Equality and class — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Equality and class
Themes
What you need to know
How Orwell explores equality, class and the rise of a new ruling class 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 pigs, who were manifestly cleverer than the other animals, should decide all questions of farm policy', 'Nobody stole, nobody grumbled over his rations', 'But everyone worked according to his capacity.', 'A too rigid equality in rations, Squealer explained, would have been contrary to the principles of Animalism.', 'Once again all rations were reduced, except those of the pigs and the dogs.', 'were discouraged from playing with the other young animals', 'neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by their own labour', 'ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL / BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS', 'the lower animals on Animal Farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the county', 'If you have your lower animals to contend with ... we have our lower classes!'.
How the pigs turn themselves into a ruling class, and the final Commandment as the betrayal of Old Major's first principle.
Context: the communist promise of a classless society, and Orwell's view that the Soviet Union became a hierarchical society with a new ruling class.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
