Exploring Corruption in Modern British Literature

There is so much time to suffer, it is unsurprising that the Modernists explored corruption so thoroughly in their work. The ubiquity of “corruption” unifies individuals as easily as a language or experience could. However, in many ways, corruption is also unique to different contexts and scenarios. The Vietnam War serviced the corruption of one generation, while the unrestricted wealth and decadence of the 1920s serviced another. While the human experience is universal, our behavior is more readily identifiable according to the context in which we live. The context of Modern British literature, of course, is defined by imperialism, nationalism, war, and the shenanigans of a people so culturally insensitive as to have themselves turned into

werewolves. Therefore, the theme of corruption in Modern British literature can be divided into the plights of the period - specifically, status, religion, and desensitization. Experiences with these three things corrupted a culture and bred a period of literature defined by the darkness of men and all the ways it came to be.
Status - power - is what commonly unites those often considered “corrupt” - politicians, leaders, wealthy men. It encompasses the political, the monetary, things perceived as inherently greedy or selfish. It is the crux of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What is more fascinating to Marlow than Kurtz, whose wealth and status renders him a local legend, whose corruption distorts him so much that he loses his humanity? Power can appeal to many, but Heart of Darkness and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” stress its particular appeal to those hailing from imperialistic England. The Englishmen seem born with an adventurous, nationalistic spirit that propels them to tread on foreign countries in the name of their nation. The texts suggest nothing initially wrong with them. Marlow is merely an explorer. Kurtz is charismatic, adored by his fiancee. Fleete, Strickland, and the narrator are average enough, if only a little too carried away by alcohol. Like most anyone, they find themselves seeking a sense of purpose. The primary characters of “The Mark of the Beast” are members of the British police force in India, with nothing to suggest that they were ever “bad” or selfish men. In fact, Strickland and the narrator’s respect for the faith of the Indian natives suggests the opposite. However, when it comes time to exercise their indisputable power over the Silver Man with a flaming hot gun barrel, the men “disgraced [themselves] as Englishmen forever.” Since there is nothing to support any theory of inherent evil within them beforehand, what is most probable? Status empowered them, status corrupted them – not even as human beings, but as the greatest species of man: Englishmen, and, in response, they are plunged into hysteria and depravity.
The same is also true of Kurtz, of course. Only briefly does Marlow speak of the kind of man Kurtz was before the Congo, and much of it is innocuous. It is when he begins to describe the pamphlet commissioned by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, though, that Kurtz’s evil dimension is expounded upon. However, Marlow describes it as a “shade of Mr. Kurtz,” suggesting diplomatically that his “sympathies were in the right place” (Conrad, 48). Through the entirety of the novel, Marlow has a clear and honest retrospective analysis of Kurtz, in addition to a confidence in his own philosophies and self-awareness, lending credence to this observation of Kurtz having well-placed sympathies. After all, no individual is born racist. The power of the white man in the 19th century bred racism and a regard of the Africans as savage, making it easy for Kurtz, in his pursuit of wealth, to develop a God-complex effective in silencing the natives. It could still be said that Kurtz was born sick, but the texts suggests otherwise when he seems to suddenly transcend his own evil, murmuring, “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad, 66.) Did he come to the Congo with evil intentions? Did he find a fiancée at home only deliberately to leave her in the pursuit of wealth and power? Or, alternatively, was he broken and deconstructed by the power afforded to him and the greed he had as a privileged, ambitious white man? As Marlow observes, “Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent” (Conrad, 65).
A close relative of power (and often a means of gaining power) is religion, an institution that the Modernist authors were clearly disillusioned with, particularly in T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Although the poem never states verbatim that its hollow men have been “corrupted,” it can be found implicitly in the fact that Eliot refers only to the darkness of a group of people, rather than describing a darkness in humanity at large. Two of the greatest existential struggles present in “The Hollow Men” are that of their difficulty with faith, one of the pinnacles of Western culture, and their general sense of purposelessness. This is exemplified when Eliot suggests that “death’s twilight kingdom” - the afterlife - is “the hope only of empty men.” They are at odds with themselves, suggesting that they cannot even be remembered as “lost, violent souls,” as they struggle with God and self-worth. Under the rule of Kurtz, the African natives face a similar plight in Heart of Darkness. When he takes a role of God-king, their lack of formal education and discernment lets them believe in his divinity, corrupting their culture. They are reduced to fearing the noise of his whistle, to warring amongst themselves at his command. Their autonomy and their purpose is lost in their service of Kurtz’s greed, and they, too, become hollow men, made corrupt by their faith and fear.
Furthermore, while it is apparent that the Englishmen of “The Mark of the Beast” were corrupted by their political power, it can also be argued that there is religious corruption in the story’s Hindu martyr, the Silver Man. He is, after all, so willing to defend his faith against blasphemy that he knowingly and bizarrely turns the blasphemer into a werewolf. Because one’s sympathies are naturally with him as he is tortured at the hands of the English, one can forget that he, too, has committed a lesser act of cruelty – and why? To defend his faith. There is no suggestion otherwise that the Silver Man is an evil man – only that he wields an evil magic in the name of Hanuman.
The final piece of the Modernists’ trinity of corruption is found in the damage inflicted by trauma and suffering.

By far, Marlow is the most sympathetic and reliable character of Heart of Darkness - he even goes so far as to offer a native slave one of his biscuits, disturbed as he is by their suffering. Furthermore, he is not an apathetic character - his characterizations of the people around him, black or white, are apt and cutting, as when he describes a white companion as “too fleshy” (Conrad, 23) or the Company’s chief accountant as a “hairdresser’s dummy” (Conrad, 21). Clearly, he is observant, sensitive. A callousness begins in him, though, subtly, from tossing the dead native overboard when the other white men found a burial more suitable, to his time in the depths of Kurtz’s Congo. Upon seeing pikes adorned with severed heads, he is “not so shocked as you may think. The start back… was really nothing but a movement of surprise” (Conrad, 55). This Marlow is removed from the “horror-stuck” (Conrad, 21) individual that fed the starving native. His corruption could be the most implacable in Heart of Darkness, but it is, in fact, there when he loses his will in response to the trauma, the agony of the Congo. His experience with disgust in Chapter 3 is laced with weariness, with detachment. Like the hollow men’s response to the trauma of war, Marlow is made desensitized and corrupt. The hollow men “grope together and avoid speech,” and Marlow avoids speaking the truth, preferring to falsify Kurtz’s final words to his fiancee, to protect the identity of Kurtz when, perhaps, the Marlow that “hate[d], detest[ed], and [couldn’t] bear a lie” (Conrad, 29) would have been disgusted to do

so.
It cannot be definitely said that men are born evil. According to the Modernists, though, they can be made so. In Modern British literature, there is a clear and universal theme of corruption, of men losing their senses of self on the soil of England and in the boomtowns of its colonies. Regardless of how they began, they all end the same way: depraved, destroyed, and corrupted.