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Replacement of a Culture In Heart of Darkness Kurtzs death is evident because of his lack of restraint and surrendered spirit of his extreme ways to accomplish good for his system. As does his culture, and when he faced with the adversity of the Congo, he died because he could control the evil within him. Joseph Conrad uses the theme of light and dark to contrast the civilized with the savage in Heart of Darkness. In Hear of Darkness, Kurtz comes to the Congo with noble intentions. He thought that each ivory station should stand like a beacon light, offering a better way of life to the natives. He was considered to be a universal genius because he was an orator, writer, poet, musician, artist, politician, ivory producer, and chief agent of the ivory companys Inner Station.
yet, he was also a hollow man, a man without basic integrity or any sense of social responsibility. Daring to face the consequences of the culture, he loses his identity; unable to be totally beast and never able to be fully human, he alternates between trying to return to the jungle and recalling in grotesque terms his former idealism. The colonizers cruelty towards the natives and their lust for ivory also is spotlighted in Kurtzs horror. The white men who came to the Congo professing to bring progress and light to darkest Africa have themselves been deprived of the sanctions of their European social orders. The supposed purpose of the colonizers traveling into Africa was to civilize the natives. Instead the Europeans took the natives land away from them by force.
In such a way one culture became substituted by another. When the play Translations was first performed by Friel's own theatre company it was performed in the Irish language, and at the start of the play, all the characters speak Irish as their first language, the English language comes into the script a lot later, which reflects the course of events in Ireland over the past two centuries. All these characters have been brought up speaking the language and it is a fundamental part of their life, culture and identity. English is the second main language in the play. It represents the future to Maire and Owen, and a mistake to Hugh and Manus.
Yolland however falls in love with Ireland, its language and culture and he feels that something is being eroded by his task of renaming the geographical features of Ireland. Yolland is not the stereotypical English male of the time, because he missed the boat to India and that stereotypical way of life, which would be following his fathers wishes. The other two languages used in the play are Greek and Latin, which are spoken only by Hugh and Jimmy. These two classical languages create an identity of intellectualism in their users and it is significant that it is the Irish rather than the English characters who can speak them contradicting Lances view of them being inferior.
Friel shows us the use of language in several different forms. The first scene where Manus is teaching Sarah to speak shows us that language is used to create communication. This can also apply with the lack of communication between the English and Irish characters, for instance how Maire and Yolland fall in love with the sound of each other, despite not being able to understand a word that the other actually says. Different languages create boundaries of communication and the play shows that a lack of communication through language leads to violence, like when the Donnelly twins are supposed to have hunted after Yolland and when Lance threatens to terrorize the villagers.
One of the problems of using communication through language is that it is a weapon that can be used against you as well as for you. The play is set at a time when colonization is occurring through education and thus language in Ireland, rather than through brute force. It is a time of division in Ireland between those who claim to be looking forward to progress in Ireland with the incorporation of the English language and those who want to preserve the use of Gaelic as it is a part of their culture and it is an important method of fighting colonization. Friel creates characters that represent both of these groups. One of the main functions of language in the play is to create or reflect identity. For something to have an identity, then it is specified to have a unique quality, so identities can counter each other.
This is shown as there is a difference between the English identity and the Irish identity. Differing identities can create boundaries, as Maire and Yolland break these boundaries by falling in love and because of Yolland's English identity he is likely to have been killed. Likewise when the Donnelly twins break the boundaries by killing Yolland, the Irish villagers are punished severely, because of their Irish identity. The play seems to emphasize the importance of Ireland retaining its identity, in spite of oppression from the English. Friel highlights a particularly important era of Irish history to make this point and also makes an emphasis on how one culture can be replaced by other. Things Fall Apart, by China Achebe tells the story of an Ibo village of the late 1800 s.
Achebe in his novel showed two emotionally incompatible facets of modern African life; the humiliations visited on Africans by colonialism, and the lasting effects of this imposed alien culture or what was left of colonial rule. The novel focuses on sufferings that native people suffer because of forced replacement of their native culture by a foreign and different one. In Things Fall Apart, we witness the destruction of a traditional native culture. More specifically we witnessed the weakening of Igbo spirituality, as well as the death of the tribes livelihood. The apparent cause can be found in a seemingly good intended mission acting as a gateway for the intrusion of a foreign government. Also it was its quest to conquer a self-sustaining, prosperous culture.
Although the Igbo downfall was caused primarily by the invasion of Christian missionaries, their own religion played a significant role in allowing the initial infiltration of an alien religion. This was the final destruction of a once prosperous culture. Bibliography: Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Middlesex, England: Penguin Publishers, 1983. Taylor, Derek.
Conrad's Hear of Darkness. The Explicator. No. 4 Summer 1998: 195 - 8. Began, Richard. Achebe's Sense of an Ending: History and Tragedy in Things Fall Apart. Studies in the Novel 29. 3 (Fall 1997): 396 (16 pp) Friel, Brian.
Translations, 1980.
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Research essay sample on Heart Of Darkness Lack Of Communication
