Women In Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (1875-1924) is one of the pioneers of modernists in the twentieth century literary world in England. Once considered to be a writer of no great importance, Conrad has been on the steady rise in fame in the last century. In The Great Tradition (London, 1948), F. R. Leavis ranks him among the top four greatest English novelists, the other three being Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James. Obviously, Conrad has his special, prominent place in the history of English literature. Heart of Darkness is one of the masterpieces of Conrad. It is a jungle story about a young man named Chalice Marlow who traveled up the Congo River into the Inner Station of the Trade Company of Ivory, always cherishing his glorious dream of finding out the"blank spot on the map that he had noticed since his childhood."But he was also accompanied with another aim set after his go-off, that is, to save a sick agent named Kurtz who was known for his eloquence as well as his capacity of collection of ivory. But what he saw and heard on the way and in his destination made his journey a lasting nightmare.Heart of Darkness, first published in 1899 as a serial story in Blackwood's Magazine, became extensively influential during subsequent decades. Critics interpret it from philosophical, psychological, and political perspectives. This thesis will approach Heart of Darkness from a feminist perspective to throw a new light on the study of the text. It sets up three tasks to undertake. The first chapter comes to the literature reiterating some researches of Heart of Darkness in the light of feminist points of view. The second chapter analyzes the harmonious relationship between Conrad and the women in the novella. By analyzing and commenting on the five female characters in Heart of Darkness, it tends to prove that Joseph Conrad speaks to women, of women at the deepest level. And by raising serious doubts as to the radical feminist criticism in terms of the women images, the paper makes an endeavor to appraise Conrad and Heart of Darkness in a positive way as well as from the perspective of feminist and other helpful theories so as to supply the strong basis for those powerful and authentic women figures and to support some new and different accounts of what a feminist reading means in Heart of Darkness. The third chapter concentrates on the analysis of patriarchal ideology permeated in Marlow's narrative discourse. Marlow, in his repeated expression, attempts to fix women in the negative and inferior position, associating them with passivity, silence, absence, delusion, and with something mystifying and fearful. However, Marlow's reading of women is the reflection of the viewpoint at Conrad's time. On the surface, the five women written by Conrad seem to be passive and weak. But in fact, the author wants to call the readers'attention to women and further thinking about women. It's clear that we should make the very distinction between Conrad, the author, and Marlow, the narrator. And we should not ascribe the latter's mis-reading of women unjustifiably to the author himself either. So we can read the women described in Heart of Darkness in a further way.