Pigs get a bad rap some times. They’re passed off as gluttonous, greedy animals, covered in filth and sometimes their own feces. For humans, being called a pig or a hog is something rude and degrading, intended to make one feel ashamed or inferior.
That’s how we generally view pigs: a dirty, greedy lower species that just so happens to taste absolutely delicious in a BLT sandwich. And chorizo. Also, pork chops. Oh and hot dogs!
Excuse our untameable appetite. We are such pigs, really (hardy-har-har). Anyways, back to our scheduled programming.
However, both George Orwell and William Golding do not see these cloven-foot porkies just as walking, squealing examples of abhorrence; they seem them as symbolic extensions of mankind.
The comparison is unflattering, of course, but that is precisely the authors’ intent. The British authors’ classic novels, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies respectively, are all about the dark or even evil capabilities and tendencies of humans, essentially. In fact, both novels read as allegories that comment on the power-greedy and dirty jerks human beings can be sometimes.
Take Golding’s classic about a bunch of British boys marooned on an isolated tropical island without adult supervision. Already the story is veering towards chaos. We mean, have you ever seen a group of boys with no adult to rein them in? Clearly, Golding intended to invoke this feeling towards prepubescent and naturally rambunctious boys in drafting a novel not only focused on the maltent of humans but on the order and structure of society. As the boys have to fend for themselves, they try to logically set up some sort of system or order to manage themselves. They become divided on what’s more important: maintaining a constant signal fire to alert passing ships or violently hunting down poor little mama pigs. Naturally, two headstrong boys who head each respective cause—Ralph and Jack—disagree, and the battle for island power begins.
Interestingly enough, that scenario is similar to Orwell’s Animal Farm. In that allegorical animal tale, the pigs are the intelligent beings in charge after the farm animals rebel against their negligent farmer, Mr. Jones. After their wise old leader, Major, dies, the animals are left to two leader who competitively rise to see who gets to be on top. There’s Napoleon, the aptly named, tyrannically inclined porker who wants to be on top and look down at the smaller, inferior animals. You could consider him the Jack of this scenario (though Jack ends up killing a bunch of pigs, but that’s besides the point). Then, there is Snowball, the softer pig who wants to teach the other animals and build a windmill.
Orwell’s act of placing the pigs in power is not lost on us. Snowball isn’t as sweet as his name suggests—he did after all, reduce the Seven Commandments to the line “four legs good, two legs bad.” While the pigs are largely said to resemble or stand in for certain prominent figures of the Russian communist revolution, they can be interpreted to speak about the atrocities humans are capable of when having too much power and dominion over others. These books, which are often used to instruct CASHEE students due to their vocabulary and seeming simplicity, could actually be very valuable to students of AP Psychology in understanding the human psyche in times of duress and power.
Which brings us back to Golding. One of the key Lord of Flies quotes sums up what both Orwell and Golding are attempting to convey in bringing a type of symbolic biology to their novels. The actual “Lord of the Flies” a severed head of a sow—that’s a female pig to you — that start to talk to one of the boys, innocent Simon. The pig’s head was the result of a violent attack and graphic murder of the mama pig by Jack and his crew, with the head saved as a offering to the imagined “beastie” they think is lurking around somewhere on the island (though the evidence for this is fairly nil, but you know how the imaginations of young boys are).
Poor little Simon—who is arguably a symbol of human goodness as he suggests that the beast is “only us”—is the recipient of the pig head’s only conversation: “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill…You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you?”
Juxtaposing these two novels together, you can start to see why pigs are not held in the best regard. For Orwell, they’re the natural stand-in for power-hungry human politicians or revolutionaries and for Golding, they’re the symbolic equivalent of mankind’s “beastie” side. Well, at least pigs taste yummy.
Paul Thomson is an avid reader of English Literature. His areas of expertise include CASHEE, AP Psychology, and ACT Prep. In his spare time, he loves to participate in online literature forums and promote reading for youth.