 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
George Orwell’s Misogyny—A Feminist Interpretation of Animal Farm
WANG Xinyue
Full-Text PDF
XML 1700 Views
DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2021.06.005
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
George Orwell, formerly known as Eric Arthur Blair, was one of the greatest English novelists, essayists, and critics of the 20th century. Animal Farm is the most famous political allegorical novel in the world. The most discussed topics about this novel are totalitarianism and utopia, and few people discuss this novel full of male color from the perspective of women. As a male-oriented novel, people can clearly feel that the female images in the novel are mostly negative, ignorant, obedient and enjoying the cozy life, and the female images created are mostly with the subjective color of the writer. Behind this phenomenon is the discrimination of male writers against women. Affected by patriarchal culture, male writers often belittle or suppress women in their literary works. This paper attempts to analyze the images of female characters in Animal Farm, and Orwell’s tendency of misogyny from a feminist perspective. Orwell’s works reflect the social status of women as the “second sex”. It is easy to recognize his androcentrism, ingrained thoughts of gender hierarchy and intense misogyny.
Animal Farm, George Orwell, misogyny, feminism
Beauvoir, S. D. (2015). The second sex. London: Vintage Classics.
Bloom, H. (2006). George Orwell’s animal farm. New York: Infobase Publishing.
Martín, S. (2020). Masculinity and patriarchal villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort. New York: Routledge.
Orwell, G. (1996). Animal farm. London: Signet Classics.
Patai, D. (1984). The Orwell mystique: A study in male ideology. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.
Rodden, J. (2006). Every intellectual’s big brother: George Orwell’s literary siblings. The United States of America: The University of Texas Press.
Smith, J. (2013). Misogynies. London: Westbourne.