"Heart of Darkness"by Joseph Condrad

Heart of Darkness is a tommyrot told by a musical composition to men approximately a man's exalted failure to live as a man should live. In the text there are barely six women, four of whom the lector actually adopts, and one of whom the reader actually hears: the Knitters, the Aunt, the Wife of the High Dignitary, the Splendid Savage Mistress, and The Intended. In addition to these "characters," Marlow as well as makes several pronouncements about women as they unsex or threaten men; moreover, Marlow's (or Conrad's) figurative language also images women, likening literal objects to the feminine, or the feminine to literal objects. The enjoyment of this essay is to trace and analyze these references to and about women, which bunk to direct chauvinism, like racialism, in an unknowable Other.

Many people specify chauvinism as a kind of misogyny--a conscious enmity toward, and dismissal of, women. But this definition is no more right than one which says racism is limited to the KKK: both chauvinism and racism occur when women and Africans are "used" as literary and typical backdrops for the spiritual journey of white men. The black civilization in Marlow's narrative is a convenient canvas on which to determine the civilized man's darkness of mind and soul; women similarly function a

s a symbolic background for the action, values, and ideology of men--all male authors in the text, including Conrad, Marlow, and Kurtz.

The gist of this is ingeminate when Marlow emerges from his interview, so that upon his exit as well as his magnetize the reader meets The Knitters, who thus function as a skeleton device inwardly a framing device within a third framing device (the story-within-a-story). The repetition strengthens the foreboding(a) quality, and retrospectively the reader sees that they have indeed guarded the gate of hell, since they mark the beginning of Marlow's voyage into the heart of darkness in Africa. And although Marlow talks often enough about moral nefariousness and spiritual depravity, his description of the Old Fat Knitter's wart is the wholly description of physical ugliness.

Finally, it is large that even while Conrad invests these women with Latin phrases like "Morituri te salutant" (Conrad 14), thereby ensuring that the reader must see their role as Fates Guarding the Gates of Hell, he strips them of self-knowledge of their role. Women in this text are ignorant of Self, period. The Knitters have "cheery and foolish faces with blithe old eyes" (Conrad 14).

The first and most important third estate of the women in the text is that not one of the six exists autonomously. to each one exists only insofar as she is identified with a man: the Aunt with Marlow, the Splendid Savage Mistress and the Intended with Kurtz, and the Knitters with the " ill plumpness" (Conrad 14), or the man who owns the company. The Wife of the High Dignitary, mentioned once, cannot exist, since she has uncomplete name nor personality, without the High Dignitary (Conrad 15). In a story in which nameless characters are frequently reduced to their functions (bricklayers, helmsmen, the Accountant, the Lawyer, the Director, etc.), it is significant that the only thing the Wife actually does is gossip, a traditionally "female" quality. It is through the Aunt's social
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