Orwell's heart of darkness: The road to Wigan pier as modernist anthropology

• Published in: Prose studies Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 71 - 102
• Main Author: Rae, Patricia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Taylor & Francis Group 01-04-1999; Frank Cass and Co
• DOI: 10.1080/01440359908586662
• EISSN: 1743-9426
• ISSN: 0144-0357

Critics have charged that Orwell's complaints about the dirt and smell of working-class houses in The Road to Wigan Pier inadvertently show that he was contemptuous of the class he claimed to serve. This essay disputes that assessment, arguing that Orwell's study is an admirable example of "modernist anthropology," a genre whose goal is to give an uncensored account of an ethnographer's difficulties in the field. Unlike the self-fashioned father of this genre, Malinowski, who sacrificed Conradian irony for the sake of "anthropological authority," Orwell courageously portrays the prejudices of his fieldworker-persona, hoping to expose a form of hypocrisy typical of left-wing middle-class domestic ethnographers in the 1930s. Orwell's text emulates Conrad's Heart of Darkness, both in its rich portrait of an unreliable investigator, whose horrified reactions to an alien environment signify a parallel journey into the "darkness" of his own heart, and in its complex ideological analysis of the phenomenon of self-censorship.