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Privileging Marlow 
“Heart of Darkness” (Joseph Conrad)
By Patrick McEvoy-HalstonJune 2003
Johanna Smith, in “‘Too Beautiful Altogether’: Ideologies of Gender andEmpire in Heart of Darkness,” argues that Marlow is attempting to revitalize whathad become an old conception of separate spheres. According to Smith, Marlow isan ideologue who presents his listeners with a new Kurtzian imperialism in hopesof challenging and helping replace a feminine one. If Smith is correct in hersuspicions, she certainly overemphasizes Marlow’s skill as a craftsman and hiseffectiveness as a spokesman. His uneasiness with women is everywhere manifestand obvious in the text. So too is his ineptness--he creates separate spheres with amasculine one which includes at least one woman! But imperialism never loosesits taint of feminine acquisitiveness in his narrative, just as influence never seemsto lose its taint as a feminine power. Quite possibly, given his characteristicresponses to compromising situations, it is more accurate and helpful to imagineMarlow as more intent on using his privileged position as narrator to establishhimself as a skilful evader rather than an imperialistic Darth Vader.Marlow’s fascination with, and fear of, the power and influence of women ismore evident in the text than Smith appreciates. Smith, hoping to emphasize theimportance and relevance of feminist analysis, prefers to construe Marlow as aneffective and menacing opponent. She sees Marlow as proficient in effectively characterizing women as weak and delicate. His power, she tells us, “as themasculine narrator of his story” (Smith 173; emphasis in original),
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allows him toeffectively silence, commodify, and belittle the women in his “tale.” She arguesthat we need to be armed with discursive analytical skills, with feminine critiques
1 Hereafter all quotations taken from pages numbered between 169 and 183 refer to Smith’s essay. Allother quotations refer to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
 
of ideology, in order to better recognize and resist being victimized by “Marlow’snarrative aim to ‘colonize’ and ‘pacify’ women” (170). Considering Smith’sconception of Marlow’s intentions and her high regard for his competence as wellas his villainy, it is not surprising that Smith misses evidence that complicatesand/or contests her thesis.For instance, Smith believes that Marlow is attempting to reinforce anideology of separate spheres which was losing its influence by the late nineteenthcentury. She believes that he is attempting to create an ideology which imagines women as incapable of accepting and/or handling the purportedly hard truths of Reality. Yet the first encounter we have in the text (other than with Marlow) withsomeone whose authoritative presence is built upon an extended experience withtruths of this kind is the old woman at the Company’s Brussels office. She knowsthat so few of the men that come before her will survive their experiences abroad.She seems “uncanny and fateful” (25), and makes Marlow feel very uncomfortable.Smith rightly recognizes the old woman’s mythological associations with one of thethree Fates, but does not convincingly explain why Marlow, if he meant toestablish women as essentially ignorant and incapable of handling hard truths, would permit a figure whose Fate-like ability to divine men’s future is never really  belittled in the text. The old woman’s callous attitude towards young men ischaracterized as a realistic and legitimate response to the fate she rightly knowsawaits most of the men she sees. And it is an attitude that Marlow adopts, and isdelighted to mimic, in his own treatment of his attendees onboard the Nellie (50).(And also while in the jungle: he tells us he thought that the pilgrims “consideredhim brutally callous” [87]).Smith passes too quickly over another surprising association Marlow allowsher. Smith reminds us that Marlow portrays the old woman as someone who“‘pilot[s] young men into the Company’,” and suggests that the old woman is beinglikened to “the pilot who ferries the dead across the Styx into Hades” (175). Smithis aware that if there is an almost reliably exclusive, homosocial and masculinefraternity in the novel it is the brotherhood of seamen (182), of empowered loners, yet does not explore why Marlow, in effect, includes the old woman within thisfraternity! Comparing her to someone who successfully ferries doomed souls to
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the most dangerous, hellish of imagined places is an especially strange thing forMarlow to do if his intent was solely to convince readers that women are toodelicate to venture abroad.To be fair, Smith argues that Marlow attempts to “stabilize his masculinity,”a masculinity she recognizes was threatened by the old woman, in relation to hisaunt (and also the Intended) (176). She tells us that in his “farewell visit to hisaunt, he uses her feminine lack of experience and debased imperialist rhetoric toconstruct the ‘sentimental presence’ that can be distinguished from an ‘idea’ andthen rejected” (178). Smith, in dramatizing his encounter with his aunt as one in which he uses her, fails to consider it more as one in which he felt used. Marlow describes his aunt as “triumphant” (27), and it is possible to read him as morereactive than active, as more a victim than a victimizer in this scene, and to judgehis cutting after-the-fact commentary as largely compensatory in nature.Certainly it is an encounter in which his aunt’s influence and power in theCompany and potentially over him is made clear to Marlow, and it is also one in which his aunt has both the tonal authority and assumed right to dominate adependent attendee as a triumphant, domineering matriarch. When Marlow quotes her “exact” wording, we hear her patronizing tone, her assumed authority:“‘You forget, dear Charlie, [. . .]’” (27). As with the old woman, Marlow feelsuncomfortable in her presence (27). This rebuke is his aunt’s response to Marlow feeling a need to resist her--whether simply her idealistic beliefs, as we are told, orthe entirety of her authority over him, we cannot be sure. His quibble with herand/or her views, if we trust Marlow’s account of this encounter, was delicately,even meekly, delivered: “I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit”(27). It is not clear that his “delicacy” was born out of a need to be civilized, or outof an awareness and sensitivity to his aunt’s own supposed delicate nature.Instead, he might have been carefully attempting to contest her authority withoutinviting upon himself a humiliating lecture. That is, he might have moderated hisdelivery more out of fear of reprisals than for any other reason. As it turns out, forhis miniscule display of impudence, he is patronized, lectured at, told to “wearflannel, [and to] be sure to write,” and afterwards, likely owing to thesehumiliations, he is left still feeling “queer” (27) and uneasy.
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