From social relationships to political power structures, all aspects of society were changed by the technology innovations of the industrial revolution. Manufacturing goods on a mass scale led to the development of an entirely new worker who’s success now depended on his ability to operate machines rather than his talent as a craftsman. The steam engine revolutionized modes of transportation: trains and railroads were implemented everywhere and steamboats facilitated cross-oceanic trade and exploration. In developed nations, agriculturally based economies gave way to manufacturing and trading economies as feudal systems were replaced by democratic societies. What allowed for this shift? According to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1832), the equality supplied by democracy is what facilitated the entrance into this new economic and political era. Furthermore, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are both texts written in response to the changes resulting from the industrial revolution. Both Marx and Conrad’s writings have a common concern: the theme of oppressors and oppressed. This tells us that at that time more than ever, inequality was an issue to be reckoned with. This contradicts Tocqueville’s prediction that society is constantly and permanently moving towards a general leveling. From these three authors, we are allowed to see an inherent paradox in the equality of conditions supplied by democracies: while democracy was the means that allowed feudalism Ñ a system where inequality was blatantly obvious Ñ was replaced, the class structure and political consequences (i.e. imperialism) of this new system were, acco…
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…uropeans, Conrad is perhaps suggesting that the title of the book is in fact a reference to the European because they, as oppressors, force natives into an oppression they know to be incoherent and problematic as suggested by Marlow’s thoughts when seeing a native die before him: “to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs” (38).
List of Works Cited:
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton
Humanity of the Primitive in Heart of Darkness, Dialect of Modernism and Totem and Taboo
Humanity of the Primitive in Heart of Darkness, Dialect of Modernism and Totem and Taboo
The ways in which a society might define itself are almost always negative ways. “We are not X.” A society cannot exist in a vacuum; for it to be distinct it must be able to define itself in terms of the other groups around it. These definitions must necessarily take place at points of cultural contact, the places at which two societies come together and arrive at some stalemate of coexistence. For European culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this place of contact—this new culture by which to define itself—came from Africa, from those “primitive” cultures whose society was being studied and in some ways appreciated for the first time. The African natives became the new Other, the new way to define what Europe was at that time.
The way in which this redefinition took place was through the institution of a fundamentally hierarchical system. “Primitive” versus “sophisticated,” “barbarous” versus “cultured.” The anthropology of the time—articulated primarily by Frazer—espoused an evolutionary view of humanity. Societies passed through several stages of development on their way to true civilisation, and, while the Europeans had made it all the way, the Africans were lagging just a bit behind. This, however, created a problem for Europe. If Africans were fundamentally the same as Europeans (albeit farther back on the evolutionary ladder), what did that say about the roots of European society? This uncertainty created a very disjunctive view of primitives in the literature of the time. In his book, The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North suggests that, “The colonial subject is either a part of nature, utter…
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… intensely inhuman, Freud shows us that these things are all one. This continuum of thought collapses into one inescapable fact: we are the primitive, and he is us.
Works Cited and Consulted
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1971.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: W. W. Norton