Kurtz's Death In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness From Ecofeminist Perspective

This thesis studies Kurtz's death in Heart of Darkness and explores the reasons and inevitabilities of Kurtz's death from the perspective of ecofeminism. Heart of Darkness is one of the representative works of British modernist writer Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Critical articles on Heart of Darkness emerge one after another. Researchers and scholars from home and abroad have made a great many literary reviews and critics on this novel from various kinds of perspectives, among which the most frequently employed ones include colonialism criticism, post-colonialism criticism, feminist criticism, moral criticism as well as racial criticism and so on. However, this thesis mainly focuses on the discussion about the death of the leading character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness from the perspective of ecofeminism, in order to justify Conrad's concerns on the deterioration of African primordial ecological system and dislike of male chauvinism, as well as to testify his consciousness of feminism.This thesis is divided into four parts. The structure of the paper is as follows:In the first chapter, this thesis gives an introduction of several current prevailing critical and literary reviews on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In recent years, domestic and overseas researchers and scholars have been criticizing and reviewing this novella mainly from these perspectives:moral criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, existentialism, colonialist criticism, feminist criticism, racial criticism as well as Conrad's influence study and so on. In the second chapter, in an ecofeminist approach, this thesis analyzes the two major female characters in Heart of Darkness and expounds the relationship between Kurtz's death and the two female characters in the novel, in order to testify Conrad's solicitude for the women and concerns about the humanity. Furthermore, it gives us a display of the necessity about Conrad's writing Kurtz to be dead in the end - the thoughts of male chauvinism and control over and betrayal of women intensify Kurtz's inner fear and accelerate his death. Therefore, Kurtz's death shows that Conrad was optimistic on the termination of male chauvinism and the victory of feminism on African continent. In the third chapter, from the perspective of ecofeminist literary theory, this thesis gives an analysis on how Conrad describes Kurtz's crazy devastation and ravage on African ecology and his cruel oppression and exploitation on African original inhabitants to discuss how Conrad presents the relationship between Kurtz's death and African ecological system and original inhabitants. By taking the approach of analyzing how Kurtz madly destroys African ecological integrity and cruelly exploits indigenous African people to pursue material wealth, this thesis justifies that the death of Kurtz has its inevitability under Conrad's pen, thus proving Conrad's resentment to imperialism and colonialism and his worship for the humanistic nature. In the fourth chapter, it is a summarization on how Conrad has manifested the reasons and inevitability of Kurtz's death in Heart of Darkness, demonstrating that Kurtz's male chauvinism and his devastation, oppression and exploitation on African continent and African people aggravate his inner contradictions, fear and self-introspection, hence accelerating his death; in the meantime, it also presents that Conrad was concerned about the primitive ecology and humanistic nature as well as females; and it illustrates Conrad's praise and admiration on females.