noble savage

noun

: a mythic conception of people belonging to non-European cultures as having innate natural simplicity and virtue uncorrupted by European civilization

also : a person exemplifying this conception

Examples of noble savage in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The curtain was ornately embroidered with images of bears, onion domes, and noble savages untainted by logic. —Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023

Native Americans have long been depicted in Hollywood films and television projects as either bloodthirsty barbarians or noble savages. —Marlow Stern, Rolling Stone, 9 June 2023

This palpable connection yields highly intimate moments, while jettisoning the cliché of the noble savage by underscoring the acute awareness this community has of its political context, environmental issues and new ways of confronting these realities provided by technology and mass media. —Emiliano Granada, Variety, 29 May 2023

To romanticize the lost past is to risk another form of exoticization, casting Indigenous peoples as beatifically wise ancients — the archetype of the noble savage — and thus depriving them of dimension and a stake in modernity. —New York Times, 17 Feb. 2022

Rather the novel presents Tarzan as Rousseau’s unspoiled child of nature, a literally noble savage free from the vices and corruption associated with advanced industrial society. —Washington Post, 19 Aug. 2020

In this sense, he is cast as a modernizer, turning noble savages into solid citizens. —James Marcus, The New Yorker, 1 June 2020

Whereas the book’s white characters are nuanced, Indian characters are reduced to dangerous adversaries or noble savages. —Elena Nicolaou, refinery29.com, 24 Aug. 2019

That’s the only yeti to be found in the script, except obliquely, perhaps, in its endorsement of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage. —Margaret Gray, latimes.com, 7 June 2019

Word History

First Known Use

1670, in the meaning defined above