THE WOMEN DO NOT TRAVEL

THE WOMEN DO NOT TRAVEL: GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND INCOMMENSURABILITY INCONRAD'S "HEART OF DARKNESS"Author(s): Gabrielle McIntireSource: Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 257-284Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26286130Accessed: 09-10-2019 03:49 UTC

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THE WOMEN DO NOT TRAVEL!

GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND

INCOMMENSURABILITY IN

conrad's heart of darkness

Gabrielle Mclntire

It is a story of the Congo. There is no love interest in it and no

woman—only incidentally.

—Joseph Conrad, "To Fisher Unwin."

Despite Joseph Conrad's anxious confession to his publisherT. Fisher

Unwin in 1896 that there would be "no love interest [...] and no woman"

in Heart of Darkness, or at least "only incidentally," the novella he pro duced two-and-a-half years later is radically preoccupied with women and the ways they influence his "story of the Congo" (l99).Yet Conrad allows women scarcely any narratological or thematic attention in Heart

of Darkness; instead, women appear to function primarily as ancillary details to Marlow's narration about Kurtz and his adventure to the "heart"

of Africa. However, despite women's near invisibility—a half-presence that echoes the text's preoccupation with shadows and darknesses1— they are an always-palpable presence in the background of the text.They

tropologically illuminate the relationships of difference and distance that

MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 48, number 2, Summer 2002. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

THE WOMEN DO NOT TRAVEL:

GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND

INCOMMENSURABILITY IN

conrad's heart of darkness

Gabrielle Mclntire


258 Difference and Incommensurability in Heart of Darkness

Conrad establishes between Europe and the Congo, and they figurally

represent the incommensurability between different ideologies and dif

ferent genres of speaking and knowing that are so central to the text's status as a framed oral narration.

The women of Heart of Darkness have, in fact,suffered from a double

invisibility. First, Conrad invites his readers to participate in Marlow's

insistence that the women are "out of it" (49) by figuring women as

palimpsestic, ghost-like, half-presences. At the same time, the women of

the text have remained nearly invisible because so few critics have cho sen to examine their roles; when women are considered, critics have

focused mainly on Marlow's lie to Kurtz's Intended. Once we begin looking

(and we do have to look to find them), no less than eight women are present in Heart of Darkness: the Belgian aunt who secures Marlow a job

when his prospects for work in Europe are exhausted; the two women

sitting on "straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool" who appear to

Marlow in the Company offices as guardians of "the door of Darkness"

(14); the "wife of the high dignitary" to whom Marlow's aunt recom

mends him for employment in Africa ( 15); the African laundress for the

Company's chief accountant, who keeps him looking like a "vision" or a

"miracle" (21 ); the "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" (60) at

the Inner Station who "rushed out to the very brink of the stream" (66) as Marlow leaves with Kurtz on board his steamer;2 Kurtz's mother,

who dies shortly after Marlow returns to Belgium (70);and finally, Kurtz's

Intended, the woman he might have married, whom he "intended" to be

his final interpreter, and the woman to whom Marlow lies at the very end of the text.3

What is going on with these women? Perhaps most clearly,Conrad

associates women with the cultures and geographies they inhabit as

though by contiguous extension. The principal women of the text are

always positioned in transitional spaces in either the colony or the

metropole, while they are decidedly static and unable to wander be

tween cultural, ideological, and national boundaries, as do Marlow and Kurtz. In terms of Marlow's understanding of his voyage, the women are

neither here nor there;or rather, they are only ever here or there, since

they are powerless to transgress the limit that such a boundary implies.

Mostly the women are sedentary, stationary, and confined to their own

territories, metonymically embodying the separate cultural, racial, and


Mclntire 259

geographic identities at play in the novel. The aunt sits in her upper

middle-class domestic parlor in Belgium as she sends Marlow off to his

adventure in Africa; the two knitting women sit in the outer room of the

Company offices and glance at the men en route to the Congo; and, at

the end of the text, Kurtz's Intended receives Marlow in a "lofty draw

ing-room" (72) where they both "sat down" for their mournful exchange

(73). Even the movement Conrad grants to the African woman at the

Inner Station only further emphasizes her essential immobility:she struts

along the river bank as she wails at Kurtz's departure, but she, too, is

confined to her own territory.

Placed as they are, Conrad's women reinforce a sense of extreme

separation between the colony and the metropole, and as such they are

crucial for guarding and preserving difference between Africa and Eu

rope. Kurtz's aunt embodies whiteness as well as the racist politics of the

European colonizing mission, while she also represents the ignorance of

the sedentary white Belgian masses that do not and cannot participate

in Marlow's knowledge of the "dark" continent. Marlow's aunt is evi

dently very comfortable, ensconced in privilege, and capable of serious

influence with people such as "the wife of the high dignitary" of King

Leopold's Belgian Congo. Before he leaves for Africa, Marlow finds her

"triumphant" as she praises his work for the Company, and they drink

tea during "a long quiet chat by the fireside." Marlow, however, only

mocks her flattery, considering her as a carrier for the ethics of the

colonizing mission. In one of the many moments in the text when Conrad

reveals his famous attention to the power of the written word, Marlow

declares that his aunt has been sufficiently influenced by the "rot let

loose in print and talk just about that time" to gain the sort of limited,

ideologically saturated and very public knowledge of colonialism the Com

pany wishes the general populace to possess ( 15—16).4 Suggesting both

familial rootedness and European cultural supremacy, the aunt upholds

the "decency," order, calm, and "triumph" of the metropole without

moving beyond the domestic space of her own parlor.5

Despite differences of race and place, yet with striking similarities in terms of her rootedness, the African woman at the Inner Station—the

"wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" who mirrors the "sorrowful

land" (60)—emblematizes and helps to inscribe the racist distinctions the text has already established between the colonial vision of native



"savages" awaiting exploitation and the civilizing mission of the colonists,

the white "emissar[ies] of light" ( 15). Marlow describes her in terms of

her physical beauty, her warrior-like posture and clothing, and her inde

cipherable language. Distinct from the ugliness of the white women who

knit in the Company's offices—the "slim one" with a "dress as plain as an

umbrella cover" (13) and the "old one" with "a wart on one cheek" ( 14)—the black native woman is granted a sexual and valuable body: she

is "gorgeous," and laden with costly ornaments that "jingle and flash" as

she moves in her slow procession. But while her beauty and confidence

distinguish her, she too is restricted to her own territory, and Marlow

describes her with a simile that links her to the land she represents, as

though by contiguous extension:

in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrow

ful 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 passionate soul.

She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced

us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a

tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and dumb pain mingled

with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood

looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with

an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. (60)

In more than one sense her valuable body "mirrors" the body of Africa

and its "dark" wilderness that the colonists are plundering as they scramble

for their hoards of ivory, for Marlow anthropomorphizes the wilderness

at the expense of the woman by figuring her as co-extensive with place:

both she and the land convey "sorrow," while the land itself "seemed to

look at her" as though it were looking at itself. Conrad thus bestows at

least as much agency on the land as he does on the woman herself. Nevertheless, the African woman is given an important signifying power

since as she struts along the river bank, holding "her head high" (60), she

represents the absolute distance and incommensurability between Marlows colonial river steamer and her people's land,which she guards

even as she later gives a fervent and sorrowful "send off' to Kurtz. Marlow


Mcintire 261

tells his auditors that when she concluded her exchange of glances, "[s]he

turned away slowly, walked on following the bank and passed into the

bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of

the thickets before she disappeared" (61 ). Marlow's orientalizing terms

here invoke visions of a valuable and hunted animal retreating back to its

camouflaged zone of protection: she disappears into the thickets to re

sume her spatial identification with the "dark" territory.That is, just as Marlow earlier feminizes the wilderness that surrounds the isolated

colonial stations along the Congo by describing them as "clinging to the

skirts of the unknown" (36), the African woman here "passe[s]" back

into the feminized indecipherability of the unknown which defines her.6

In contrast, at no point in the text are the colonists themselves

identified with the land of the Belgian Congo. Instead, the Congo always

remains a discrete territory, epistemologically distanced from the possi

bility of European identification. In this sense Conrad critiques the colo

nial project by suggesting that colonists are always interlopers on the

space of others. Frantz Fanon would propose many years later that "[f]or

a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete,

is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and,

above all, dignity" (44). Conrad perverts this relation between the land

and its people by problematically implying a fantasy of extension be

tween race, gender, and territory to propose, in effect, that race and

gender are the motherland. However, neither women nor natives ever

control the land, nor does it grant them "dignity." Instead, the inscruta

bility of Africa's wilderness becomes another metaphor that repeatedly

reinforces both the literal silence of its inhabitants, and their imagined

ignorance.

In an excellent article that does consider a range of female figures

in Heart of Darkness, Bette London suggests that in Conrad's text we

need to "consider gender and race as interlocking systems whose mutu

ally authorizing relationships support the dominant cultural perspec

tive" (235).The dominant cultural perspective is, of course, colonial im

perialism, and Conrad uses race and gender together to enforce the

distinct alterities between Belgium and the Congo and colonizer and

colonized that a model of colonial subjugation demands for its success

ful operation. In similar terms,Jeremy Hawthorn proposes that "in Heart

of Darkness issues of gender are inextricably intertwined with matters of



race and culture" ( 183). Even so Conrad's placement of women in these

fixed and liminal territories goes further than merely accentuating the

differences and distances between Africa and Europe: it also emphasizes

important incommensurabilities between different modes of knowing,

speaking, and experiencing.That is, while Conrad's text explicitly marks

out incommensurable differences between Europe and Africa and be

tween Europeans and those he calls "savages," these geographic and

racial differences are sustained and enforced by the incommensurabili

ties in knowing and speaking that he establishes along gender lines. Part of what is at stake in Marlow's narration and his brief but

recurring attention to women is a need to distinguish two entirely dif

ferent communities of people predicated on modes of knowledge and

experience.The male protagonists possess both empirical and abstract

conceptual knowledge of the colonial enterprise in both Africa and Eu

rope—while the five major women of the text (Marlow's aunt, Kurtz's

Intended, the African woman, and the two knitting women in the Com

pany offices) apparently possess only conceptual knowledge of either

Africa or Europe. Because of his aunt's acceptance of the public ideolo

gies in support of colonialism, Marlow claims that women in general are

out of touch with truth [....] They live in a world of their own

and there had never been anything like it and never can be. It

is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it

would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded

fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the

day of creation, would start up and knock the whole thing

over. ( 16)

Instead of reading his aunt's complicity with the Company project as

metonymically representative of the ethics of the colonizing mission—

which he does elsewhere—he reads her indoctrination as a specifically

feminine ignorance.This "world" of women that Marlow imagines is dis

tinguished by its non-relation to "truth" and its excessive concern with

aesthetics over practicality. In contrast, the "men" Marlow refers to as

"we" (effectively interpellating both his audience on the Nellie and

Conrad's early male readers) possess a sufficiently accurate version of

the "facts" about the daily business of colonization to make theirs a world

that does not "fall apart"—to use bothYeats's and Achebe's important


Mclntire 263

phrase—at least riot until well into the unimaginable twentieth century.7

The functional world that men have constructed abides by a utilitarian

and empirically tested logic simply because it pursues its ends effectively.

It recognizes such details as the "fact" that the Company is "run for

profit" ( 16).The world Marlow imagines for women, however, is distinct

from that of the men who actually go to the "heart" of the "dark" conti

nent to set up their version of a "world" insofar as it is fixed, static, and domestic: neither the women's world nor the women themselves can

migrate to different territories or do more than manage the incommen surable differences of colonial order that Marlow and Kurtz confront as

they travel. That is, neither women nor Africans (regardless of gender)

are capable of navigating between types of knowledge any more than

they are capable of leaving the territory that defines them.

Just as his aunt functions for Marlow as a metonym for all women

who are ignorant of the "truth" and are miserably "out of it" (49), his

profound misanthropy for the population that remains in Europe cen

ters on his scorn for their ignorance, such that his misanthropy parallels

his misogyny. He comments scathingly and condescendingly on the people

he sees in the streets upon his return to Belgium: "They trespassed upon

my thoughts.They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an

irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know

the things I knew [ ] I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but

I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so

full of stupid importance" (70).Accusing them of "trespass[ing]"—an of

fence he is guilty of in far more literal measure in the Congo—his dis

dain for the people he sees in the streets in Belgium occurs precisely

because of their lack of knowledge, as we come to realize that the key

conflicts of Heart of Darkness are delineated along epistemological lines.

In a text that is on a very fundamental level about language and its

limits, narrativization and narratability.and speech and speakability.some

of the terms Jean-François Lyotard sets up in The Différend: Phrases in

Dispute might help us diagnose how Conrad's constructions of gender,

genres of knowledge, and modes of speech mutually reinforce the dis

tance and incommensurability between the male and female "worlds" of

Heart of Darkness. Lyotard suggests that a differend marks the failure or

impossibility of translating one rhetorical or speech genre into another.

He writes: "The différend is the unstable state and instant of language



wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot

yet be.This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also

calls upon phrases which are in principle possible" (13). I want to pro pose that the incommensurability between Marlow and the women of

his narration reveals a differend that in turn elucidates the more general

incommensurability between modes of knowing and speaking in the text.

As I will show,the women participate in and inhabit a different discursive

genre from men since they are most often silent, uncomprehending, and

indecipherable. Lyotard further proposes—in terms that echo Conrad's articulation of the different "worlds" and "universes" of the sexes—that

a differend describes "[incommensurability, in the sense of the hetero

geneity of phrase regimens and of the impossibility of subjecting them to

a single law [...]. For each of these regimens, there corresponds a mode

of presenting a universe, and one mode is not translatable into another"

( 128). In Heart of Darkness, Marlow's narrative mode of speech presents

and reveals a "universe" in which women are untranslatable and quite

literally unable to be told. Marlow is only capable of reading them as

metaphorical and meets a limit precisely because he cannot translate them to the real.8

Later in the novella—after Marlow has claimed that his aunt and

women in general are "out of touch with truth" (16)—he pushes this exclusion further to insist, with an intratextual echo of his own words,

that women should be "out of his whole story. In the middle of his description about his steamer's dangerous approach to the Inner Sta

tion he happens to mention "the girl," but then catches himself:

"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began sud

denly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—

completely.They—the women I mean—are out of it—should

be out of it.We must help them to stay in that beautiful world

of their own lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it.

You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz say

ing 'My Intended.'You would have perceived directly then how

completely she was out of it." (49)

Quite strikingly, his insistent repetition in this passage that women are

"out of it" marks one of the few places in the text when Marlow inter

rupts his narrative with an aside to his auditors. Indeed, he stutters and


Mclntire 265

falters in his narration most explicitly at the moments when he is unable

to make women a part of his story. Here he "suddenly" stops the articu

late flow of his yarn to revise his own terms and preoccupations by

asserting that women are not simply of a different world, but ought to

be "out of the story "completely." His tangent is so filled with hesita

tions and dramatic caesuras that his very language betrays how unset

tling women are to Marlow's order of things: as figures that cannot quite

make their way into narration, or even into language, they resemble

Lyotard's differend because they present a problem—not simply of trans

lation, but of an epistemological incommensurability with Marlow's genre

of telling and knowing.

His repeated insistence that women are "out of it" ought to alert

us to the fact that they might be more important to his story than he

allows. Marlow's repetitive insistence on women being "out of it" actu

ally seems to betray his own anxiety regarding women as guardians of

difference and players in his own destiny, since they are, in fact, overly

imbricated in his story. He confesses this predicament to his fellow sail

ors with embarrassment: "would you believe it?—I tried the women. I,

Charlie Marlow, set the women to work—to get a job. Heavens!" (12)

Here he must not only repeat the personal pronoun, "I," but he feels

compelled to name himself to the others in order to stress his own astonishment, to perform his alienation from ostensibly unusual behav

ior. Without his aunt's intervention, Marlow would never have gained his

appointment to the river steamer in Africa in the first place; his aunt is,

quite significantly, partly responsible for originating his story.

Not only are women "out of touch with truth," but Conrad also

constructs the women of his story in terms of a different discursive

genre from the men in Heart of Darkness. In contradistinction to Kurtz's

"folds of a gorgeous eloquence" (72), and Marlow's exquisite narration

to his fellow sailors that takes place with scarcely a pause, the women's

narration and their very narratability are severely restricted. Not a single

woman has a name, women scarcely speak,and when they do speak they

are misunderstood, deliberately misled, or represented as profoundly

lacking a comprehensive understanding of the events in which they par

ticipate. The only women of the text who are granted a decipherable

language are Marlow's aunt and Kurtz's Intended, and they are the only

two with whom Marlow converses.Johanna M.Smith argues that Marlow



chooses not to "silence" the Intended and the aunt simply because he

"needs them for his speech: by mocking the lack of worldly experience

which their words convey, he can recuperate that experience as a manly

encounter with truth. By having them feebly echo the case Kurtz has

made for imperialism, he can reverse the powerlessness evinced in his

response to Kurtz's eloquence" (189). In contrast, the African woman is

powerfully granted sound—a point I will return to later—though for

Marlow the sound of her wailing is closer to the "howl" of the "bush"

(46) that eerily takes his crew by surprise than it is to language.

In The Différend one of Lyotard's principal concerns is to explore

how parties within discursive encounters involving heterogeneous "phrase

regimens" are divested of the possibility of communicating, and are there

fore "reduced to silence" (10). While he is interested especially in the

philosophy of language and its discursive systems, he also includes a deeply

ethical and political dimension to the differend, claiming, "What is at

stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear

witness to différends by finding idioms for them. In the differend, some

thing 'asks' to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not

being able to be put into phrases right away" (13).Without framing his

argument in feminist, queer, or racial terms, Lyotard goes very far in

describing how institutional and societal modes disallow certain forms

of speech or genres of expression by not making space for the possibil

ity of their idiom.That is, a differend occurs not simply when voices are

not heard, but because those voices cannot be heard.The voices Lyotard

writes of are as unintelligible to the more powerful discourses that frame

and contain them (whether these are legal discourses, or whether they

involve an exchange in which one of the parties—sometimes a priori—is

refused the chance for self-articulation) as the women in Heart of Dark ness are to Marlow's narration.9

For the majority of the text we do not and cannot know why

women partake so completely of a different epistemological framework

than the men, and it seems that Marlow is quite happy to allow this difference (which generates a differend) to remain unchallenged. He has

virtually no desire to explore the incommensurabilities between their

systems of knowledge and his own, establishing himself instead as an

"Enlightened" reader, as Bette London points out, and "the voice of cul

tural authority" (241).That is, he is capable of distinguishing between


Mclntire 267

epistemes while confidently remaining within his own. While his aunt is

making him "quite uncomfortable" with her naïve praise of the Company's

project, for example, lauding their efforts to "wean those ignorant mil

lions from their horrid ways," Marlow only ventures a "hint that the

Company was run for profit" ( 16). He stops short of a full explanation of

his views, which he narrates to his male auditors, and he only weakly

expresses his discomfort through the always-ambiguous gesture of a

hint. Marlow thus not only allows his aunt to misread his own ambiva

lence about the Company's capitalist ventures, but he seems to wish this

misreading upon her. He considers her, as with the Intended at the end,

incapable of knowing.

If we move backward into Heart of Darkness with the teleology of

Marlow's lie in mind, the narration's dependence on a complex series of

différends becomes increasingly apparent. Not only is Marlow unable to

read women—effectively structuring them as a différend—but he also

disdains women because of their perceived inability to recognize the

incommensurabilities at the heart of the darkness of Africa. Perhaps the

most shocking example of the distance Conrad creates between Marlow on the one hand and women and Africans on the other occurs when

Marlow meets Kurtz's Intended after his voyage to Africa and finds him

self unable to translate the excess of his experience into intelligible words.

Despite Marlow's stated disgust for lies (29), and his claim to have been

searching both for "the truth of things" (17) and "truth stripped of its

cloak of time" (38), he chooses to lie when the Intended asks him for

Kurtz's final words.The phrase Kurtz repeats as he dies—"The horror!

The horror!" (68)—becomes for Marlow another metonym for the untranslatability and inexplicability of his experience of Africa. They are

Kurtz's words, simultaneously and ambiguously alluding to his horror of

his own tyranny, his horror of a continent in miserable subjugation, and

possibly to the horror of his vision of death, but Marlow makes them his

own.As Michael Levenson suggests, Kurtz's phrase involves "the produc

tive confusion of two realms: personal agony indistinguishable from politi

cal catastrophe" (5). Kurtz's repetition becomes Marlow's private refrain

for Africa, which he refuses to share with Kurtz's Intended, and presum

ably shares for the first time when he narrates it to his fellow sailors.

Even when he does narrate his tale to his male audience, we should

keep in mind that Marlow relates it in a trance-like state, with a "hesitat



ing voice" ( 11 ), as though he only finally tells it (or confesses it) in spite

of himself. Indeed, the frame-narrator describes the group onboard The

Nellie in terms suggestive of altered or religious states of consciousness,

thus supplementing Marlow's story with the impression that an occult

transmission of knowledge is taking place: the listeners themselves "felt

meditative," and, in terms that orientalize Marlow for a change, before

Marlow begins his story he "sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the

mizzenmast. He had sunken cheeks,a yellow complexion,a straight back,

an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands out

wards, resembled an idol" (7). At the close of his story Marlow is even

more deeply associated with a religious and, in this case, a philosophic

figure : "Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of

a meditating Buddha" (76).

Sometimes Marlow is, in fact, quite self-consciously aware of the

authority of his position and his voice, claiming that "for good or evil

mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (38). In terms of Lyotard's

model of "phrases in dispute," the silence of women stands out ever

more starkly because of its extreme opposition to Marlow and Kurtz's

command over language. Marlow speaks directly from the metropolitan

center of the British Empire—his narration literally takes place on the

fluid, shifting territory of the Thames, just upriver from London—while

he repeatedly reminds us how important his English-ness is to his ad

ventures. The English language provides the common linguistic ground

between him and Kurtz, allowing Marlow to converse fluently with Kurtz,

a man who is known for "his ability to talk, his words—the gift of ex

pression" (48). Marlow remarks:

This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured

me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether.

This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he was

good enough to say himself—his sympathies were in the right

place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French.

All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by

I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society


Mclntire 269

for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him

with making a report, for its future guidance.And he had writ

ten it too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating

with eloquence. (50)

Kurtz's familial genealogy of partial Englishness is what allows him to

communicate with Marlow, just as Marlow's national English and conti

nental family connections allow him to encounter Kurtz at all.Appropri

ately, Kurtz is something of a cultural hybrid: his roots lead to a mixed

European ancestry (Marlow does not narrate what the "other" parts of

Kurtz's descent are), while he apparently had travelled to Africa out of

an "impatience of comparative poverty" (74).

Conrad thus links Kurtz and Marlow through the particularity of

their shared background and experiences, through their association with

the "new gang—the gang of virtue," since they were both recommended

by "the same people" (25), and through the feet of their wandering. Marlow

is "a seaman, but he was a wanderer too." He has a marked difference

even from his fellow sailors to whom he relates his tale because, unlike

them, he "still 'followed the sea'" (9). To reinforce Kurtz and Marlow's

parallel need for adventure and travel, Conrad later intratextually ech

oes the narrator's observation that Marlow is a "wanderer" by describ

ing Kurtz as a "wandering and tormented thing" (65). Marlow is a dis placed Englishman who must rely on a female relative in Belgium to

secure him a job, while Kurtz is a displaced citizen of all of Europe.

Kurtz and Marlow's intimacy then springs up in part from their

mutual love of what Édouard Glissant calls "errantry." Errantry, for

Glissant, is "not rhizomatic but deeply rooted: in a will and an Idea" (41 ),

and in contradistinction to mere "wandering," errantry aligns itself with the abstract telos of an Idea. Before Marlow even meets Kurtz he is told

that Kurtz "had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort" (33).

Marlow, in turn, wills to understand the incomprehensible Idea of Af

rica—and, ultimately, of Kurtz himself—and he fantasizes that travel will

provide him with this knowledge.What Marlow actually comes to "know"

during his voyage is unclear, and Conrad seems to want to leave the

markers of truth or discovery ambivalent. Just as Marlow conveys that

before he knew Kurtz "[h]e was just a word for me" (29), Marlow ago

nizes over the fact that his narration may appear to his audience as

simply an inchoate string of words. He asks: "Do you see him? Do you


270 Difference arid Incommensurability in Heart of Darkness

see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell

you a dream" (30). Kurtz and Marlow "see the story" because they pos

sess a shared vision of the atrocities of deep colonial Africa in which

they both participate in different ways.

At the same time, Kurtz and Marlow's all-male community of knowl

edge is semi-marginal and always on the move.They seem to participate,

at least tentatively, in what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "being in common." This

"has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a

unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being in

common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any

empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (nar

cissistic) 'lack of identity'" (xxxviii). Neither Kurtz nor Marlow has the

type of static identity that Marlow criticizes in women, and concomi

tantly, they shift locales endlessly precisely because they cannot discover

what Nancy calls one's own "ideal place." Even when it appears that

Kurtz may just have discovered his "ideal place" by tyrannically control

ling a station far enough down river to put him beyond the precincts of

Company control, Marlow enforces his retrieval mission to dislocate Kurtz from his usurped African territory.The "lack of identity" they share

is predicated on both their errantry and on Marlow's narcissistic under

standing of Kurtz's final words, as Marlow seems to believe that only he

can interpretively grasp the brilliant logic in Kurtz's pathetic cries that

point to no particular referent. Following Nancy's terms, however, their

community ultimately fails because of Marlow's excessive identification

with Kurtz and his homoerotic desire to possess the "truth" singly about

Kurtz, and frantically exclude it by lying to Kurtz's Intended.

Marlow's misogyny then depends on an important distinction be

tween "wanderers" and those who stay at home. In contrast to the

homosociality of Marlow and Kurtz and the ways in which they are nar

rated as wanderers who become "friend[s]" (62) that partake of an "un

foreseen partnership" (67), the women of the text remain geographi

cally, ideologically, and culturally stationary and isolated.While Heart of

Darkness is critical of the grand narratives of colonialism, pointing out

the "darkness" at the heart of the colonial project and critiquing the

empty desires of the Company "pilgrims," Conrad nevertheless valo rizes Marlow's form of wandering. Yet Marlow does not travel to Africa

to understand another culture, but rather to satisfy his childhood "han


Mclntire 271

kering" to explore what had been "the biggest—the most blank" (II)

space on the world map, even though "It had got filled since my boyhood

with rivers and lakes and names" (I I-I2).10 Unlike the (problematic)

birth of anthropology, when, as Édouard Glissant proposes, "[understanding cultures then became more gratifying than discovering

new lands" (26), Marlow's voyage is rooted in a childhood fantasy of

discovering the unknown promised by the unwritten cartography of the

blank map. His adult voyage to the Congo is his attempt to actualize this

abstract desire for knowledge by supplementing it with the empirical

experience that will allow him not simply to name but to narrate this

blank space.As Conrad writes in "Geography and Some Explorers," one

of his autobiographical Last Essays, "the honest maps of the nineteenth

century nourished in me a passionate interest in the truth of geographi

cal facts and a desire for precise knowledge" (qtd. in Kimbrough 145;

emphasis added). His concerns with honesty, truth, facts, and knowledge

are precisely the issues that the women of Heart of Darkness help to

illuminate by their very exclusion from these spheres.

While women do not wander in Heart of Darkness, and Conrad

does not grant them the possibility of grasping the Idea of colonial ex

ploration,the women are nevertheless crucial for sending off the men to

their travels. In one of the important send-offs of the text, where women

are placed in liminal positions yet are unable to transgress the bound

aries between here and there, Marlow exchanges meaningful glances with

two mysterious women who knit black wool in the Company's head offices.These women occupy a transitional space in the labyrinthine head

quarters: they are outside the waiting room and the inner office, yet

inside the Company, and they are some of the last faces the young "fool

ish" men will see before leaving for Africa (14). Inhabiting an ambiguous

position, these women are at once comforting and sinister. On one level,

their knitting seems more appropriate to a domestic space of semi

leisure than to a space of business, and the women provide a last glimpse

of "home" for the men who cross their threshold, complete with a cat

who sits on the older woman's lap. But, at the same time, they are remi

niscent of the three fates of Greek myth who weave and unweave desti

nies regardless of individual wishes."



Significantly, Marlow's exchange with the two knitting women oc

curs in glances, without words—just as the indecipherable send-off by the African woman at the Inner Station—while it leaves an indelible mark

on his consciousness that involuntarily returns to haunt his memory in Africa. He describes his visit in these terms:

[The older woman] glanced at me above the glasses.The swift

and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me.Two youths

with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over

and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about me

too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and

fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding

the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall,

one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown,

the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with un

concerned old eyes. "Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri

te salutant." Not many of those she looked at ever saw her

again—not half—by a long way. ( 14)

Marlow must quite literally navigate his way through the glances of these

women to approach the center of the Company, while, sitting on the

outskirts of the Company offices, the women also function as the Euro

pean gateway to the subjugated Congo.They are strangely "unconcerned"

and distinctly unattached to Africa.The women quite incommensurably

knit wool, as though for a cold climate, indicating their indifference to

the fates of the men who pass them by. Nevertheless, Marlow conjec

tures that the women knit "black wool as for a warm pall," inviting us to

imagine that they are knitting feverishly because they sit at the door of

death, preparing palls to cover the dead as they return from the heat of

Africa to the chill of Europe.

Linguistically, too, Conrad links them to the colony with his word

play on the "feverish[ ]" (14) pace with which they undertake their task.

In practical terms, however, they are doing the wrong thing—racing against

a time that both means everything and nothing once Marlow reaches

Africa, where the lack of basic materials (rivets) delays his retrieval of

Kurtz for months, rather than hours or days.Apparently, as Conrad shows

us, the colonial system of extraction was so profitable that it could af


Mclntire 273

ford to be badly organized.The two women eerily possess a commensu

rate and fateful knowledge of the men who pass them by, and they ex

hibit an ironic efficiency in their "feverish" pace to provide materials for

the dead.Are these women, then, figures of knowledge? Is Conrad offer

ing a deconstruction of Marlow's terms whose logic states that women are "out of touch with truth"? As with the other women of the text

their knowledge can only be conceptual, but it nevertheless leans to

ward experience since it can be none other than the knowledge of the

probability of death. This "fateful" knowledge momentarily links them

with the community of men who pass through their offices,and provides the closest encounter between Marlow's versions of "male" and "fe

male" forms of knowledge that the text will allow.

The Latin Marlow uses to apostrophically address the women—

"Ave! [...] Morituri te salutant" ( 14)—conveys strangeness, difference, and

the solemnity of death in a tongue belonging to the early Roman "con

querors" to whom he refers at the beginning of his narration ( 10). Marlow

and these knitting women are, in this specific moment, separate commu

nities, functionally communicating because of their mutual access to the

knowledge of death and a foreboding sense of "Darkness." Paradoxically, the women here disclose both a différend and a moment of commensu

rability: their gendered community is opaque and unsettling to Marlow,

yet Marlow's phantasmatic Idea of the "Darkness" of Africa momentarily

appears to correspond with their Idea of Africa as a place that sends back the dead.That is, the women who "knit," "glance," and "introduce"

have a peculiar epistemological access to the "Darkness" that they guard,

though their imagined Idea will necessarily be incommensurate with the

particularity of the lived experience that unfolds for Marlow. Marlow's

encounter with these women is disturbing enough that this image later

returns to his memory, as though from the repressed, to "obtrude" itself

on his thoughts precisely as he crosses the boundary from the river (his

steamer—as the metropole framed by the dark continent) to the bank

(the native territory, the unknown, the unexplored) in pursuit of the

escaped Kurtz. As Marlow remembers remembering the women—in a

moment that reminds us that this is a text about memory—they no

longer seem as apposite to the Darkness that they guard,and Marlow, in

effect, takes back his earlier intimation of their knowledge: from the

vantage point of experience the older woman appears only within the



context of some fleeting "imbecile thoughts" as "a most improper per

son to be sitting at the other end of such an affair" (64).

Marlow disdains European women because they seem debilitatingly

unable to know difference; they are unable to conceive of the prolifera tion of differends that mark Kurtz's summation of "the horror." At the

same time, Marlow extends his critique of the limits of women's knowl

edge to Africans, and specifically to African women. He places the two African women that he encounters—the laundress and the woman at

the Inner Station—into similar categories of non-knowledge as the Eu

ropean women.The laundress of the "Company's chief accountant" (21 ),

just as the "savage" "fireman" who stokes the furnace aboard the river

steamer (38), is "useful" only insofar as she has "been instructed" (39),

for she possesses no real relationship to subjectivity or the power at

tendant with critical knowledge. Yet Marlow admires the fruits of her

labor, and he comments at length on details of the accountant's appear

ance, for which she is responsible:

I met a white man in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw

a high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair

parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a

big white hand. He was amazing and had a pen-holder behind

his ear. I shook hands with this miracle [—] Yes. I respected

his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. (21)

Does this not remind us of the terms Marlow criticizes his aunt for

using, when she imagines Marlow as "[s]omething like an emissary of

light, something like a lower sort of apostle" ( 15)? Is Marlow not guilty of

the same type of aestheticizing that he complains makes women inca

pable of setting up a world? What is Conrad ironizing? Perhaps Marlows

need to segregate women's knowledge is rooted in his wish to distance

himself from a recognition that their "feminine" way of experiencing the

world at times infects his own epistemology.The women's knowledge

that he observes is alternately "out of touch with truth," "fateful," in

structed, and also incomprehensible; in other words, women's knowl

edge is very much like Africa itself for Marlow.


Mdntire 275

The woman at the Inner Station also seems to possess and mark a

knowledge of her own, insofar as she performs the sentiments of her tribe in her "articulate" send-off to Kurtz. She is an untranslatable fixture

of her geographical locale who nevertheless possesses an uncanny knowl

edge that Marlow himself cannot comprehend. In terms reminiscent of

the two knitting women, she appears to Marlow as one who "looks"

(60) and "glances" (61 ) at the Company men who pass before her eyes.

She guards her territory as a sentry: her demeanor is "warlike" (60), she

has a "helmeted head" (66), and, like the younger knitting woman who

walked "back and forth introducing," she walks along the bank "from

right to left [ ] with measured steps" (60). Marlow notes, without additional commentary on its significance, that she moves in a counter

clockwise direction, perhaps insisting on her inversion ofWestern Euro

pean order, although her movements are ordered and precise.

While Marlow tries to decipher her movements, her glances, and

her shrill cries—all gestures outside of language for him—he is forced

to confess that she remains incomprehensible.Just after he first narrates

her appearance on the river bank, associating her at once with danger,

Marlow relays the harlequin's account of an episode involving her and

Kurtz a few days earlier: "Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day

to care, or there would have been mischief. I don't understand .... No—

it's too much for me.Ah, well, it's all over now " (61). Her incomprehen

sibility leads the harlequin, too, to the stuttering and hesitating silence of

a differend where, as Lyotard suggests, one epistemological and discur

sive genre is "not translatable into another" (128).The next day when the steamer pulls away with Kurtz on board, the African woman shouts

out "something" and "all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring

chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance." Marlow asks Kurtz if

he understands their cries, and Kurtz merely responds, "Do I not?" (66) Kurtz, however, does not translate for Marlow, and Conrad leaves the

meaning of their cries undefined. Perhaps they are shouting Kurtz's name,

or something equally impossible for Kurtz to misunderstand. All that is

clear for Marlow, and hence for us, is the fact that their protest against

Kurtz's departure occurs through sound and language.They are power

less now to take up a physical fight, and hence their protest must come

through words alone.Yet Marlow is again left unable to read either women

or Africans with any precision. And these failures of communication do



not stem simply from a lack of translation—which does not signify a

differend for Lyotard ( 157)—but from Marlow's interpretation of their

world as more commensurate with the "heavy, mute spell of the wilder

ness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast" (65) than with his

own genre of knowing.

Indeed, women are frequently figured very much like the wilder

ness itself in Heart of Darkness, as Conrad consistently associates women

not only with the land they inhabit as guardians, but also, in the case of

Africa, with the silence, shadowiness, and indecipherability they share

with the colonial territory. Both women and the wilderness provide a

backdrop to the narration, a figurative ground on which the male action

is superimposed. From the beginning of his tale Marlow consistently and

repetitively describes the Belgian Congo as a mysterious and dark place

full of silences, participating in a European fantasy that the African wil

derness was, as Ian Watt argues, "by definition an extreme example of a

place where the light of civilization has not come; and Africa, for this and

other reasons, long figured in European thought as the Dark Continent"

(Conrad in the Nineteenth Century 250). Early on Marlow remarks, "the

silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me

as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for

the passing away of this fantastic invasion," while, like a mother, "the

wilderness without a sound took [the beaten "nigger"] into its bosom

again" (26; emphasis added). Later on the wilderness is "great, expectant,

mute" (29; emphasis added), a "rioting invasion of soundless life" (32; em

phasis added), and "[a]n empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable

forest" (35; emphasis added).These associations of the wilderness with

silence and muteness carry right through the text. As such, the wilder

ness is figured as a major marker of Africa's subjection: a geography,

space, and history that quite literally cannot be heard, yet which never

theless possess a mysterious, indecipherable "hidden knowledge" that is

"mute" but "with an air of whispering—Come and find out" (16). And

this is where the wilderness is, in fact, a step up from women: it pos

sesses secrets worth discovering, while women's silence is representa

tive of nothing more than lack and absence.

Interestingly, Conrad associates Kurtz as well as women with the

wilderness.When Marlow's allegiances are beginning to shift to Kurtz he

tries to disclaim his new loyalties to his auditors, insisting that "I had


Mclntire 277

turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz who, I was ready to

admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me as if I

also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets" (62). Of

course Marlow does not literally choose the wilderness; if he chooses

any "wilderness" at all, it is only the "wilderness" of human experience and its extremes. And he makes his revulsion from the wilderness clear

in a series of dizzying and slippery tropes that disclose an intense corpo

real fear of being swallowed up by this "silent" land that is figured so

much like the women of the text. He moves rapidly from claiming an

allegiance to the "wilderness" to imagining not just Kurtz but he himself

as "buried" by the wilderness, as though together—in a homoerotic

burial—they would be entombed by the land that fascinates them. Nor

does he simply envision a scene of interment in the African ground;

rather, he imagines "a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets," as though

the earth itself were a repository of hidden knowledge, ready to incor

porate their two bodies that have thirsted for its secret.

At the very end of the text, Marlow's desire for non-contact be

tween his epistemological framework and women's in general is high lighted when he chooses to lie to Kurtz's Intended. Marlow's desire to

visit her has been piqued by Kurtz's "small sketch in oils" of the In

tended—"a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch" (27)—that Marlow first sees at the Central Station before he meets Kurtz. The portrait of a deliberately blinded woman who nevertheless

functions as a carrier of light draws together Marlow's general charac

terization of women as blinded, ignorant, and yet oddly capable of illumi

nating the way into darkness, offering a parallel with his aunt's procure

ment of his position and with the ways the women of the story illuminate

the epistemological structures and concerns of Heart of Darkness.12 Al

ways one step away from truth and knowledge, women can reflect their

light, but not know where they walk. Importantly, the painting also oper

ates as a symbolic point of currency for Marlow since together with

Kurtz's letters, the blinded figure of liberty provides a connecting bridge

between Marlow and the Intended, and gives him a reason for visiting

her. Marlow chooses to visit her on the pretence of returning what is

rightfully hers—to "give her back her portrait and those letters my

self'—while he simultaneously admits that his move is made equally out

of "[c]uriosity," and a desire "to surrender personally all that remained

of [Kurtz] with me," including "his memory" (71).



When Marlow does visit the Intended, he is capable only of re

turning the portrait and her own letters, not of giving her Kurtz's final

words; he can return things, but he cannot meet her with language.Their

dialogue takes place in a chiaroscuric setting of half-lights and shadows, and as elsewhere in the novella Marlow describes the Intended in terms

that suggest she is co-extensive with her physical environment.The room

they sit in has a "tall marble fireplace [that] had a cold and monumental

whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner with dark gleams

on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus" (72), and

the room grows increasingly "dark" as their conversation about Africa

and Kurtz progresses.The Intended herself is still in mourning and dressed

"all in black," yet she is also aligned with whiteness; she possesses a

"pale head" (72), "fair hair," a "pale visage," and she "seemed surrounded

by an ashy halo" (73).13

The Intended is predictably eager to hear all that Marlow has to

tell about Kurtz's last days. But even though Marlow has already pro nounced that "as it turned out [he] was to have the care of [Kurtz's]

memory" (51 ), he is unwilling to share either memory or truth with this

woman. If Marlow is to insist on meeting Kurtz's Intended only in the

language of lies, it appears he must foreclose communication altogether.

Rather than giving the Intended the dignity of a conversation, he mimics

her phrasing in a bizarrely sadistic wrestling match that belittles her

desire for knowledge of her once future husband.14 In answer to her

statement, "You knew him well," he echoes her in profoundly homo

erotic language,"! knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know

another" (73). His echolalia effectively parodies her desire for knowl

edge about nothing less than knowledge itself by claiming a supreme (and

possibly sexual) form of knowledge for himself. He has already conveyed

a stuttering erotic homage to Kurtz that insists upon their eternal "inti

macy," claiming that in his first words to Kurtz Marlow said the "right

thing," just at the "very moment when the foundations of our intimacy

were being laid—to endure—to endure—even to the end—even be yond" (65).

As their exchange continues he finds her responses deeply trou

bling and finally bars communication with her altogether, recognizing in

the "appealing fixity of her gaze" (73) the same language of "glances" he

so detests in other women. As Marlow is struggling to piece words to


Mclritire 279

gether in the hesitating language of discomfort, claiming "He was a re

markable man [....] it was impossible not to the Intended interposes "Love him." This statement works simultaneously as a com

mand, as an assertion of her own love for Kurtz, and as an attempt to

meet Marlow on his own discursive level by literally completing his sen

tence to join his genre of praise. By echoing him in the language of love

and desire, however, the Intended pushes his remembrance of Kurtz to

its passionate and epistemological limits: her conclusion is precisely the

sort of thing Marlow does not want to hear from a woman; it is far too

near to the "truth" about his attachment to Kurtz. Marlow experiences

this interpolation as a terrifying shutting down of his voice, feeling that

she was "silencing me into an appalled dumbness" (73).This is, of course,

a distinctly feminine position in Heart of Darkness, and, along with the

sudden revelation of her uncanny knowledge, produces a discomfort from which Marlow will be unable to recover.

After a few more moments of an awkward, hesitating dialogue in

which Marlow expresses a palpable jealousy for the Intended's devotion to Kurtz and her assurance of their mutual love, Marlow tells her that he

was with Kurtz "[t]o the very end [....] I heard his very last words," but

then suddenly "stopped in fright." The Intended, of course, asks him, with

childlike repetitiveness,"Repeat them [....] I want—I want—something—

something—to—to live with" (75). Again she is asking to participate in

his language, to know the words he carries as memory. Marlow, however,

is incapable of speaking. Rather than tell her the truth of Kurtz's aston

ishing last words, and thus uphold his promise to Kurtz to communicate

his story to her on a decipherable level, Marlow reinforces their differ

ence by refusing to meet her in the same discursive territory of "truth."

Instead of telling the Intended that Kurtz died muttering "The horror!

The horror!"—a statement that Marlow interprets as a "supreme mo

ment of complete knowledge" (68) that "had the appalling face of a

glimpsed truth" (69)—he tells her that Kurtz died muttering her (un

specified) name.As such, Marlow ends his story on a différend by direct

ing her away from knowledge to leave her believing in a false romantic

vision of Kurtz's final words. Instead of allowing for the positivity of difference and otherness, Marlow refuses to risk the sort of incommen

surability that might flourish if he tried to convey "the horror" to the

Intended. Clearly he believes it would be impossible for her to under



stand his community of errantry and experience, and he chooses to close

off an anticipated differend rather than to allow its free play: in effect, he

will guard the difference between male and female forms of knowledge

as vigilantly as the two knitting women guard "the door of Darkness."

His lie also binds him irrevocably and phantasmatically to Kurtz

since it makes him the sole inheritor of Kurtz's story. By choosing to lie

to the Intended, Marlow meddles with authorship and authority (he is a

storyteller, after all) to impose his own revisions on Kurtz's final state

ment, thereby effectively authoring Kurtz's story himself. His lie uncan

nily marks the moment at which he is closest to Kurtz, yet simulta

neously this refusal to honor Kurtz's contract for truth instantly dispels

their community and their "Being in common." His lie to the Intended—

which Marlow has already prematurely confessed to his auditors mid

way through his narration when it slips from his lips as a kind of prema

ture ejaculation of the intention of the whole story—consequently marks

the moment when Marlow has least control over language, narration, or

his search for "the truth of things."

To mark the closure of his story, then, Marlow refuses the possibil

ity of relation by purposefully remaining fixed in a differend as a means

of resisting the frightful contact of knowledge between different modes

of thought. In his mind we can hear him insisting that women do not

travel, and they "live in a world of their own." His refusal to relate to the

Intended is tantamount to claiming a continually shifting epistemological

status that no one but himself can discern. By lying to her, and in the split

moment that informs his decision to do so, he apparently finds her name

(and perhaps the name of "women" in general) translatable and com

mensurable with the incommensurability of "the horror." Within his

own mind he might even believe that he is telling her a kind of truth,

leaving her ignorant of the "facts" of what really happened, but affirming

to himself the affinity between women and "The horror!"

Notes

I wish to thank Laura Brown, Eduardo Cadavajonathan Culler,Ellis Hanson,

Molly Hite,Jodie Medd, Natalie Melas,Daniel Schwarz,and Hortense Spillers for offering both encouragement and critique at various stages of writing

this paper.


Mclntire 281

I. Since its initial publication and early reviews, critics have found Heart of

Darkness excessively atmospheric, as well as structurally and adjectivally

difficult, shadowy, and undecidable. Ross Murfin offers an excellent over view of some of these early- and mid-century critiques, pointing out that

in 1903 John Masefield thought it consisted of "too much cobweb" (98); in

1936 E. M. Forster considered it "a little too fuzzy" (98); and in his highly

influential work, The GreatTradition ( 1963), F. R. Leavis concurred with Forster,

also stressing its "overwhelming sinister and fantastic 'atmosphere'" (Leavis

173).

2. Even though it has become something of a critical convention to call this woman "Kurtz's African mistress," she is never explicitly named or desig nated as such. Heteronormative biases have led critics to assume a sexual

relation, but there is no substantial evidence in the text to indicate the

precise nature of her relationship with Kurtz. Instead of characterizing her as his "mistress," then, I will simply refer to her as the woman at the Inner Station, or the African woman.

3. Beginning with the opening words of the text—"The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest"

(7)—every vessel that carries Marlow from one land to another is also gendered as feminine. While Conrad's use of feminine names for ships is

of course quite conventional for the period, it nevertheless underscores the fact that he leaves every woman of his text unnamed. In pointing this

out, we might note, though, that Heart of Darkness also participates in a more general absence of naming: other than Marlow and Kurtz, charac ters are known by function rather than by proper name. This tendency

extends equally across boundaries of race and place. Marlow's audience for his tale consists of the "Director of Companies," the "Lawyer," the "Accountant," and the unnamed frame-narrator; while in Africa he speaks

of figures like the "Manager," the "chief accountant," and the "helmsman."

Even so, Conrad articulates gender differences through his unnaming since

the men tend to be referred to by title or function, while the women are

usually referred to by function in terms of their relation to men: Marlow's "aunt," Kurtz's "Intended," Kurtz's "mother," the "laundress" for the chief

accountant. Furthermore, geographic place names are rarely specified ei

ther: neither the Belgian city nor the Belgian Congo is named; instead we

hear only of "a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre"

( 13), and, just once, of "Africa" (II). The Congo itself is never named; when Marlow describes his childhood fascination with its representation on the map, he recalls only that it looked like "an immense snake, un coiled" (12).When he arrives in Africa after his ocean voyage, he simply remarks that he finally "saw the mouth of the big river" ( 18). Conrad was



well aware of this absence of naming place, at any rate, and in the same

letter quoted above to T. Fisher Unwin, he notes that in his manuscript,

"The exact locality is not mentioned" (qtd. in Kimbrough 199).

4. Conrad gives an exquisite disquisition on the relation of language to art in

his "Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus." Here he argues against the

eroding power that "careless usage" can exert upon language, insisting that "it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, never

discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to color, and that the light of magic suggestive

ness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the common

place surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of

careless usage" (xlix).

5. Ian Watt reads Marlow's misogyny as specifically directed to "women of the well-to-do and leisured class to whom his aunt and the Intended, and

presumably the womenfolk of his audience, belong." Treating Conrad's text in the context ofVictorian ideology,Watt argues that "Marlow's per

spective, in fact, assumes the Victorian relegation of leisure-class women

to a pedestal of philanthropic idealism high above the economic and sexual facts of life" ("Heart of Darkness and Nineteenth-Century Thought" 114).

6. Conrad invokes the valences of racial passing through his choice of words, which therefore ask us to consider for whom or for what he implies the African woman might have been "passing." Does having an autonomous and authoritative presence as a woman in this text necessarily entail a form of passing? When the African woman "passed" back into the wilder ness, is Conrad suggesting that she "passes" back to her "real" identity?

7. Edward Said is generally critical of the "politics and aesthetics" of Heart of

Darkness, which "are, so to speak, imperialist" (24); yet he proposes that

"[s]ince Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illu sions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nostromo), he permits his

later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into

dozens of European colonies, even if,for his own part, he had little notion

of what that Africa might be" (26).

8. In "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness," Garrett Stewart takes this point even further to argue that "both" women of the text (in this case the Intended and Kurtz's "mistress") "copresent in the narrator's mind's eye, are emanations of Marlow as well as of Kurtz" (328), and he proposes that the Intended's "black-draped mourning is Kurtz's darkness visible" (331). It would be going too far to pursue this line of thought further and


Mclntire 283

propose that the women are never more than Marlow's symbolic projec tions, but Stewart is right to point out the consistent manner in which women function as a kind of tabula rasa on which Marlow's preoccupa tions are staged.As we will see, the women also take on qualities from the

settings that surround them.

9. In her recent study, Conrad and Women, Susan Jones points to a fascinating

letter George Gissing wrote to Joseph Conrad in 1903 in which Gissing claims there is a pressure of speech behind the actual silence of Conrad's

women: "Wonderful, I say, your mute or all but mute women. How, in Satan's name, do you make their souls speak through their silence?" (qtd.

in Jones 21). His point is idealistic and misogynistic at the same time, though he does touch upon some of the work these silent, or nearly silent, women do in Conrad's text.

10. As Robert Kimbrough reminds us, it was a common feature of the nine

teenth-century colonial imagination to conceive of unexplored territo ries as "blank" or "white" empty spaces. Kimbrough writes that Sir Rich

ard Francis Burton, for example, went in 1856 "to search for the sources of the Nile and to map what [he] called the 'huge white blot' of Central Africa" (146).

11. In a further link between women and discursive patterns in Heart of Dark ness, we should note that both Hermes and the three Fates created the

alphabet, although they invented only the first five vowels and two conso

nants (Graves 65, l82).That is, the Fates are partially responsible for the signs that make written language possible.

12. Earlier in the story, when Marlow is first describing the trip toward the Inner Station on the river steamer, he associates himself with someone

who is "blindfolded." Defending his navigational skills he claims he "didn't do badly either since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to me yet Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road. I sweated and shivered over that business considerably"

(36). When he later invokes the image of the "blindfolded" woman he again offers the possibility to his readers that he and the women of his

story are more intertwined—even metaphorically—than he would like to admit.

13. See Natalie Melas's "Brides of Opportunity: Figurations of Women and Colonial Territory in Lord Jim" for a brilliant discussion of the ways in which Conrad's Manicheistic dualisms echo structures of colonialism.

14. Henry Staten reads this encounter as a sado-masochistic power conflict between Marlow and the Intended where Marlow possesses a "desire to inflict mourning on a woman and then to drink of her grief (163).



Works Cited

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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 3rd ed. Kimbrough 1-76.

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Joseph Conrad. Ed. Cedric Watts. London: Penguin, 1988.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961.Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.

Forster, E. M. Rev. of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. 1936. Murfin 98.

Glissant, Édouard. The Poetics of Relation.Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of

Michigan P, 1997.

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Jones, Susan. Conrad and Women. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999. Kimbrough, Robert, ed. Heart of Darkness. By Joseph Conrad. New York: Norton,

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Leavis, F. R. The GreatTradition. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Levenson, Michael. "Does TheWaste Land Have a Politics?" MODERNISM/mo

dernity 6 (September 1999): 1-14. London, Bette. "Reading Race and Gender in Conrad's Dark Continent." Criti

cism 31 (1989): 235-52. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minne

apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Masefield, John. Rev. of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. 1903. Murfin 98.

Melas, Natalie. "Brides of Opportunity: Figurations of Women and Colonial Territory in Lord Jim." Qui Parle 3 (1989): 54-75.

Murfin, Ross C., ed. Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.

Nancy,Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community.Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus,

Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Smith,Johanna M.'"Too Beautiful Altogether:' Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness: Murfin 179-95.

Staten, Henry. "Inflicting/Mourning: Heart of Darkness." Eros in Mourning: Homer

to Lacan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Stewart, Garrett. "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness." PMLA 95 (1980): 319-31.

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