Napoleon’s Panoptic Surveillance in George Orwell’s Animal Farm
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24843/JH.2025.v29.i03.p04Keywords:
Panopticism, surveillance, Foucault, Panopticon, discourseAbstract
This article aims at examining the Panopticism within the novella Animal Farm during Napoleon’s leadership. This is done by applying the theory of Panopticism developed by Foucault as derived from Bentham's Panopticon model. This research utilizes the qualitative method and uses George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm (1945) as the data source. Foucault's panoptic schema is characterized by the impression of continuous observation internalized into self-surveillance. The findings suggest that the Animal Farm is considered a panoptic society, with the pigs corresponding to the tower inspectors and the farm animals as the prisoners. The panoptic surveillance comes in various forms and primarily through discourse, to influence the animals to conform to the norm of staying docile and accepting Napoleon’s leadership. The Panopticism in Animal Farm shows how discourse can be a powerful device of social control as a surveillance method, especially when it incites fear and the desire for security.
References
Barker, P. (1998). Michel Foucault: An introduction. Edinburgh University Press.
Bentham, J. (2018). The Panopticon. In T. Monahan & D. M. Wood (Eds.), Surveillance studies: A reader (pp. 31–35). Oxford university press.
Bozzo-Rey, M. (2012). Social Control and the Legal Panoptic Paradigm. In A. Brunon-Ernst (Ed.), Beyond Foucault: New perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon (pp. 161–184). Ashgate.
Bradbury, R. (2021). Fahrenheit 451. In J. R. Eller (Ed.), Novels & story cycles: The Martian chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion wine, Something wicked this way comes (pp. 231–362). Library of America.
Brunon-Ernst, A. (2012). Deconstructing Panopticism into the Plural Panopticons. In A. Brunon-Ernst (Ed.), Beyond Foucault: New perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon (pp. 17–42). Ashgate.
Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches.
Downing, L. (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault.
Dreyfus, H. L., Rabinow, P., & Foucault, M. (1983). Michel Foucault, beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (2nd ed). University of Chicago Press.
Elmer, G. (2012). Panopticon—Discipline—Control. In D. Lyon, K. D. Haggerty, & K. Ball (Eds.), Routledge handbook of surveillance studies (pp. 21–29). Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (2nd Vintage Books ed). Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (2018). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In T. Monahan & D. M. Wood (Eds.), Surveillance studies: A reader (pp. 36–41). Oxford university press.
Laval, C. (2012). From Discipline and Punish to The Birth of Biopolitics. In A. Brunon-Ernst (Ed.), Beyond Foucault: New perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon (pp. 43–62). Ashgate.
Lyon, D. (2018). Surveillance Studies: An Overview. In T. Monahan & D. M. Wood (Eds.), Surveillance studies: A reader (pp. 18–21). Oxford university press.
Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. The University of Adelaide Library; Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/AnimalFarmByGeorgeOrwell
Orwell, G. (2001). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Project Gutenberg Australia. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
P. Hier, S., Walby, K., & Greenberg, J. (2006). Supplementing the panoptic paradigm: Surveillance, moral governance, and CCTV. In D. Lyon (Ed.), Theorizing Surveillance: The panopticon and beyond (pp. 230–244). Willan Publishing.
Pombo, D. L. (2020). “Eat—Or Get Eaten Up”: A Study of Power in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger [Undergraduate Thesis]. University of A Coruña.
Scott, D. (Ed.). (2017). Understanding Foucault, understanding modernism. Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
Sheridan, C. (2016). Foucault, Power and the Modern Panopticon [Senior Thesis, Trinity College]. http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/548
Taylor, D. (Ed.). (2014). Michel Foucault: Key concepts. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315711478