Pigs in Western literature have long formed the subject of folk legends, children’s rhymes and stories, movie comedy, novels and poems. What is it that both repels us and draws us in these obese and clumsy creatures? Why do we view them with both revulsion and, at times, surprising affection?
Pigs in the Ancient World
Pig symbolism in Western Europe, and in the Near Eastern societies that gave us our main religious traditions, is very ancient. Fraser’s The Golden Bough (1890) and Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948) both point to the pig’ associations with the pagan Mother Goddess all around the ancient Mediterranean.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam
In Abrahamic faith traditions pigs are regarded as unclean. The eating of pork is forbidden to both Jews and Muslims. In the Christian New Testament an evil spirit driven out of a human being by Jesus enters into a herd of pigs, and drives them over a cliff. Believers usually point to the unclean lifestyle of pigs, their love of dirt and habit of eating carrion and manure. It also seems likely that those earliest monotheists, the Jews, rejected the pig for its connections with pagan worship.
Proverbs
The revulsion from pigs’ less attractive characteristics has found its way into proverbs. Making a pig of yourself, or to pig out; but also to make a pig’s ear of something, meaning to bodge it or do it badly. To be pigheaded is to be stubborn, refusing to listen to reason. When something or someone can’t be made more refined or elegant we say ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.’ To say of someone, ‘He’s a pig,’ is to sum him up as selfish, greedy, unmannerly, crass and overbearing; in short, unpleasant generally. The most insulting term radicals of the Sixties could think of for the police they despised and hated was, ‘The Pigs’.
Respect for Pigs
Many recent portrayals of the pig in our culture have been friendlier. Here are two twentieth-century examples:
G.K. Chesterton on porcine beauty
This early twentieth century writer is one of a select few who praise the pig as beautiful. The shape of a fat pig is, Chesterton claimed in The Uses of Diversity (1920), ‘among the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature’. Its contours are ‘swift and yet heavy’, like the lines drawn by ‘rushing water or in a rolling cloud’.
Ted Hughes, ‘View of a Pig’
In his poem ‘View of a Pig’ (Lupercal 1960), Hughes gives us another aspect of the pig: its power and potential ferocity. A young pig, according to Hughes’ poem, can be ‘faster and nimbler than a cat’, and its squeal ‘like the rending of metal’. Adult pigs can eat dead cats, and even cinders, the poet tells us. When they bite, they take out a half-moon shaped slice ‘right out’. Their bite ‘is worse than a horse’s.’ While this hardly amounts to an unreserved recommendation, Hughes’ description of the pig evokes respect – even a perverse admiration.
Young Pigs Face the World
As in the nursery rhyme, ‘This little Piggy Went to Market,’ pigs in stories for children are usually piglets. They are stand-ins for a young human who is learning about life. Like children, they are small, chubby, cute, sometimes gluttonous or selfish, but also often determined, resourceful, and capable of learning from experience.
Pigling Bland
Beatrix Potter’s story Pigling Bland (1913) tells of a young pig sent out into the world to seek his fortune. Finding the world a dangerous place, he cleverly evades the threats, ever-present to pigs in a world of hungry humans, of being killed and turned into bacon. After he meets up with the lovely young Berkshire sow, Pig-wig, the pair escape to the next county, where they live happily ever after.
Piglet in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
In Shepard’s illustrations for the A.A. Milne stories, Piglet is always drawn as tiny in comparison with the other animals. His role in Winnie-the-Pooh, as in other tales about the house at Pooh Corner, is mainly that of loyal sidekick to the Bear. Piglet echoes Pooh’s words, joins in his songs, and generally walks in Pooh’s footsteps.
Porky Pig (Looney Tunes, 1930s)
The young pig in the Warner Brothers cartoons is (with the exception of the odd angry outburst in a showdown with Daffy Duck), generally polite and shy. Though capable of using long words, he has a stammer, and often seems confused by the strangeness of the world around him.
Wilbur (Charlotte’s Web, 1952)
E.B. White’s lyrical celebration of family life on an American farm was adapted for the screen as a Hanna-Barbera cartoon in 1973, and again as a Paramount film with human actors in 2006.
In both the book and the films Wilbur the pig is shown as naive, slowly finding out about the world. He learns only from the other animals that, like other pigs, he is destined for the slaughter. Wilbur is at first portrayed as a self-pitying and somewhat self-centred character. He gradually learns to care about other people, however, through the example of self-sacrifice shown by Charlotte the spider, who saves Wilbur’s life.
Babe (The Sheep-Pig)
Dick King-Smith’s story for children was first published in the UK, as The Sheep-Pig, in 1983. In the United States the book became Babe the Gallant Pig, and then the box office hit Babe (1995), directed by Chris Noonan. While there are similarities with the plot of Charlotte’s Web, in Babe the pig is saved from slaughter mainly by his own skill (in herding sheep).
Grown-up Pigs
If in recent fiction they have mainly served as a stand-in for the maturing young, pigs in Western culture have sometimes been assigned more mature roles. Here are three of them: the Starlet, the Stalinist and the Soldier.
The Starlet: Miss Piggy
Miss Piggy of the Muppets show of the mid-1970s - she of the improbably large blue eyes and pearl necklace - has clearly left her piglet-hood well behind her. Bosomy, glamorous and temperamental lover of Kermit the frog, always impeccably dressed, narcissistic and yearning for fame, she possesses all the stereotypical traits of the would-be music star.
The Stalinist: Animal Farm (1945)
When Orwell wrote his allegory of the hijacking of the Russian revolution by the power-hungry clique led by Stalin (the pig Napoleon in Orwell’s novel), it seems fitting that he chose pigs to represent his Party animals. The pigs of Animal Farm are intelligent and ruthless, as well as entirely self-interested. It is not difficult to imagine them coming at last to resemble the capitalist humans they have initially helped to overthrow.
The Soldier: Hogs of War (Infogames 2000)
In this video game, developed by Infogrames Studios for the PC and PlayStation, competing armies are represented by pigs of opposing nations, as they fight a world war to control the valuable resources of pigswill (oil ) held in ‘Saustralasia’. An Orwellian parable for our own times?
While we share with pigs their love of laziness and gluttony, most of our fictions about them are a projection of our own human qualities. For better or worse, we like to tell ourselves that Pigs R Us.
Further reading:
Harris, Marvin. Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches; The Riddles of Culture. New York: Random House, 1974.
Retan, Walter, and S. D. Schindler. Piggies, Piggies, Piggies: A Treasury of Stories,Songs, & Poems. New York: Simon & Shuster Books for Young Readers, 1993.
Sillar, Frederick Cameron and Meyler, Ruth Mary. The Symbolic Pig. An Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1961.
