Violence and fear — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Violence and fear
Themes
What you need to know
How Orwell explores violence, terror and fear as tools of control across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty', 'There was not an animal on the farm that did not take vengeance on them after his own fashion.', 'as fierce-looking as wolves', 'the dogs sitting round Napoleon let out deep, menacing growls', 'any animal giving so much as a grain of corn to a hen should be punished by death', 'the dogs had tasted blood, and for a few moments they appeared to go quite mad', 'it was far worse now that it was happening among themselves', 'when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere', 'Four dogs guarded his bed at night, one at each corner', 'When captured, he said, Frederick should be boiled alive.', 'The sight of their dead comrades stretched upon the grass moved some of them to tears.'.
Violence before and after the Rebellion, and how the threat of the dogs silences the animals more often than the dogs attack.
Context: Stalin's secret police, the famine and the purges, and the hens' revolt as the starving peasants of Ukraine.
For Edexcel's essay on this text, link each point to its context and the writer's purpose, which earn as many marks as knowledge of the text (16 of 40); language analysis earns no marks there.
