| Summary/Abstract |
When the readers of the Ladies Home Journal turned to Thompson’s article, after paging through columns offering housekeeping and beauty advice, they faced a somber shift in tone in the journalist’s descriptions of the Dachau concentration camp. Thompson’s problematic language about civilization, race, and savagery echoed the themes of a novel by one of her favorite authors, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which described another genocidal atrocity at the hands of white Belgians in the Congo. In 1941 she had lamented the shortcomings of journalism to fully represent the war and expressed hope that it would produce “a Victor Hugo, a Sienkiewicz, a Joseph Conrad to record the final triumph of the world’s lost cause through the invincibility of the human spirit.”2 By 1945, however, Thompson herself chose to echo Conrad’s depiction of humanity’s descent into evil rather than the invincibility of the human spirit.
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