Colonizers, Cannibals, and the Horror of Good Intentions in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Carola M. Kaplan

Marlow's compelling but ambivalent description of the "savage" woman enables the reader to see the contrast between her authority and unique attributes and Marlow's repeated attempts, throughout the text, to deny the power and individuality of African natives. Marlow responds to her dangerous allure--dangerous because he sees her as partly responsible for Kurtz's "going native"--by insisting on her ineradicable twofold otherness, the savage and female as distinguished from the civilized and male. By designating her the living embodiment of these dualities, Marlow shores up the binary oppositions upon which his understanding of Western civilization rests.

The "savage" woman, as Marlow describes her, is a distillation of alluring but frightening otherness. His view of her highlights her beauty, leadership, and ferocity. She is "wild," "gorgeous" (136), and proud. Wearing a helmet, armor, and magic charms, she is fearless in the face of the pilgrims' bullets, and is obeyed by her tribesmen. She is "like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose" (137), a description sufficiently ominous but all the more so for echoing the previous description of the wilderness as "an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" (103). Although she is without words, the "savage" woman is not without purpose--and this, her "struggling, half-shaped resolve" (137), is all the more menacing for being unknowable. Her threatening otherness is most fully articulated by Marlow's parodic double, the Russian "man of patches" (88) who finds her so frightening that he proclaims: "If she had offered to come aboard [the steamer] I really think I would have tried to shoot her" (88). The contrast between the harlequin's nervousness and the "savage" woman's composure, between his ragged attire and her "gorgeous" adornment highlights her formidable power.

In her overt sexuality and aggressive claims upon Kurtz's person, Marlow finds her both enticing and menacing. Voracious and diabolical, she appears to belong to a matriarchal and polyandrous female warrior culture. Equated with the wilderness--she is its "tenebrous and passionate soul" (137)--she is a kind of succubus that has made Kurtz her concubine and thereby drained him of his vitality:

   The wilderness had patted him on the head.... it had caressed him,
   and--lo!--he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got
   into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the
   inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled
   and pampered favourite (121).

The "savage" woman is one with the wilderness that has claimed Kurtz for its harem. This image of Kurtz as the "spoiled and pampered favourite" in a male harem directly threatens the patriarchal and ostensibly monogamous structure of the society from which he has emigrated.

So threatening is the "savage" woman in her sexual otherness that Marlow adopts a strategy of subduing her power through grief: "she stopped as if her heart had failed her" (137). Finally the text supplants her with--in effect, turns her into--the Intended, in perpetual mourning and domestic confinement, whose outstretched arms mirror the "savage" woman's gesture but lack her power to command a tribe or to enshroud a pilgrim ship in shadow: "Suddenly she [the "savage" woman] opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head.... and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace" (88). Thus Marlow's narration quells the anxiety the "savage" woman evokes: It demonstrates that her "barbarous" charms are in fact "powerless" (156). Her inconsolable grief, in paralyzing her, restores the male--in the person of her paramour, Kurtz--to primacy.