Male Bias In Heart Of Darkness English Literature Essay

Male Bias In Heart Of Darkness English belles-lettres EssayIt searchs that the essential uncertainties and inconsistencies in Conrads meta archives, the indirectness and ambiguous constitution of the storey Marlow gives. Marlow in Conrads Heart of Darkness has the characteristic nineteenth century view of wowork force women argon non as good as men, they argon non as smart and are not worth as much. There are only 3 women in the text, Marlows aunt, Kurtzs fianc and Kurtzs Amazon lover. N bingle of these characters are not important to tale Marlow is telling. Marlow even says its queer how issue of touch with the true women are, they live in a world of their own, and there had neer been anything exchangeable it, and neer push aside be (Conrad, 27). Even though there are few women in the text and they corroborate very small roles, Marlow makes women wait significant when he talks round them.Marlow outright talks about the relationship between men and womenThe mind of m an is capable of anything because eachthing is in it, all the past as sozzled as all the future Very well I hear I tolerate precisely I concord a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the run-in that cannot be silenced. (Conrad, 51)He goes on this rant the he be prevaricationves only men are intelligent passable to understand what he is saying. He is saying that men cannot be silenced, but by saying this he is implying that there is a chance that phallic voice can be silenced. Its bid he on the Q.T. believes women can somehow silence men. It seems that Conrads goal is to silence the women in the text. Marlow states They, the women I mean, are out of I, should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours set abouts worse (Conrad, 63). The language he uses makes it seem like women keep the world of men from falling apart. Of course this is a male narrative telling the boloney of a man doing manly things. The Heart of Darkness exhibits a non-white male view of women demonstrated by Marlows use of the sexual metaphor of penetration and other diction utilise in the text.Gilbert and Gubar argue that Heart of Darkness penetrates more ironically and thus more enquiringly into the dark core of otherness that had so disturbed the patriarchal, the imperialist, and the psychoanalytic imaginations Conrad designs, designs for Marlow a pilgrimage whose guides and goal are eerily charwomanish (Conrad, 44) (Gilbert and Gubar).The narrative seems to keep with the male-controlled design, with a hero conquer whom defeats hurdles and becomes one of the socially elite. The plot itself follows the typical male hero who saves the day and becomes a hero, just like the stories Bewolf, and the Odyssey. The storyline, however Marlow seems to pose on the fence as to whether he sides with the colonialists or the natives, and the story itself doesnt provide a closing and we never really know which side Marlow is on.Conrad s hows some characters in his opus style that portray the Congo women, as well as his attitude toward the clean issues of social system in Heart of Darkness, as Lcriture Feminine (Kristeva). He shows characteristic of feminism, which Kristeva associates with a gender little, pre-oedipal stage. Kristeva relates the semiotic as a womanish whose sexuality has not yet been constructed (Kristeva). While acknowledging that the fictive world of Heart of Darkness belongs to men, nineteenthcentury, imperialistic, European men, Sedlak, for example, says that Conrads women do display a separate consciousness (Crouch, 2).French feminists, such(prenominal) as Helene Cixous, state that the diction is essentially bi-sexual, one which proposes to break down all the rigorous binary by be disorderlyering the boundaries between the mannish and distaff and the binaries, such as proper(a) and improper, normal and divergence, rational and irrational, expert and subservience, by which civilizations l ive on. match to Eagleton,Most women are like this they do someone elses-mans- writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing thats in ensnare masculine. Great care must be taken in working on feminist writing not to get trapped by names to be signed with a womans name doesnt ineluctably make a piece of writing maidenlike. It could quite well be masculine writing, and conversely, the concomitant that a piece of writing is signed with a mans name does not in itself exclude womanhood. Its rare but you can sometimes find femininity in writings signed by men it does happen. (, 232). portend claims that Heart of Darkness portrays a powerful female ne dickensrk, which frequently takes charge and assumes control of the novellas events (20). This whitethorn seem absurd because as the story opens, the narrator describes the Thames as a manly domain crowded with memories of men and ships it has borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea (Conrad, 18). It is a place to think about the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the generator of empires (Conrad, 19). However these ships sailed only for the glory of the Queens highness, and when she meets the ship, it thus pass out of the gigantic tale (Conrad, 19) of masculine venture and splendor and into a domanin which apparently allows women on board. The issue is not one of elaborating a rising theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the winnings of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal (Irigaray). thence is it possible for a male text such as Heart of Darkness also be as habitual if it was on a feminine text and not a masculine one? Well, while listen to Marlows narrative about his journey to fill in the blank spaces on the earth (Conrad, 22) or in this case Africa his journey seems to seem quite feminine because he has to rely on others to help him, his motives are interrogationed, and he makes moral decisions that dont seem masculine. This is first evident when he has to get help from his aunt to get a job. This is something that was typical of women in the late 1890s. He seems humiliated when he has to ask would you believe it? I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work- to get a job. Heavens (Conrad, 23). Then before leaving for the Congo he has tea with his aunt and says good by, she gives him her blessing, like mothers of the Great War who send their sons of to battle, expcecting to have him return a hero. However, Marlow returns more tame than hero, more feminie than inhibit hero.Then Marlow distrusts himself about being able to become a conquering hero when he says I dont know why a queer feeling came to me that I was an imposter (Conrad, 27), which is considered a feminine quality. Then when he gets to the Congo he eavesdrops on a chat involving the station master and his nephew where the y are plotting to foli Kurtz. Then he doesnt let anyone know what he heard. This makes him seem incompetent and weak, which is again making him seem feminine.Why would Marlow still make this journey with all these doubts? The answer rests in his masculine boyhood when he was a child, there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that faceed particularly inviting on a map I would put my finger on it and say, When I upgrade up I go out go there (Conrad, 22). When he got to the Congo it was no longer this perfect(a) space, it now has rivers and lakes that have already been explored. All that was left for him was a river that is reminiscent of a giant glide with its head in the sea and body turning with the country. He concludes, the snake had charmed me. (Conrad, 23) agree to Straus,It is Conrads text itself that stimulates the notion that the psychic penury of women is a necessary condition for the heroism of men, and whether or not Heart of Darkness is a critiq ue of male heroism or is in complex complicity with it, gender dichotomy is an inescapable element of it (125).Marlow first views the map of the river as a snake in a Brussels office, where two knitting women operate as protectors of the gates of Hell. Marlow says, it was fascinating-deadly-like a snake-ugh (Conrad, 23). When Marlow enters the chief officials office he is metaphorically entering the underworld of the snake river, the sinister female power Marlow wishes to explore in give to purge the feminine inside himself however he ends up embracing this femininity quite of purgation it.From the very start of the text Conrad exposes Marlows feminity, by first showing him as a submissive man, because he follows Buddha who believes in obtaining peace by being enlightened. This intellection is directly contrasting the attributes of a conquering hero, which he is supposed to be in this story he is telling us. Then the text itself leaves us safe of questions about who Kurtz is an d how Marlow feels about Kurtz and his crime. Furthermore we dont really know what Kurtzs crime was. All of theses questions make us question Marlow.As Marlows expedition continues, we see more binary oppositions, as his compassion shifts between the white colonialists (whom are viewed as superior) and the glums whom have been robbed of their culture and deprived of their homes. This is evident when he is outraged by the treatment of the natives as less than human as they are moving around as ants (Conrad, 29). He cannot stand the incident that the natives, who are creating the rail manner that will support the expansion of the colonialst, are being treated worse than close animals. You can see this viewpoint is evident in Conrads picture of the chain gangA sharp clinking behind me make me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink unploughed time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound around their loins, and the short ends waggled to and from like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope each had an iron collar around his neck, and all were connected in concert with a chain, whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking (Conrad, 30).Then he goes on to depict them as black shapes crouchedin all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair and just describes stand horror-struckas one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all fours to the river to drink (Conrad, 32). Chinua Achebe in his article An Image Of Africa, states that Conrad in this passage is stereotyping the African as creature and primitive, deserving of our compassion but not our respect. However you can look at this passage as Marlow laying with the natives and being disgusted by their treatment at the hands of the colonialists. Therefore he would be taking the natives side over that of t he white colonalists he feels sympathy for the unempowered female, because he may end uo powerless like the natves he has come to defeat and the marginalized women at home.Nevertheless, Brook Thomas (as quoted in Murfin) believes there is another(prenominal) way of looking at this depiction of the natives in a chain-gangEven though Conrad had himself been there, he chose to tell his story indirectly through an idiosyncratic, first-person narrator, Marlow, whose narrative is in turn relayed by another narrator who presumably has not even been to Africa. This elaborate structure makes us aware of structure as structure thus, the novel, doesnt pretend to put forward us a perfectly clear, uncluttered, unbiased, perfectly natural view of the facts of the past (Murfin, 236).Thomas viewpoint validates the desire that the language and structure of this story allow for a lot different interpretations. Another important fact that most people overlook is that Conrad is Polish and is demonst rablely exiled in England. His second language is English and therefor he was also not always accepted as normalin the English society. Edward Said declaresBecause Conrad also had an extraordinarily residual sense of his own exilic marginality, he quite care in full qualified Marlows narrative with the provisionality that came from standing at the very juncture of this world with another, unspecified but different (Culture and Imperialism, 24).Furthermore North describes how Conrads fancify nationality was viewed as a racial differentiation by his friends in England. Conrads Polish accent was associated by them with the Orient, and unless that his appearance and mannerisms were considered by H.G. Wells and Ford Mad Ford to be Oriental. Several critics thought he was Jewish. Another found him positively simian (North, 50). This view of him being different from his English friends also made him seem inferior, and may have lead to his understanding for the women and natives in the te xt. Marlows expedition is a journey toward the farming of multiple perspectives caused by the exiled livelihood of Conrad.Said commented on the imperial background of Conrads Heart of Darkness give care most of his other tales, Heart of Darkness is not just a recital of Marlows adventures it is also a dramatization of Marlow telling his story to a group of listeners at a particular place in a particular time Neither Conrad nor Marlow offer us anything outdoors the world-conquering attitudes embodied by Kurtz and Marlow and Conradthe disk shape of the whole thing is unassailable. Except as I said a moment ago that Conrad is conscious about setting and situating the narrative in a narrative moment, thus allowing us to realize afterward all, that far from swallowing up its own history, imperialism has in fact been placed and located by history, one that lies outside the tightly inclusive ring on the deck of the yawl Nelly. (Said, 49)Therefrore Conras is self-consciousness, and th is causes multiplicity in the perceptions within the narrative. This idea is further repeated by Kristevas feminist viewpoints about the obliqueness, uncertain and ambigious perceptions essential in a narrative genre.In Marlow journeys to the semiotic he avoids his real feelings about Kurtz because he is worried that he may identify that his is like Kurts, therefore he can end up like Kurtz. Marlow states I think it had whisper to him the wilderness things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception, so he took counsel with the great loneliness and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating (Conrad, 73). Conrad displays a comparable uncertainty in describing Marlows conflict with the feminine standards personified in Kurtzs mistress, who is viewed a dominant female goddess as well as a sumptuous temptress, both connected with the native animal race by the white English males. Marianna Torgovnick contends that the African woman is the crux of th e matter of Heart of Darknessthe representative native the only one fully individualized and described in detail, overleap for the Helmsman, who also dies in the story. She is, the text insists, the symbol of Africa (154-55).Kurtzs mistress has a sexual power that Marlow fears, because he fears the female inspiration within himslef. This female inspiration shows herself in the uncertainties and oversights of the narrative. Conrad has a hard time getting through to his narrator, Marlow. He struggles to speak about the conquest over the savage temptress however he is unable, or unwilling to do so.Marlow is articulate in his ability to deacribe, however at the end of the text the reserved look from the savage native woman is more powerfulk than Marlows own wordsAnd from right to left on the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. She walked with measured steps, intent in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly with a light jingle and flash of w as make in the shape of a helmet she had bright leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every stepShe was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress, and in the be quiet that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and fervent soul Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and a tiresome painSuddenly she opened her bare arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an seditious desire to touch the skyA formidable silence hung over the scene. (Conrad, 76)This section of text shows Marlows split attitude toward female p ower on one side Conrad and Marlow are busyed by the native womans sexual ambiguity, and on the other side they are captivated by her. Kurtzs savage lover is seen as almost damp in the text and this silence is symbolic of the undiscovered and unexplored spots in Africas jungle that Marlow and on the Q.T. Conrad had longed to travel. However these blank spaces, unexplored areas are fantasy as he admits the muteness of the women to be fantasy, on the linguistic level.The idea of a silent female is in fact a fantasy because he shows the savage mistress to have a very powerful diction, just as powerful as that of the colonists. This is evident when she rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance (Conrad). According to Gilbert and Gubar, she is a silent symbol in the text that expresses her unknown history as well as her intimidating hyster y.The mistress is the typical monster female in the text. She is not only a threat to the men because of her voice she is also standing in direct opposition to Kurtzs intend. She is seen as the strong hostile monstrous monster woman while Kurtzs fianc is seen as the angle, pure Victorian fantasy. Torgovnick states that,Marlow clearly conceives of her as a substitute for, an inversion of Kurtzs high-minded, white intended. Like the Belgian woman, she is an impressive figure, but unlike the Intended she is not high-minded she is presented as all body and inchoate emotion. The novella cuts from the figure of the African woman with outstretched arms to the Intended one woman an affianced bride, one woman all body, surely an actual bride (Torgovnick, 146-147).The British code states that miscegenation is wrong and therefore Marlow is scared to fall in love with a savage native woman and end up like Kurtz. However the savage woman is so attractive and seductive, as exposed by the texts il lustration of her, that Marlow has a hard time fighting it this is seen as a representation of Conrads true feelings about femininity. The African woman, who purposely remains unnamed, represents Conrads natural idea of the savage female, because not lonely is she seductive, she is also deadly, just like Africa . Kurtz has been ruined by a devastating femininity while this femininity is mesmerizing it also destroys men because it is forbidden. The Savage native woman is the femininie standard that Marlow call for to block in order to triumph.Torgovnicks and Gilbert and Gubars, are the only studies of Conrad that notice that the native woman may have something to do with his concerns with inptralism. This native woman makes Marlow tackle his boyhood desire for filling up the blank spaces on the African map he pointed to as a child. He travels all the way to the Congo and instead of finding blank spaces he finds other humans who have their own culture.So the question is how can he fi ll up a blank space on a map is another people are already living there? This question or a variation of this question has been contemplated by Conrad regarding the connection concerning masculinity and feminity, when looking at the power of colonialism and their weakness, and Conrads racism and his compassion for the conquered Conjoins. Is this not woman as dark continent which Marlow fears in himself but cannot re-press (Kristeva). The savage womon in the text is seen in terce differet ways, the first being as the other, as an African temptress, and as a mute savage with no individual characteristics.Faced with anything foreign, the Established Order knows only two types of behavior, which are both mutilating either to screw it as a Punch and Judy show, or to defuse it as a pure reflection of the West. In any case, the main thing is to deprive it of its history (Barthes, 96).The native African woman cannot be seen as just one of these things, she is walsy multi-dimensional and w ill never be understood in Marlows view of the world. Conrad places the African temptress in the middle of his issues with colonialism, by making her speechless. I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of languageone of the elements in the man of colors comprehension of the dimension of the other. For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other (He argues) further that Existence is language, and language is always a matter of politics (Fanon, 17-18).Therefore, in order to exsits you must have language and the subordinate of the colonialists must learn their conquorers language in order to be viewed as human. Therefore when Conrad makes the African temptress mute he is making her unable to speak with her master and therefore less than human, except through her sexual power over Kurtz.Eric Cheyfitz points out thatThe conception of the orator as emperor, conquering men with the weapon of eloquence, is a classical and Renaissance commonplace, and argues tha t this imperial common place finds its place in the story of the orator as the first settler, that is as the first civilizer and colonizer of humans (112-113).Marlow learns about the sundry(a) accomplishments of Kurts and his eloquence through stories he hears, however by the end of the story his articulacy is gone and all he can utter is the horror, the horror. A colonised person confronts the language of their civilizing nation that is with the culture of the mother country, the colonized is elevated above the jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother countrys cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, the jungle (Fanon, 18).As you can see with Kurtz the opposite is true, he accepts the blackness of the jungle, and he doesnt loose his western way of behaving. According to Marlow, All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz (Conrad, 65). Fannons belief that the colonized will assume the language and philosophy of their colonizer, the na tive seductress remains her darkness, whereas Kurtz loses his whiteness. Conrads representation of the savage temptress insinuates that you must look at her with all three perspectives, instead of just looking at her with one or two opposing perspectives. Therefore Conrad echoing the feminist ideals of vagueness, obscurity, and various perceptions characteristic of most female narratives, thus Marlows stretch back to England is reiterating Gilligans psychosomatic interpretations regarding female moral growth.There is very little written about Marlows pauperization for being dishonest with Kutzs Intended. What I did find didnt even look at the idea of female sentiency that has been evident in the anaylsis so far in this research. For example, Marlow never shrinks from judgement, but he judges without slip ideals, without general principles, indeed without consistency. He derides moral absolutes and willingly suspends universals in favor of concrete discriminations (Levenson, 56). We know from his characterlization in the text that he hates lieing and believes that Kurtz is collectible honesty however when he meets with the Intended he is not fully honest, and doesnt even speak about justice. Instead he acts like a saint who would rather, not agony her feelings, than tell the truth. Marlow explains his motivation for lying to Kurtzs Intended, he doesnt try to bring up their progress, or show sorrow on her. He merely believes that the truth would have been too dark-too dark altogether (Conrad).In this text the darkness becomes a moral sensation (Levenson, 56-57), which promotes the idea of several different perceptions in Conrads moral replies to racism, feminism, imperialism, and colonialist exploitation. Nevertheless, the mock of moral fundamentals in Marlows choice to lie, as pointed out by Levenson, is a female cogitate approach that Gilligan creates the framework for and Levenson doesnt seem to contemplate. The moral development and judgemnet of wom en, according to Levenson, is linked to Marlows reaction to Imperalisim and also to Kurtz. This makes it seem like he was being compassionate and not sexist when he lied to Kurtzs Intended.Therefore due to Marlows experiences in Africa his moral awareness has taken on a feminine characteristic. In her text In A Different Voice Gilligan hypothesizes that womens ethical rationalizing is not founded on the ideas of right and wrong, however unlike men, it is found on the situation and the observations of anguish and compassion. The reluctance to judge may itself be indicative care and concern for others that infuse the psychology of womens development and are responsible for what is generally seen as problematic in its nature (Gilligan, 172). Women will usually choose the option that will not hurt anyone, or hurt the least number of people. Why should we believe that the moral sequence through which boys pass constitutes moral development muck up court? (Gilligan, 174). Perchance, fem ales are more concerned with kinship and accountability furthermore not moral in the formal tone of the word, but more reasonable morality. Whereas Men have a more explicit idea of right and wrong, neutral justice (so they would have us believe). If Marlow was judged by Gilligans philosophy for his conclusion to lie to the Intended, then he would be believed to have lied to her to safeguard her from unnecessary pain that telling her the truth would have caused her.In this critical reading of Heart of Darkness Conrads text has been viewed as having a feminine writing style. It has also been revealed that Conrad was viewed as an outsider, exiled by his own Polish people and an immagrant to his home of England, and this created his compassion for the crush people of the colonlized Congo. This does not mean that Conrad isnt racist and isnt imperialistic. The reading advocated that the lot of women are unable to making moral choices based on a more definite idea of right and wrong. Mar low uses various sexual metaphors, such as penetration, and other diction used in the text exhibit a male biased view of women and their roles in society.