Awesome Make-Up Blog

It seems that we've approached Victorian England from a modern, post-colonial perspective. In the children's novels we've read, we point out the portentous and the sinister underneath all of the naiveté. In The Jungle Books, for example, Kipling carefully constructs his ideology within the story so that we identify--and even sympathize--with Mowgli, the embodiment of colonization. Today, we understand the concept as bad and harmful, but Kipling does a damn good job at convincing the reader otherwise.

The "warnings" that hover over the texts in both The Time Machine and The Coming Race can serve as a second example for our perspective. We certainly see the consequences of a world without the humanities in these texts--the Vril-ya and the Eloi are both on the surface a flawless race, but behind that are serious afflictions, all caused by "evolving past" art.

This hindsight perspective can certainly apply to modern society, but unfortunately, history always repeats itself; such patterns are never noticed and warnings never heeded. To use an example from class, the current administration is pushing a more science and math-based education (a link to an article is here). This was done in the 1960's, and we have created a monster. Apparently Obama never read The Coming Race.