Hayfield

The Hayfield is the principal pasture on Animal Farm, the place where the animals' first harvest after the Rebellion was gathered and a recurring location that marks the arc of their collective labor, their early triumphs, and the slow erosion of their revolutionary hopes. It is the field where the animals proved they could manage the farm without human beings, and later, the place where the gap between the pigs' propaganda and the animals' lived experience became most visible.

The First Harvest and Revolutionary Triumph

Immediately after the expulsion of Mr. Jones, the pigs led the animals to the Hayfield to begin the hay harvest. The work was hard—the implements had been designed for humans, and no animal could use a tool that required standing on its hind legs—but the pigs were clever enough to find a way around every difficulty. Boxer and Clover harnessed themselves to the cutter or the horse-rake and tramped steadily round the field, with a pig walking behind calling out "Gee up, comrade!" or "Whoa back, comrade!" Every animal, down to the humblest, worked at turning the hay and gathering it; even the ducks and hens toiled to and fro all day in the sun, carrying tiny wisps of hay in their beaks. The harvest was finished in two days less time than it had usually taken Jones and his men, and it was the biggest harvest the farm had ever seen. There was no wastage whatever, and not an animal had stolen so much as a mouthful. The Hayfield thus became the first proof that the animals could succeed on their own, a concrete demonstration of the promise of Animalism.

The Site of Labor and Sacrifice

In the years that followed, the Hayfield remained a central site of the animals' labor. Throughout the spring and summer they worked a sixty-hour week, and in August Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well—strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself would have his rations reduced by half. The harvest was a little less successful than in the previous year, and two fields which should have been sown with roots in the early summer were not sown because the ploughing had not been completed early enough. The Hayfield, once a symbol of collective achievement, became a place where the animals worked longer hours and fed no better than they had done in Jones's day. Squealer would read out lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred, three hundred, or five hundred percent, but the animals could not help feeling that they would sooner have had less figures and more food.

A View of the Whole Farm and the Weight of Memory

From the knoll that commanded a view of most of the farm, the Hayfield was visible as part of the landscape the animals now owned. On the evening after the executions, when the animals huddled together on that knoll, they could see the long pasture stretching down to the main road, the Hayfield, the spinney, the drinking pool, the ploughed fields where the young wheat was thick and green, and the red roofs of the farm buildings with smoke curling from the chimneys. It was a clear spring evening, and the grass and the bursting hedges were gilded by the level rays of the sun. Never had the farm appeared to the animals so desirable a place. Yet Clover, looking down the hillside, felt that this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. The Hayfield, like the rest of the farm, had become a place where the animals labored under the watch of pigs and dogs, their revolutionary dreams reduced to a memory.

The Final State: Prosperity Without Fulfillment

By the final years of the story, the farm was more prosperous and better organized, and the Hayfield was part of that prosperity. The windmill had been completed, the farm possessed a threshing machine and a hay elevator of its own, and various new buildings had been added. Yet somehow the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs. The animals were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the pool, they labored in the fields; in winter they were troubled by the cold, and in summer by the flies. The Hayfield, once the site of their greatest collective triumph, had become just another field where they worked without end, their hopes for a better life deferred indefinitely.