The Explicator, Vol. 69, No.

1, 10–12, 2011
Copyright

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online
DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2011.579011

POLLY SAPAKIE
Northern Arizona University

Freud’s Notion of the Uncanny

in ANIMAL FARM

Keywords: Animal Farm, Freud, pigs, the uncanny

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is famously political. Viewed as fable or fairy

story, Animal Farm lends itself to multiple critical interpretations. Richard I.
Smyer’s argument, in Animal Farm: Pastoralism and Politics, includes one crucial
theme is “[n]ot only are the important truths . . . known, [but] often both beast
and man attempt to block them from consciousness” (112). The link between
the critics’ allowance for differing interpretations and attempted denial of truth
in Animal Farm intersects with Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny. The
uncanny is “undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread
and horror” (Freud 619). It is “produced when the distinction between imagination
and reality is effaced” (636). Freud’s uncanny is evident in Animal Farm, especially
in the novel’s closing scenes.
Though little scholarship exists to link the uncanny to Animal Farm, I suggest
the final scenes of the novel haunt readers because of the uncanny. Included in the
final chapter is the striking scene when “on a pleasant evening when the animals
had finished work . . . the terrified neighing of a horse sounded from the yard”
(Orwell 132). Clover’s terror arises because she sees Napoleon walking on his
hind legs, carrying a whip in his trotter. Eerily human-like, the sight of a pig
walking on his hind legs obscures the boundaries of reality, fogging them with
fear. This uncanny moment represents the formerly repressed reality of Animal
Farm, the reality the animals have ignored—the pigs have become oppressors,
remade in the image of active evil. This doubling of Farmer Jones, a “distorted
version of a being already in existence” (Gentile 23), compounds the terror of the
animals.

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Freud’s Notion of the Uncanny in ANIMAL FARM 11

Building on the unspoken fears of the animals, these pigs would be as men and
carry the weapons of man, including the whip that subjugates the animals by its
very presence. The gradual development of the pigs into what they had originally
overthrown is by degrees, so the animals can ignore it for a time. However, by
the time four legs are good but two legs even better, it is hard to overlook the
metamorphosis of the pigs into something like humans, “aping their predecessors
in appearance as well as performance” (Morse 88) in order to preserve their
tyranny.
Unmitigated by the fact that the animals made bargains all along, usually
unspoken, with the reality of life under the pigs, the uncanny fears of the animals
rose to the surface. The animals endured small indignities that bled into large
horrors, all for the putative guarantee of a golden future, never attempting to speak
out until it is too late:

It was as though the world had turned upside down . . .[T]here came
a moment when the first shock had worn off [and] they might have
uttered some word of protest. But just at that moment, as though at a
signal, all the sheep burst out into a tremendous bleating of—“Four
legs good, two legs better!” (133)

No argument is articulated, and the fears of the animals merge with their confusion
and uncertainty, illustrating the presence of Freud’s uncanny in this upturned world.
As the pigs gain power, unrepentantly perverting the aims of the rebellion,
they use language as a weapon, an uncannily subtle manner in which to control
the animals. The pigs do more than talk, though, by manipulating the reality
of Animal/Manor Farm to the degree that the animals are confounded, sensing
that what once was is now misshapen into an unrecognizable incarnation of the
initial rebellion. “[T]he uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back
to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 620), yet it brings with it a
new fear, as when the animals see Napoleon walking as if he were Jones. The
animals remember upright, unkind masters who carry cruel whips with them as
they swagger around the farm, now transformed into peacocking masters with
cloven hooves, an ancient and tangible evil indicative of the uncanny.
The final scene of the novel is the most characteristic of the presence of
Freud’s uncanny:

What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? . . . The creatures
outside looked from pig to man, from man to pig, and from pig to
man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
(140–41)
12 The Explicator

The animals confront what readers have long known. The supernormal sight of the
pig-men supping with the men-pigs destroys “whatever vestige of self-deception
the animals may have” (Morse 86), with the repression of the covert fears of
the unnatural they have tamped down for years now all too evident. This scene
is uncanny, indeed, with the familiar merging with the fantastic, all beyond the
animals’ ken. Ambiguous and indefinable, the uncanny is manifested by the self-
deception of the animals. The uncertainty of the animals about the spectacle of the
pigs and men combine with the bitter knowledge that their past, regressed selves
predicted and hoped for the opposite of this scene, and these effect the reader as
an eerie tableau.
Freud’s concept of the uncanny is a feeling simultaneously familiar and un-
familiar, an indefinable melding of fears, hopes, dreams, and desires. Because
the animals see themselves as equal to the pigs, they vicariously live through the
pigs, eroding the short-lived freedom of the rebellion. The animals nearly view
the pigs as their doubles, and Freud argues that the uncanny “is marked by the
fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as
to which his self is” (629). Bringing to light ancient terrors and the apprehension
“that someone or something has been here before us and that we are strangers
or interlopers, lost in alien terrain” (Gentile 30), the betrayals and depredations
of the pigs are particularly devastating because of the unearthly presence of the
uncanny.
Animal Farm becomes the simultaneously familiar and alien Manor Farm,
uniting the fate of the beleaguered animals with Freud’s uncanny, giving voice to
thoughts usually repressed and eluded: “[T]he fear is . . . the primitive fear that
our life is not our own, that free will is an illusion and our life has been mapped
out by a higher power” (Gentile 30). No animal on the farm has any semblance
of autonomy or free will after being forced to acknowledge the illusory nature of
the pigs’ collective identity in the novel’s closing scenes. The animals’ dream of
a golden future becomes an appalling nightmare, as unavoidable as it is acutely
suggestive of Freud’s uncanny.

Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.”’ 619–645. Bartnæs, Morten. “Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ and De-
constructive Criticism: Intellectual Uncertainty and Delicacy of Perception.” Psychoanalysis and
History 12.1 (2010): 29–53. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 13 Nov. 2010.
Gentile, Kathy Justice. “Anxious Supernaturalism: An Analytic of the Uncanny.” Gothic Studies. 2.1
(2000): 23–38. Print.
Morse, Donald. “‘A Blatancy of Untruth’: George Orwell’s Uses of the Fantastic in Animal Farm.”
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies. 1.2 (1995): 85–92. Print.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York: Signet, 1996. Print.
Smyer, Richard I. Animal Farm: Pastoralism and Politics. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Print.
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