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Essay / A study of the downsides of capitalism in The Time Machine
In The Time Machine by HG Wells, the anonymous narrator, commonly known as the Time Traveler, creates a device capable of traveling through time and proceeds to encounter two humanoid species of a distant future. The Time Traveler's adventure is commonly accepted by readers as that of a Victorian-era man who lives thousands of millennia through the limitless exploration of time. This initial interpretation fails to integrate Wells' underlying themes of the evolution of humanity, class division, and the effects of capitalism with today's time traveler culture. If this key aspect of the Time Traveler's narrative goes unnoticed, readers will be ill-equipped to fully understand Wells' ultimate analogy, the struggle between capitalist and worker. The relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks, the two divergent species from the author's future, is a representation of the characteristics and future projections of the 19th century Victorian era, presented through an early science fiction interpretation. In this essay, I will analyze the analogy between the Eloi and the Morlocks, putting forward Wells' latent argument about what will happen to humanity if capitalism persists in taking advantage of workers for profit and well-being. to be privileged. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay As the time traveler observes the relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks and studies the behavior and physical traits of both species, he develops several theories like why humanity became a completely different race from each other. He discovers that humanity evolved into two different species due to "the progressive widening of the present, merely temporary and social, difference between the capitalist and the worker" (40). The time traveler does not simply claim that humanity has evolved and changed from what he knows, but that it has changed due to widening social inequalities between the upper and lower classes over the course of time. Victorian era. This theme is crucial to understanding the purpose of the book, which revolves around this general idea of class suppression and societal confrontation. To understand this representative class struggle between the Eloi and the Morlocks, we must understand the beginnings of their respective races. The Eloi are ultimately the descendants of the elite because they inhabit and control “considerable portions of the country’s surface” (40). The Morlocks, or lower class, "lost their birthright in the sky" (40) and had to settle underground, while maintaining the production of goods. Thus, according to the Time Traveler's Social Darwinist perspective, humanity has transformed into distinct branches of contrasting species, which are also a physical embodiment of the differences between upper and lower classes, due to their gradual change of location, but fundamentally because of their class contrasts. The fact that the Eloi did not produce or work for their own goods reinforces the idea that they are elitist and comparable to the upper class of England in the 1890s. The Eloi presented "no machinery or apparatus of any kind, and yet they were dressed in pleasant fabrics” (34). The only logical reason for the Eloi to acquire their wares would be the Morlocks, with their use of "large industrial machinery" (44). Consequently, the Morlocks are socially dominated by the elitist Eloi. Most critics agree that the Morlocks are socially subordinate to the Eloi because.