A Feminist Reading Of Heart Of Darkness

Joseph Conrad has been long considered as a male-oriented author. His work Heart of Darkness, acclaimed as "one of the most influential novellas in the nineteenth century", is frequently quoted to confirm such a Conradian image. As far as Conrad's women are concerned, the male-dominated Conradian critics reveal the critical inclinations either to celebrate him as a novelist of virility and strength with a capacity for focusing on such important subject matters as imperialism and colonialism, or to accuse him of hostility to women and deep patriarchal ideology. But they fail to pay due attention to the significant women pulsing in the deep structure of the text. Moreover, they tend to blur the distinction between Conrad the author and Marlow the arch narrator, ascribing the latter's patriarchal ideology unjustifiably to the author himself.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: first, to cast a critical glance on the bias-based accusation of Conrad's complicity in patriarchal ideology with Marlow the narrator. This thesis contends that far from endorsing Marlow's patriarchal ideology, Conrad holds it up to irony and criticism. Secondly, following the rich tradition of "feminist critique" as Elaine Showalter labels, it works to expose Marlow's misreading of women and patriarchal ideology embedded in his narrative discourse. Thirdly, reading in the spirit of "against the grain", it seeks to deconstruct Marlow's false representation of women and dismantle his seemingly self-sufficient patriarchal narrative discourse.The Introduction traces the interpretive history of Heart of Darkness from various perspectives in the hope that it can equip our present feminist reading of the text with a rich and broad critical background.Chapter One is devoted to a discussion of some key concepts of feminist criticism and the nature of Conradian criticism. It points out that Heart of Darkness can be fruitfully approached from a feminist perspective.Chapter Two concentrates on the analysis of patriarchal ideology permeated in Marlow's narrative discourse. Marlow's patriarchal ideology finds full expression in his repeated attempts to fix women in the negative and inferior position of the binary oppositions, associating them with passivity, silence, absence, delusion, with something mystifying and fearful. These readings are fantasized out of Marlow's phallocentrismand thus doomed misreadings. Muffling women's voices, depriving them of power for discourse, relegating them to the margin of his tale, Marlow takes considerable pains to construct a closed patriarchal narrative discourse as well as an exclusive men's realm.Chapter Three sets out to dismantle Marlow's patriarchal narrative discourse. Conrad consciously differentiates himself from Marlow by rendering him an unreliable narrator whose narrative authority is frequently undermined by his monstrous lies, self-contradictions, macro comments on and false representations of women. However, Conrad's Heart of Darkness questions more than Marlow's individual authority, it questions the nature of the patriarchal narrative discourse. By reading out the inconsistencies, gaps and absences within Marlow's narrative discourse, the thesis is under the way to subvert the binary opposition of men/women Marlow tenaciously holds and to deconstruct the falseimages of women in his narrative discourse. Moreover, the thesis seeksto uncover the repressed women's discourse and reconstruct women's real images from the deep structure of the text. Women are not the passive and voiceless Others who are content with the marginal position the male-centered society has assigned to them. Acting on their own initiatives, they penetrate into men's sphere and obtrude men's discourse. Women's unauthorized presence at the center of the text threatens to dismantle Marlow's seemingly closed and self-sufficient patriarchal narrative discourse.