"The Women" in Heart of Darkness
All of Europe, we are told, contributed to the making of Kurtz-Europe: safe, civilized, scheduled, masculine, literate, Christian, and dead. Kurtz, a European "Knight", sets out on a crusade to win the hearts and minds of a lesser people, ignorant of the degree to which Africa is dangerous, wild, timeless, feminine, unfettered by letters, religious, and vibrant. His love turns to rape when he discovers how unfitted he is to master the magnificent vitality of a natural world. The difference between Europe and Africa is the difference between two secondary symbols: the European woman who has helped to puff up Kurtz's pride and the African woman who has helped to deflate him.
The Intended (nameless, intended for someone else, not herself) is totally protected (helpless), rhetorically programmed (words without matter), nun-like in her adoration (sexually repressed), living in black, in a place of darkness, in a pre-Eliot City of the Dead, in the wasteland of modern Europe. She, like Europe, is primarily exterior, for the simple black garment hides nothing.
The Native Woman is Africa, all interior, in spite of her lavish mode of dress. While Kurtz is male, white, bald, oral, unrestrained, the native woman is female, black, stunningly coiffured, emotive, and restrained.
When Kurtz says "The horror! The horror!" rhetoric and reality come together; Europe and Africa, the Intended and the African, collide. Kurtz realices that all he has been nurtured to believe in, to operate from, is a sham; hence, a horror. The primal nature of nature is also, to him, a horror, because he has been stripped of his own culture and stands both literally and figuratively naked before another; he has been exposed to desire but can not comprehend it through some established framework. That which we can not understand we stand over; that which we can not embrace, we reject; that which we can not love, we hate. To Kurtz, Europe and Africa have both become nightmares- "The horror! The horror!"- and it is between these nightmares that Marlow must make his choice.
Because of his total self- and sexual knowledge, Kurtz could never go back to his Intended- the agony of this realization informs his repeated "horror". Such as he had become would overwhelm the male-sheltered, carefully cultured, literally manufactured woman. Her repressed sexuality, further battened down by her mourning, is part of Kurtz's horror. On the one hand he experienced lust unleashed- through carnal knowledge of Africa coming into self-knowledge of his European hollowness- but he is rendered unable to share that knowledge. To do so would be to inflict rape and slaughter merely of a different kind in a different place in the world. And for Marlow to have indicated to the Intended the way Kurtz lived and died would have been to carry out that rape and slaughter.
Conrad set up the ironic contrast between the two women through the painting by Kurtz that he left behind at the Central Station. The picture represented "a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre- almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister". Europe in Africa- the torch will be quenched, the blind woman swallowed whole. Marlow did not really lie, for the last words Kurtz pronounced were in partial reference to his symbolic model for his symbolic picture.
Marlow knows that the Intended could not stand up to (understand) the raw truth as discovered by Kurtz, could never stand up to (understand) the Native Woman. Marlow neatly sums up the tragic relationship that was created among these three people:
"She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them back and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her too, a tragic and familiar shade, resembling in this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness".
Empty words, empty gestures. Europe and Africa. Each is a Heart of Darkness. A choice of nightmares.(25)
(25) ã The World's Classics
Joseph Conrad. Youth, Heart of darkness, The End of the Tether.
Edited with an introduction by Robert Kimbrough.
Introduction, Notes, Glossary ã Robert Kimbrough- 1984
Pages: 15, 16, 19, 20 and 21.
More articles con the author: [Next] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
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© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
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Creada: 22/02/2000 Última Actualización: 11/03/2000