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Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is, admittedly, a text with many racist, imperialist and sexist subtexts. A feminist literary analysis, however, ...
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by Kathryn Marie Smith
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida April 2009
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Author: Kathryn Marie Smith Title: Revis(it)ing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness : Women, Symbolism, and Resistance Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Sika Dagbovie Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2009 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is, admittedly, a text with many racist, imperialist and sexist subtexts. A feminist literary analysis, however, can extract women’s empowerment and agency. This thesis takes a closer look at the Mistress (also known as the African woman) and the Intended, two women with vastly different racial and class backgrounds who, in their own ways, demonstrate resistance. This thesis analyzes Mr. Kurtz’s often ignored sketch in oils, arguing that the sketch itself demonstrates the colonial mentality of difference and the disruption of that difference. It then explores both the Mistress and the Intended in detail, positing that while the Mistress uses the colonizers’ fear of the wilderness and its silence to her advantage, the Intended takes control over her own domestic circumstance. Overall, this author asserts that the Mistress and the Intended, while often dismissed, are noteworthy, important, and influential characters in Heart of Darkness.
This manuscript is dedicated to the Women’s Studies Center at Florida Atlantic University. The Women’s Studies graduate program has offered me invaluable opportunities for learning and teaching, and has equipped me to pursue my dream of becoming a college professor. I will always remember the people I have befriended in this program, and I hope to pass on their legacy of encouragement and empowerment.
Introduction: Text as Symbolic Power (Play) On the surface, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a story of Belgian colonialism in Africa, seems to be a maledr iven text which leaves little room for a feminist literary analysis. Conrad’s narrator, protagonist, major and minor characters are all European men, and the women who exist within the novella are not even given names. These women are the fiancée and the lover of Mr. Kurtz, a manager of the Belgian Congo trade, and they are only known in reference to him – his fiancée as his Intended and the African woman only as his beautiful “savage” Mistress. 1 The narrator, Marlow, often depicts these two female characters as two dimensional caricatures instead of genuine people, striving to keep them in their geographic and proverbial place throughout the novel. Despite the patriarchal and imperialist elements written and narrated throughout the text, however, a feminist critique can reveal important ways in which the Mistress and the Intended defy Marlow’s categorization. Though the women in Heart of Darkness are often relegated to the margins of the text, they are simultaneously unimportant and vitally important. Heliéna M.
(^1) In the essay, “A Black Athena in the Heart of Darkness , or Conrad’s Baffling Oxymorons,” André Voila et al. argue that Conrad never specifically names the African woman Kurtz’s mistress. Thoughtheir point is intriguing, for the purposes of my paper, as well as clarity, I will be following the literary critical tradition of identifying Kurtz’s fiancée as the Intended and the African woman as the Mistress.
Krenn, a postcolonial literary scholar, highlights this contradiction in her essay, “The ‘Beautiful’ Women: Women as Reflections of Colonial Issues in Conrad’s Malay Novels,” stating that the “Conradian female character appears to be altogether insignificant even though she plays both a structurally and thematically important role” (106). The Intended and the Mistress are not valued characters in terms of textual attention and spoken voice, but they are imperative to Marlow, for they represent foundational symbols of colonialism. Their “structurally and thematically important role,” then, is the representation (and consequent disruption) of purity and sexuality, civilization and savagery, order and chaos, respectively. In Marlow’s perspective, Kurtz’s fiancée embodies the “civilized” woman who is white in many senses of the word – pure, fair skinned, European, upper middlec lass – while Kurtz’s African mistress is the epitome of savagery and darkness. As symbols, these two women are vital to colonialism, in that they justify the racism, ideals and false heroism of imperialist agendas. Padmini Mongia elaborates upon the women’s contradictory and complicated position, writing, “[n]ot active participants in adventure narratives, women are nevertheless the site upon which the anxieties of late Victorian and early Edwardian England are played out. The feminine, always associated with what is weak but also often threatening or seductive, is a negative trope in... Heart of Darkness ” (135). Mongia poignantly highlights the strange ambiguity the Mistress and Intended occupy in Heart of Darkness ; though they are not major characters in the traditional sense, they remain the “site” of much of the thought and action. Kurtz’s Intended is the appropriately weak and cloistered feminine figure while his Mistress represents the
This thesis seeks not only to illuminate and deconstruct the false binaries of colonialism, but also to revive the Intended and the Mistress as important characters in Conrad’s novella. Drawing on and departing from those critics who have acknowledged the women’s (un)importance, I take a feminist critical perspective by highlighting the female characters’ agency within Heart of Darkness. I follow the lead of postcolonial literary critic Rose Marangoly George, who offers a remedy to the rampant imperialism of Western texts in her article, “Feminists Theorize Colonial/Postcolonial.” She suggests that readers use “a critical framework in which literary and other texts can be read against the grain of the hegemonic discourse in a colonial or neocolonial context” (Marangoly George 212). According to Marangoly George, this framework is different than typical literary analysis, for it “insists on recognizing, resisting, and overturning the strictures and structures of colonial relations of power” (212, emphasis mine). She therefore offers three interconnecting responses to colonialist literature which I employ in this thesis: (a) recognizing and identifying imperialist, racist, and sexist elements, (b) resisting these elements through critique and through revealing women’s agency, and (c) overturning the “strictures and structures” of imperialism by writing new meanings into the text. 3 In analyzing Heart of Darkness, I argue that Marlow actively constructs the Intended and the Mistress as static symbols, but that these female characters break free from
(^3) Marangoly George references Spivak in her insistence on recognizing women’s agency despite oppression: “Spivak points to what will become a major preoccupation of postcolonial feminist writing:namely, if and how disenfranchised women can represent, speak, and act for themselves, despite oppressive conditions. Postcolonial feminism unflinchingly acknowledges that there are many obstaclesin the path of securing such ‘voicec onsciousness.’ Yet, despite the odds, postcolonial feminist discourse strives to create the space for this ‘countersentence’ to be spoken by the ‘gendered subaltern’”(Marangoly George 216).
these oppositional categories and threaten to destroy the carefully crafted empire of colonialism. Discussing the women’s agency in Heart of Darkness is inherently complicated because, as fictional characters, they are largely controlled by the author Conrad, and even the narrator Marlow. What this thesis reveals, however, are the ways in which the characters escape Conrad’s control at crucial times within the narrative. The Mistress, for example, is so threatening to Conrad that he edits her role several times between 1899 and 1902 to diminish her presence. In Chapters Three and Four, I analyze these elisions to expose the Mistress’s hidden power. Furthermore, I read the Mistress Intended as a character that in fact speaks to “real” historical and autonomous women. Throughout this thesis, I avoid the “tendency to either ignore or romanticize female agency, portraying women as victims or heroines” (Hodgson and McCurdy 16). Instead, I acknowledge that the female characters are oppressed in certain ways but also argue, like Dorothy Hodges and Sheryl McCurdy that they “produce, reproduce, and transform gender representations and relations” and that “the cumulative effect of their actions, large and small, is to shift relations of power, and thereby reconfigure gender relations and representations” (16). The irony of Heart of Darkness is that although Conrad and Marlow reduce the Mistress and the Intended to symbols in order to contain them, the female characters end up symbolizing not only the impossibility and disruption of colonial binaries, but also powerful archetypes of female power.
overtly racist text which underwrites an imperialist agenda. Achebe describes the convention of making Africa(ns) dark and forbidding in his essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ,” arguing that Conrad’s novella “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization” (Achebe 252). Achebe astutely posits that Conrad chose Africa as a location for fantastical and horrifying events because his (racist) audience would readily accept chaos and darkness if it came from the continent of Africa. According to Achebe, Conrad “chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths,” and these myths pertain not only to Africa but to the African woman as well (Achebe 253). He claims that Conrad spends time describing the Mistress for two reasons: “[f]irst, she is in her place and so can win Conrad’s special brand of approval and second, she fulfills a structural requirement of the story: a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step forth at the end of the story” (Achebe 255). I will discuss both of Achebe’s contentions further in my thesis, but I challenge his claim of “the author’s bestowal of human expression to the one [The Intended] and the withholding of it from the other [the Mistress]” (Achebe 255). Achebe may be correct in that Conrad (and Marlow) do not bestow the Mistress with “human expression,” yet a close reading of her interactions with the colonizers reveals a great deal of agency and autonomy. 5 Chinua Achebe is not the only critic to underestimate the volition that Conrad’s women display. In her groundbreaking article, “The Women Do Not Travel: Gender, Difference, and Incommensurability in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ,”
(^5) See Patrick Brantlinger and André Voila et al. for a similar perspective.
Gabrielle MacIntire describes the women as “powerless,” “sedentary, stationary, and confined to their own territories”: language which is, in itself, very confining (258 9). Nina Strauss uses the same negative language in her work, claiming that the African woman’s “image, though visually full, is physically void and nearly inhuman; for it is explicitly allied with that abominable darkness described by Marlow” (208). While Strauss is correct to point out the connection between the Mistress and darkness (a colonialist link which I will further discuss in Chapter Three), she forgets the crucial fact that this is how the Mistress is “described by Marlow .” The point of my thesis is to reveal the women’s importance despite sexist and racist narration. This thesis directly argues against Strauss’s statement that “Conrad’s text offers no women’s voice... to the reader” (208). In contrast to Strauss and MacIntire, Rita Bode gives quite a different interpretation of Heart of Darkness, one which exposes an abundance of women’s voices. She contends that though criticism has often focused on the “theme of brotherhood,” specifically between Marlow and Kurtz, a careful reader can find the bonds of sisterhood within the novella (Bode 20). In her essay, “‘They…Should Be Out Of It:’ The Women of Heart of Darkness ,” Bode writes about how “the women also form significant reflections of each other,” and how in this way, they “form a kind of sisterhood in which each female seems to support and complement the intents of the others” (Bode 20). The Mistress and the Intended may form connections, and indeed sometimes serve as “reflections of each other,” yet these ties are found solely in literary devices and not in the women’s actions. Bode’s article implies a conscious sisterhood between the two female characters when, in fact, they are separated by not
Heart of Darkness .” The authors offer close readings of the passages concerning the Mistress, arguing that “the paragraphs devoted to the character do not present a static portrait but a kind of compressed drama” (Voila et al. 164). The above authors have undoubtedly improved the literary analysis of Heart of Darkness by recognizing the Mistress’s agency and pioneering a study into the women of Conrad’s novella. Where they fall short, however, is in discussing the multifaceted ways in which both the Mistress and the Intended resist Marlow’s misogynistic narration. The point of this thesis is not simply to critique Heart of Darkness for its patriarchal and racist depictions of the female characters, but rather, to focus on “how disenfranchised women can represent, speak, and act for themselves, despite oppressive conditions” (Marangoly George 216).
Feminist Frameworks While many scholars have explored the themes, characters, symbols, and significance of Heart of Darkness, still others have struggled with the difficulties of even approaching colonial, masculinece ntered literature. Feminist literary theory, as a school of criticism, began in the 1960s as a study of how patriarchal texts, through masculine language, methods, and subject matter, tend to alienate female readers and scholars. Preceding the feminist literary movement, Virginia Woolf, in “A Room of One’s Own,” reflected on the inherent contradiction of woman reader/writer approaching patriarchal texts. Authors such as Kate Millett seized upon this feminist foundation and questioned how a woman reader could begin to relate to masculinist works like Heart of Darkness, when the main characters, plot line, and even
metaphors focus solely on men. In response to such obstacles, scholars like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar created their own feminist centered criticism on traditional texts, revealing patriarchal and imperialist undercurrents that previous critics seem to have missed. The goal of these authors was not only to deconstruct canonical works but also to reveal hidden female empowerment within those same literary texts. Their aims were and are threefold: “to counter conscious and unconscious patriarchal presuppositions,” “to explore women’s literature,” and to examine the continuing effects that literature imposes on general society (Leitch 315). Ultimately, feminist and postcolonial scholars view Conrad’s work as a text fraught with sexist, racist, and imperialist themes, but which, for these reasons, needs to be analyzed through a progressive lens. In the essay “‘Too Beautiful Altogether’: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness ,” Johanna M. Smith discusses the difficulties and benefits of dissecting Heart of Darkness. Smith writes: A story about manly adventure narrated and written by a man, Heart of Darkness might seem an unpropitious subject for feminist criticism... however, a feminist approach to Conrad’s story of colonizing can interrogate its complex interrelation of patriarchal and imperialist ideologies. By examining the women in Marlow’s narrative, we can identify the patriarchal imperialist blend that requires the kinds of women he creates. (Smith 180) In this one paragraph, Smith deftly identifies the limitations imposed on both the critics and Conrad’s female characters. Because the novella is both written and narrated by men, the Mistress and the Intended seem to be trapped in a limiting and
a Critique of Imperialism,” Spivak uncovers the ways in which British imperialism was inextricably connected to the literature which authors such as Conrad produced. In other words, Conrad, as a male British author, is actively constructing British ideals of colonialism, masculinity, and normality in Heart of Darkness , whether consciously or unconsciously. Exploring Marlow’s stereotypes of the Mistress and the Intended lends insight into colonial views of race, gender, and class, particularly how intersections of these social signifiers literally mold and shape literary characters. Although the two women are both middle to upper class in their respective communities, the implications of their class statuses are vastly different. The Intended, as a white, European woman, largely conforms to the expectations of domesticity, staying indoors and pining for her unfaithful fiancé, whom she believes is valiantly earning money for their marriage. Later in the story, when Kurtz dies, she is then required to dress in mourning for a lengthened period of time, still confined inside her dim home. While the European male colonizers treat the Intended as a porcelain doll because of her class, the African Mistress’s upper class does not provide her the same luxury, comfort and protection. Her jewelry, clothing, and adornment suggest that she is an upper class woman, if not a queen, amongst her people, but to the colonizers she is simply another black woman to use and control.^7 It is clear, therefore, that when colonial power is involved, race prejudice undercuts class privilege, and all Africans are subsumed into the category of undesirable darkness.
(^7) Johanna M. Smith argues that readers should view the Mistress as a woman warrior with a position of power among her native community.
Like Spivak, this thesis encourages modern readers to realize that “[t]he role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored” although this fact “continue[s] to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth century British literature” (Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts” 896). Spivak goes as far as to assert that the absence of a postcolonial, feminist lens in literature analysis is the continuation of the “imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms” (896). It is, admittedly, a paradox to embark on a feminist analysis of a text that is as obviously patriarchal and imperialist as Heart of Darkness, but I am not the first to do so. Gertrude Mianda, in her study of gender and education in the Belgian Congo, argues that “it is precisely because women were kept on the margins of social and public discourse in the Belgian Congo that we must begin to write their history by making use of men’s writings. Only in this way can we extricate Congolese women from the rubbish of colonization” (Mianda 145). Similarly, in my thesis, I extricate the stories of the Mistress and the Intended even though they are situated in a predominantly male atmosphere. My analysis of the men’s reactions to, and fear of, the women is just as telling as the women’s own actions and agency. This thesis is an attempt to restate the importance of these female characters in a more encompassing way. In my second chapter, “Sketching the Uncontrollable Darkness: Colonialism, Power, and Subversion in Heart of Darkness ,” I analyze a powerful yet often overlooked symbol in Heart of Darkness : Kurtz’s sketch of the blindfolded woman carrying a torch. I draw upon scholarship which suggests a strong connection between the appropriation involved in sketching portraits and landscapes, and the further appropriation of the land and people themselves. In drawing the
