Voices From Within The Veil Analysis

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Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. DuBois (originally published in 1920). This work allows a peep into the relationship of DuBois with nature and outdoor recreation. DuBois shared a reverence for and a fear of nature, while encountered nature in unique and special way. The work offers us a profound and unrestrained glance into the complex relationship between the wild places of the country and Afro-American people.
Why do not those who are scarred in the world’s battle and hurt by its hard ness travel to these places of beauty and drown themselves in the utter joy of life? (Darkwater 229) The question that W. E. B. DuBois confronted in “Of Beauty and Death” is one with which environmentalists have struggled through the ages. DuBois (1868-1963) was a prominent sociologist, civil rights activist, and author. The question asked …show more content…

Vaughan appropriately evaluates, one of the novel 's central clashes is the "conflict between pastoral and industrial-urban living ", as it "becomes an angry repudiation of industrial life as destructive to human values ". Utilizing both naturalism and pastoralism to overstate the conflict, Attaway exceptionally breaks out of these two representational modes with a generally minor secondary character named Smothers, a farsighted representative for theearth’s pain: "[o]ne of the men whispered that Smothers was off his nut. However they listened and heard a different kind of story: ‘It’s wrong to tear up the ground and melt it up in the furnace. Ground doesn’t like it. It’s the hell and devil kind of work” (52-3). His legs broke down in a cruel steel mill tragedy, Smothers ' cruel foresightedness is the result of wisdom gained through suffering, of an elevated feeling of what the "ground" experiences as it is mined, refined, and made into steel. Since he conveys an ecological perspective to the ethical and ontological relations among workers, machine, and earth, this character appears on the literary scene