On the surface, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness appears to be chiefly male¬-driven which leaves little room for a feminist literary analysis. The narrator, Marlow, maintains an impertinent depiction of the female characters as two ¬dimensional caricatures instead of genuine people while also striving to entrap the gender within his chauvinistic narration. However, despite the patriarchal and imperialist overtones written and narrated throughout the text, a feminist critique may reveal important ways in which the Mistress and the Intended defy this marginalized dominion. Women are often subjected to the hegemonic masculinity of Western culture, however, a closer evaluation of these gender roles can illuminate on the idea that women steadily …show more content…
This is because Marlow 's view of the women is directly associated to his view of the world in general. While Marlow travels up the Congo River and diverges from his previously-held cultural views he discovers that the trappings of the Western world and its external restraints hold no inherent value in the jungle. Western civilization is either out of place, reflecting on the chief accountant 's Western attire being described as “a hairdresser 's dummy” (Conrad 14), or absurd, in the case of the French gunboat firing into a continent being described as “incomprehensible” (11) because the “tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.” (11). With this knowledge Marlow learns that “no absolutes exist, that he inhabits an indifferent universe” (Peters 4), and that life is a "mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose" (Conrad 63). Marlow further finds that he must not let such bleak thoughts consume his consciousness as that would make life impossible. Overt knowledge of this universe is obscured by the security and comfort of Europe, but in Africa this knowledge resurrects itself, and when it does Marlow quickly represses it. For this reason, Marlow scorns at the inhabitants of the "sepulchral city"(64) because they believe the universe to be rational and safe. For him, such …show more content…
Thus creating a space for men which could “embody order, meaning, and truth of the Western view of the world, thereby providing a sanctuary from the disorder, chaos, and emptiness of the world outside that space” (Peters 9). Kurtz 's Intended is clearly defined to symbolize this role of sanctuary. Even Marlow’s comments on her appearance, “This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow … [Her] glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful … her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the inextinguishable light of belief and love … her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold"(Conrad 67-69), can be used to accurately portray her as veil of fixed purity and a fitting keeper of such sanctuary. More than her mere appearance, however, the Intended herself provides a sanctuary by believing in Kurtz 's ideals as well as himself. "I believed in him more than anyone on earth--more than his own mother, more than--himself. He needed me!"(69). Here the Intended embodies the feminine views of the nineteenth century yet, at the same time exceeds this limited role in which Marlow assigned her. This need for women to be symbols, which lead them to save the colonizers from being assimilated into darkness of the
The women in both Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are seemingly presented with traditional feminine qualities of inferiority, weakness, and sexual objectification. However, the power that they hold in male-female relationships, and their embodiment of traditional male roles, contests the chauvinistic views of society during Conrad and Hardy’s era. While Conrad presents powerful female characters through their influences over men, the reversal of traditional gender roles is exemplified more by Hardy’s character, Tess, yet both authors present revolutionary ideas of feminism, and enlighten readers to challenge the patriarchal views of society towards women. Both novels criticize traditional societal views towards women by the hypocrisy of Conrad’s Marlow, and Hardy’s narrator’s male gaze. Prince’s death, the rape and her arrest all happened to her whilst asleep.
The role of women in The Heart of Darkness is at first seen as one that is very much a backseat role to that of a man’s in the empirical
Without personal access to authors, readers are left to themselves to interpret literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Fortunately, literary audiences are not abandoned to flounder in pieces such as this; active readers may look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be deciphered with a post-colonial, feminist, or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psycho-analytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the greater roles of Kurtz and Marlow as the id and the ego, respectively, and offer the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the work as a whole.
Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is the author’s most celebrated work. The book conveys the story of Marlow, who is a sailor on the ship. Marlow narrates the story describing particularly what he came across during his journey and experienced. When we look at the events that take place in the book, it is unquestionable that Women do not occupy a significant portion of the story; the story is predominately male dominated. However, does women’s lack of appearance make them minor characters? Or do women have a minor effect in the story? Having analyzed the book under the scope of “Feminist View”, we can answer these questions and say that women play considerable roles even though they occupy a small portion in the story. In my essay I will
...present powerful characters, while females represent unimportant characters. Unaware of the influence of society’s perception of the importance of sexes, literature and culture go unchanged. Although fairytales such as Sleeping Beauty produce charming entertainment for children, their remains a didactic message that lays hidden beneath the surface; teaching future generations to be submissive to the inequalities of their gender. Feminist critic the works of former literature, highlighting sexual discriminations, and broadcasting their own versions of former works, that paints a composite image of women’s oppression (Feminist Theory and Criticism). Women of the twenty-first century serge forward investigating, and highlighting the inequalities of their race in effort to organize a better social life for women of the future (Feminist Theory and Criticism).
One of the central tragedies of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the insanity of Mr. Kurtz. How could a man who seemed so good, so stable, suddenly become so mentally lacking? Through the deterioration of Kurtz’s personality and Marlow’s response to his breakdown, Conrad explores the elements of strong versus weak characters.
Gender Role In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For the most part, people who read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad may feel that the novella is strictly a story of exploration and racial discrimination. But to Johanna Smith, who wrote “’Too Beautiful Altogether’: Ideologies of Gender and Empire in Heart of Darkness” it is much more than that. Johanna Smith along with Wallace Watson and Rita A. Bergenholtz agree that throughout Heart of Darkness there are tones of gender prejudice, but the way that these three different authors perceive and interpret those gender tones are to a certain extent different.
In order for us to deal with how a consideration of femininity can effect our understanding of a literary text, we must also be able to grasp the notion of `feminism' and `Feminist Literary Theory'. A dictionary definition of `feminism' is: `the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of the equality of the sexes.' Although this leans towards feminism in the historical sense of the word, it still provides the grounds, or foundations, from which feminist literary theories were created. Feminists argue against the stereotyping and social construction of female norms, seeing them as created by men in order to establish their own sense of power. It is thought that while males suggest that gender is sex and not actually a construct, the female role will become much more passive, stereotyped and controlled.
Conrad’s shifting setting introduces new environments and attitudes for Marlow to cope with. Marlow begins the novel in “a narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, [with] high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting right and left, [and] immense double doors standing ponderously ajar” (Conrad 45). Nearly all of the surroundings have intimidating connotations, which surprisingly fight Marlow into a comfortably safe and secure standing. Marlow notices the map in the office, and examines it to see just where his travels will take him. After observing the map, he points out that he was not going to the points of Africa that seem welcoming but he “was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was there – fascinating – deadly – like a snake” (45). He already realizes he will have trouble transitioning into the new environment, being surrounded by what seems like death. Because Marlow grows accustomed to the urbanized streets of Brussels, the difficulty of the transition to the Congo develops exponentially. Before Marlow knows it, he travels to a land with “trees, tress, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high” and they “made [him] feel very small, very lost” (75). Marlow, already apprehensive of the change to the Congo, shows his loss of confidence in his new environment.
Women have impacted history in ways that have changed the world, and have also changed the way that women are viewed today. Women, however, were not always viewed and respected in the way they are today. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and in Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts that women were treated completely different. Besides the social discrimination based solely upon race, and also the introduction of racism in politics, there were many different types of inequity living in European society during that time: gender-based sexism; a topic that is still an issue today, was a slow start for the suffragette movement in England, and the novel Heart of Darkness shows it: “It 's queer how out of touch with truth women are! They live in a world of their
In the 1900s novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the protagonist often encounters women at landmarks of his life. Charlie Marlow is a sailor and imperialist who sets out along the Congo River to “civilize” the “savages.” The novella begins with a crew on the Thames waiting for the tides to change. During their wait, a character named Marlow tells of his exploits on the African continent. In his recounted travels, Marlow meets other imperialists such as Mr. Kurtz, a man who is obsessed with the pursuit of ivory and riches. Like Mr. Kurtz, Marlow embarks across the African continent in hopes of earning both money and respect. One early critic of the novel, Edward Garnett, wrote in his review that “[Heart of Darkness] is simply a piece of art…the artist is intent on presenting his sensations in that sequence and arrangements whereby the meaning or meaninglessness of the white man in uncivilized Africa can be felt in its really significant aspects,” (Garnett). What Garnett fails to observe is that Heart of Darkness is not only an observation of “the white man,” but the white woman as well.
One interpretation of Marlow's relationship to colonialism is that he does not support it. Conrad writes, "They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,-nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom" (p. 27-28). Marlow says this and is stressing that the so-called "savages", or Africans, are being treated and punished like they are criminals or enemies when in fact they never did anything. He observes the slow torture of these people and is disgusted with it. Marlow feels sympathy for the black people being slaved around by the Europeans but doesn't do anything to change it because that is the way things are. One can see the sympathy by the way that he gives a starving black man one of his biscuits. "To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe" (p. 54). This statement by Marlow conveys that he doesn't believe that the Europeans have a right to be stripping Africa of its riches. He views the Jungles of Africa as almost it's own living, breathing monster.
In Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s view of women embodies the typical 19th century view of women as the inferior sex. There are only three relatively minor female characters in Heart of Darkness: Marlow’s aunt, Kurtz’s mistress, and Kurtz’s "Intended." Marlow mentions these female characters in order to give the literal aspect of his tale more substance. While they definitely play specific roles in the story, they do not relate with the primary theme of the story. The primary theme focuses more on how Marlow’s journey into the heart of darkness contrasts the "white" souls of the black people and the "black" souls of the whites who exploit them, and how it led to Marlow’s self-discovery.
Women have gained equality with men over the many centuries of the evolution of the modern western civilization. Hence, it cannot be overlooked that there still exist many literary examples of social disregard for woman potential. Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" exemplifies the Western patriarchal gender roles in which women are given the inferior status. Not only are women portrayed as being inferior to men, but Marlow's (the protagonist's) seldom mentioning of them in his Congo adventure narrative symbolizes his view of their insignificance. There is a total of five women presented in Marlow's narrative but only three of them are significant minor characters: Marlow's aunt, Kurtz's African mistress, and Kurtz's "Intended." The following essay will examine how the presentation of each of these three women in Marlow's narrative contributes to connecting events in the story.
Modernism began as a movement in that late 19th, early 20th centuries. Artists started to feel restricted by the styles and conventions of the Renaissance period. Thusly came the dawn of Modernism in many different forms, ranging from Impressionism to Cubism.