English Honors Papers

Document Type

Honors Paper

Advisor

Rae Gaubinger and Michelle Neely

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

This thesis places The Jungle and Animal Farm in conversation with one another to examine how each text engages, reframes, and complicates Marxist conceptions of labor, class, and (de)individuality through the figure of the pig. Beginning from the pig’s marked similarity to humans – its intelligence, sociality, and symbolic proximity – the analysis considers how this likeness makes the pig a particularly charged symbol for negotiating the moral and conceptual boundary between human and animal, inviting a reading in which human structures are reflected back through the animal form. Attending each novel’s distinct concern with socialism – Sinclair’s investment in exposing the working class condition, and Orwell’s exploration of revolutionary transformation – it traces how both works construct and destabilize distinctions between human and animal in order to naturalize, justify, and expose systems of hierarchy and control. This thesis places The Jungle and Animal Farm in conversation with one another to examine how pigs function as central figures through which questions of power, hierarchy, labor, and morality are structured and destabilized. Through close attention to the representation of pigs, it traces how systems of domination emerge, are maintained, and are rendered intelligible within each narrative. By reading these works together, the thesis highlights how categories of “humanity,” labor, and equality are produced and reconfigured, In doing so, it offers a more expansive account of how domination is both represented and reproduced through both the human/animal and bourgeoisie/proletariat divide, ultimately returning to the pig as the figure through which these shifting relations of ideology, hierarchy, and value are most clearly articulated.

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The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.