Dramatizing Civilization in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Comparative Cultural Reading

Abstract:

This paper explores how both Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native 1 (1859) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness2 (1899) comparatively approach and dramatize setting of place and characters as basic constituents of European and African civilizations and cultures. Both novels present striking cultural reflections that stem from the civilized self in man's modern existence. In The Native, Hardy invests these constituents in tracing major characters, Clym and Eustacia, who experience two dramatic conflicting cultural desires and ideologies. Similarly, in Darkness, Conrad invests similar constituents in dramatizing two central characters, Kurtz and Marlow and the setting of place. All of which imply a state of dramatic thematization of modern civilizations and their cultural limits and discourses. Moreover, both confusing places of Egdon Heath, in The Native and the jungle, in Darkness, represent real cultural objects that control the cultural behavior of the characters. It also relevantly offers what critics have observed about the novels' cultural aspects which include dramatized civilization and cultural conflicts between the civilized and the traditional.

Keywords: The Native, Darkness, Civilization, Culture, the Heath, the Congo, Dramatization.