Violence and fear — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
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 and purges, and the famines that followed the forced collectivisation of farms, including the Ukraine famine; compare the hens' revolt.
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.
