Peter Hyland has argued that Heart of Darkness has been criticized both for its demeaning, stereotypical representation of women and for its exclusion of the female reader. Marlow's critical comments on his aunt and his idealization of the Intended reflect Victorian patriarchal stereotypes: in both cases what Marlow preceives is not the woman herself but an image based on his own preconceptions about women. A stereotype is asserted to avoid confronting the "otherness" of women, and the sexual fear underlying this particular manoevre is even more evident in Marlow's representation of the African woman at the Inner Station: "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".

Johanna M. Smith has noted how the jungle's absorption of Kurtz is imaged as "sexual cannibalism": "it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh". Through Marlow's conflation of woman and jungle, itself based on an ideological alignment of male/female with culture/nature, the "heart of darkness" can be read as Marlow's fear of women projected on to the jungle. The threat the African woman embodies is subsequently represented by asserting the myth of the pure, self-sacrificing woman, the myth that Marlow imposes on the Intended, although that imposition is itself destabilized by the threatened return of the repressed.

Hyland notes that though women are marginalized by Marlow's narration, they actually usher Marlow into the experience he recounts. It is Marlow's aunt who has the influence to get him a fob when his own efforts have failed. At the start of Marlow's narrative is this disorienting experience, when his assumptions about power and gender are undermined, and Marlow's unease at the experience of his own powerlessness is recuperated through irony at the expense of his aunt and women in general In the same way it is women who guard "the door of Darkness", and Marlow's uneasiness, again related to women in positions of power and knowledge, is this time recuperated through literary distancing. Women also, arguably, constitute the experience that Marlow recounts.

As Hyland suggests, certainly, it is the African woman and the Intended who are the focus of the final part of Marlow's narrative. If Kurtz sets himself up as a god to be worshipped, Marlow here sets up the Intended for his own ambivalent act of worship: as he "bows down" before what he conceives of as the Intended's faith, "that great and saving illusion", he simultaneously reasserts and imposes on her the patriarchal ideology of separate spheres, a female world of illusion and a male world of truth. Marlow's lie to the Intended shows how what presents itself as an act of venerating women actually asserts and protects men.(26)

(26) ã Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary

Introduction and Notes ã Robert Hampson, 1995

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Pages: 35,36 and 37.

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