《《Heathdiff#39;s Great Hunger 参考2》.pdf

Heathdiffs Great Hunger: The Cannibal Other in Wuthering Heights Matthew Beaumont Fine fellows - cannibals - in their place. (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) In an article on The Future Results of British Rule in India , published in 1857, Karl Marx elaborated a highly suggestive metaphor for the ideology of progress sponsored so aggressively by the Victorian imperial project. He pointed out that, on the colonial subcontinent, the pro- found hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home , where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked . And in a shocking final stroke he declared that human progress .. . resemble[s] the hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain. Bourgeois civilization, from this perspective, is little more than a barbaric celebration of its own brutal capacity for collectively exploiting human beings as dead labour. Its sophisticated facade, like the profile of the ancient pyramids, conceals the mjissed bodies of the coundess labourers that have built it. As Marxs vaguely cannibalistic image suggests, barbarism is not the diametrical opposite of civilised culture , as it appears in contemporary ideology, but its dialectical obverse. The consequences of this dialectic of progress were becoming more and more evident in mid-Victorian Britain, where industrial capitalism was not invariably capable of maintaining its respectable form even at home . For example, the railway boom of the 1840s, as Dombey and Son (1846) testified, quickly became symbolic of capitalisms emancipatory potential, bu