Joseph Conrad’s varying depiction of women in his novel Heart of Darkness provides feminist literary theory with ample opportunity to explore the overlying societal dictation of women’s gender roles and expectations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The majority of feminist theorists claim that Conrad perpetuates patriarchal ideology, yet there are a few that argue the novel is gendered feminine.Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness…penetrates more ironically and thus more inquiringly into the dark core of otherness that had so disturbed the patriarchal, the imperialist, and the psychoanalytic imaginations…Conrad designs for Marlow a pilgrimage whose guides and goal are…eerily female” (DeKoven 233).
This short essay will use Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness to highlight Gilbert and Gubar’s theory of angel/monster dichotomy within male-authored literature.Heart of Darkness provides us with few female characters, however, Conrad uses these characters to highlight certain aspects of human nature and expound his comparison of civilization versus savagery, light versus dark. The first female character introduced to the reader is Marlow’s aunt, whom Conrad writes as “a dear enthusiastic soul” (Conrad 9) and who works hard to find Marlow a job on a ship to Africa. This self-sacrifice and enthusiasm towards the job at hand perpetuates the role of an angel in a man’s life.
Gilbert and Gubar speak of this desire to please men in their essay The Madwoman in the Attic, saying “The arts of pleasing men, in other words, are not only angelic characteristics; in other more worldly terms, they are the proper acts of a lady” (816). This supports the ideology of the time that women’s role was linked primarily to family as a caretaker and domestic goddess or angel. The aunt plays the role of Marlow’s mother and guardian angel, concerned with his health and acting out her proper role in the separate sphere of reality that men set aside for women. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be” (Conrad 14).
This need to separate the angelic qualities of women into a totally separate world might come from the desire to protect one’s mother, and plays into the idea of the eternal feminine that must be preserved. “She has no story of her own but gives ‘advice and consolation’ to others, listens, smiles, sympathizes…” (Gilbert and Gubar 815).The aunt is a perfect example of such feminine qualities and represents the untainted light of civilization. Marlow then encounters two women who represent the gatekeepers of Darkness, which puts Marlow in an uneasy mood. Conrad uses these women to symbolize both the angelic and the monstrous aspects of the female gender; they welcome the newcomers and guide them to the next step of their journey, yet knit black wool which symbolizes death, to which they are escorting their guests.
This dichotomy echoes throughout Marlow’s journey, “Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes” (Conrad 12). The two women further the theme of light into darkness, the fall of one’s humanity from civilized to savage. While the story starts with an illustration of the angelic feminine in the form of Marlow’s aunt, Conrad presents the first step into darkness by representing the two female gatekeepers.During Marlow’s mission into the heart of the Congo, he describes a few encounters with the monstrous aspect of femininity, yet the reader is faced with also an intense and inexplicable appeal of such a characterization. The first is a representation of a woman in an oil sketch; she is blindfolded and carrying a lighted torch into a darkening background.
This representation is again another step into the dark savagery, and Conrad writes “the movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister” (33).Marlow then encounters a woman whom he describes as wild and gorgeous – both acknowledging the monstrous savagery and the inexplicable draw towards such a show of strong femininity. Her characterization represents the darkness, but is also a representation of the strength of the female gender when allowed to flourish outside of set societal norms. “She was savage and superb, wild-eyes and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress” (88).
She represents the female that is “excluded from culture…but she also becomes herself an embodiment of just those extremes of mysterious and intransigent Otherness, which culture confronts with worship or fear, love or loathing” (Gilbert and Gubar 814). Once outside of the rigid expectations of gender roles in Europe at the time, the allure of strong female characters plays an important role in Marlow’s journey into the darkness. Marlow returns from the darkness in a sense, but can escape the savagery and the mark it has made on his soul.We see this in his interaction with Kurtz’s intended bride back in Europe.
She is a representation of an angel, a perfect example of the Virgin Mary that provides an avenue of salvation for Marlow. She is a domestic angel, playing the expected role of mourning widow, and by providing Marlow with a chance to tell a part of his story and alter it in order to preserve her purity, she provides him with a way back to civilization. Kurtz’s fiancee plays into Gilbert and Gubar’s assertion that the angelic quality of the feminine is linked to the otherness of acting as a bridge between life and death. But if the angel-woman in some curious way simultaneously inhabits oth this world and the next, then there is a sense in which, besides ministering to the dying, she is herself already dead” (817). She represents Marlow’s return from the darkness, but also the death of a certain part of his civility.
In Heart of Darkness, one can use feminist literary theory, in particular the angel/monster dichotomy by Gilbert and Gubar, to trace a parallel representation of Conrad’s theme of the journey into darkness.By tracing the female characters, a reader can place them within the journey as different markers or steps down into the darkness. More exploration into the female characterizations would be interesting, especially exploring Conrad’s use of the female gender for the steamboat piloted by Marlow, and his representation of the wilderness as female. For a male author, Joseph Conrad presented feminine qualities in such a way that the reader is forced to consider both the angelic qualities and monstrous qualities of women, as well as reconsider the female role in their own journey into darkness.
