his later writing, Orwell was particularly concerned with the rise of totalitarianism and propaganda, which are explored in his 1945 novella, Animal Farm. This allegorical text uses the literary form of a fable to explore the types of authoritarian control that citizens can be subjected to when corrupt leaders successfully spread misinformation. For further ideas about this theme and others explored in the novella, please see the Animal Farm: Themes page.

Animal Farm summary

Animal Farm is a short novel comprising ten chapters. It begins on a farm in the English countryside, where an old idealistic pig, Old Major, is urging the other animals to rebel against their oppressive human leaders. In order to codify his worldview, Old Major coins a philosophy known as Animalism, which includes central tenets called the Seven Commandments. Old Major dies but the animals successfully rise up and overthrow the humans. Two rivals for the leadership of the farm, pigs by the names of Snowball and Napoleon, vie for supremacy, but Napoleon, using a more aggressive and threatening approach, becomes the leader of the pigs and assumes total control of the farm.

The pigs under Napoleon begin a regime based on fear and violence, slaughtering any animal with associations with Snowball, and threatening with violence any animal who questions their rule. Meanwhile, the pigs are becoming more and more like human beings: trading with other human farmers, and sleeping in the beds in the farmhouse. They justify their reign of terror, and their human-like behaviour, with a concerted campaign of propaganda and misinformation, spread by Napoleon’s chief propagandist, Squealer. Eventually, the pigs become so much like their human predecessors that the animals can no longer tell the difference between men and pigs. For a more detailed summary of the plot, including chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, please see the Animal Farm: Plot Summary page.

How is Animal Farm assessed in the exam?

• Paper 2 of your English Literature GCSE requires you to answer four questions in 2hr 15min. Within that time, you have approximately 45 minutes to plan, write and check your Animal Farm essay

• Paper 2 is worth 96 marks and accounts for 60% of your overall GCSE grade

• The Animal Farm essay is worth a total of 34 marks, since it also includes 4 marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar

• Section A of Paper 2 contains the Animal Farm question. You are required to answer only one question on the novella from a choice of two questions

• It is a closed-book exam, which means you will not have access to a copy of the text in your exam (and there is no printed extract from the text on your question paper, unlike in Paper 1)

• You will be asked a question that asks you to analyse and write in detail about an aspect of Animal Farm

• Your answer will need to address the novella as a whole

For a much more detailed guide on answering the Animal Farm question, please see our revision notes on How to Answer the Modern Prose and Drama Essay Question.

Animal Farm characters

The characters you should focus on when revising Animal Farm are:

• Old Major

• Napoleon

• Snowball

• Squealer

• Boxer

And the minor characters of:

• Benjamin

• Clover

• Mr Jones

• Mollie

When considering Orwell’s novella, or any other text, it is critical to understand that characters are deliberate inventions made by a writer for a purpose. These characters frequently represent concepts or belief systems, and a writer, such as Orwell, uses them to explore his opinions on politics and social injustice. This is especially true of Animal Farm, since it is an allegory for leadership and governance in the Soviet Union. For more details on the characters in Animal Farm, please see the Animal Farm: Characters revision notes page.

Animal Farm context

At GCSE, it can be difficult to work out what examiners want you to include in terms of context. Put simply, context is the ideas or perspectives explored in a text, not extra historical or biographical information about an author. Therefore, for Animal Farm, context should be understood not as general information about the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, or facts about Orwell’s life, but instead refer to ideas about:

• Russian Revolution

• Equality

• Propaganda and Censorship

• Education

Lots of these ideas and perspectives are universal, so your own opinions of them are valid, and will be rewarded in an exam. For a detailed breakdown of the contextual topics listed above, see the Animal Farm: Context page.

Animal Farm themes

One of the best pieces of exam advice for any text at GCSE is to know your text back-to-front. This is especially true of understanding a text’s themes, or the ideas that are explored by an author in their text. This is because to get the highest mark on your exam, you need to take what examiners call a “conceptualised approach”: a detailed and perceptive exploration of, in this case, Orwell’’s ideas and intentions. The key themes in Animal Farm are:

• Propaganda

• Education

• Equality

• Leadership

There are of course more themes than just those listed above that are investigated by Orwell in Animal Farm, and you are encouraged to explore these too. However, the above list makes a great place to start, and detailed breakdowns of each of these themes can be found on our Animal Farm: Themes page.

Animal Farm quotes

Although you are given credit for including quotations from Animal Farm in your answer, it is not a requirement of the exam. In fact, examiners say that “references” to the rest of the play are just as valid as direct quotations: this is when students pinpoint individual moments in the novella, rather than quoting what the characters say. This is especially the case with an allegorical text such as Animal Farm, because the writer’s deliberate decisions are more about the form and structure of the text, rather than what individual characters say. In order to select references really successfully, it is extremely important that you know the novella itself very well, including the order of the events that take place in the text. This detailed chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the plot will help you to revise the chronology of Animal Farm.

However, it can also be useful to revise a few quotations from the novella that can be used in a variety of essays on different themes and characters. For an analysis of each of these quotations, see our Animal Farm: Key Quotations page.

Top tips for the highest grade

Please see our revision pages on the modern text exam for guides on:

• Structuring your Animal Farm essay

• Animal Farm methods and techniques

• How to include context in the Animal Farm essay

• Understanding the Animal Farm mark scheme

• Animal Farm model answer