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Conrad's Savage Woman
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 While Marlow's appreciation
of this "wild and gorgeous" woman, of a woman "savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent" (YS 135) is in stark contrast
to his view of the pale and shadowy Intended who like his aunt arouses his anger and contempt in her refusal to recognize
the truth, it is at the same time in keeping with patriarchal appreciations of spirited and outspoken women, who are admired
as long as they were not too long in contact either with the men who admired them or with the women these men were constantly
in contact with.
Marlow's view is no different from that
of men within the colonized society. Tsitsi Dangarembga's exploration of Nigeria during the colonial period in the novel,
Nervous Conditions, portrays power relations between men and women as being similar to that
between the colonial government and the people of Nigeria. The patriarchal Babamukuru commends the forthrightness of his young
relative Lucia. "That one," he remarks to his wife, "she is like a man herself," but qualifies the remark by adding: "she
says the first thing that comes into her head." Forthrightness, then, is as amusing in a woman as the sight of a child imitating
adults or as Marlow's fireman who is a "parody" of the European (YS 97). It is amusing, but not to be tolerated for long.
When our attention is drawn to these differences,
we may erroneously suppose the African woman to be the untamed, and therefore "savage" and "superb" counterpart of the Intended
who has long been tamed and reduced by civilization. If Africa is, as Frances Singh suggests a symbolic representation of
the Id in relation to the ego/superego that Western civilization represents, the savage woman might well be the Id of the
Intended or be a woman in an earlier stage of being than the Intended. Marlow's description of her does in fact see a close
bond between her and the land that gives credence to this view:
And in the hush that had falled 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
passionate soul. (136)
Both Africa and its people are as far
as Marlow is concerned in the beginnings of time, a primeval time. To be like the African woman would then involve a regression,
a movement backward in time and in civilization that would be impossible to achieve.
Ruth Nadelhaft in her introduction
to Joseph Conrad cites the views of critics such as Sherryu Ortner and Carolyn Merchant who
emphasize a connection between woman and nature who are mastered by man and culture (9). So for example, Marlow notices that
whole villages and lands in the Congo have been lain waste by the Belgians. The impact of culure on the land is paralleled
by the disastrous effect of man's control over woman. In this way, then, the Intended may be seen as the shadow of the savage
woman, all that is left of a fine woman after man and his culture have appropriated her. I think it is important to note that
the state of the Congo is not a result of the appropriation of the Belgians, but of an inefficiency in the method used. The
Congo is as it is because the Belgians have not completely and successfully appropriated the land or even attempted to do
so. The civilizing mission has been neglected in the interests of the ivory. This would suggest that women must be fully and
completely owned by men to achieve fullness. The Intended is a shadow because she is neglected by Kurtz, not because she belongs
completely to him. It is difficult to know whether Marlow subscribes to this view, but the difference between the Intended
and the African woman may be explained thus.
Even if we were to accept the implications
of the connection between the land and the woman that such critics suggest, it would seem that as women, we are faced with
only two alternatives: to be savage, wild, and barbaric or to be a pale shadow like the Intended, refined out of all existence.
These binaries are the stereotypical bipolar terms in which women are conceived. Neither suggests the efficiency, the energy,
the rationality, the courage, or the forthrightness and essential human nature attributed to men.
The discourses of colonialism and gender
are similar - and I would suggest that the final superimposition of the European figure and the African suggests the connection
between the two discourses - not only in that the colonized peoples are conceived in terms similar to those used to describe
women - irrational and irresponsible - but also in the ambivalence of a discourse that can see women or the colonized individual
as being at one and the same time shy, coy, and innocent and sexually bold, a temptress, and a seductress.
The ambivalence of these terms is better
understood not by looking at their differences, but by looking at their similarities. Both sets of terms are negative. The
African woman's flesh-and-bloodness goes to one extreme with an emphasis solely on the physical; the Intended's soul is set
at the other extreme with a too great emphasis on an elevation to a spirtual level. Each term has a range of significance
from negative to positive, and it is usually the range of significance falling on the negative end of the scale that is attributed
to women and the colonized individual. Women are either barbarous or repressed, never forthright, calm, outspoken or frank.
Are these the only alternatives that Conrad will allow us?
In Marlow's mind, the two women are also
connected by their shadowy presence. The African woman is a "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" (YS 135) just as the
Intended is a "pale Shade." These are not the only people seen as phantoms. Marlow repeatedly refers to Kurtz as a shade,
too. Going on shore to bring Kurtz back to the steamer, Marlow refers to "the very natural aversion (he) had to beat that
shadow." "The shade," Marlow later tells us "of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham." Kurtz and the
two women are drawn together in Marlow's narrative as shades (YS 143).
Marlow's reason for calling Kurtz a shade
is that the latter succumbs to the horror of the darkness within us. Kurtz's method, Marlow feels, demonstrates that he "lacked
restraint in the gratification of his various lusts...there (is) something wanting in him...which when the pressing need arose
(can)not be found under his magnificence eloquence" (YS 131). It takes tremendous strength to remain deaf to the horror, and
Kurtz obviously lacks substance. Marlow, who is Conrad's spokesman in his indictment of Belgian colonialism, characterizes
those who cooperate in or enable this form of colonialism as "mean and greedy phantoms" (YS 147).
The Intended and the African woman, then,
are shades because of their complicity in an act of greed and monstrous cruelty. It is their illusions which keep alive the
flame, the light that guides men such as Kurtz into believing that they have undertaken and are fulfilling a great mission.
Fairly early in the novel, Marlow chances upon a portrait of the Intended painted by Kurtz. It portrays a "woman draped and
blindfolded carrying a lighted torch" (YS 79). Kurtz must have recognized the Intended's role in keeping alive the illusion
of the torch of enlightenment he thought he was carrying.
Marlow's contempt for his
aunt because of her belief in the civilizing mission of the Belgian company and because she overlooks the fact that the company
is run for profit is paralleled in his contempt for the Intended who is also "out of it." Marlow goes on to reveal that not
only are women out of it, but that they "should be out of it." "We," Marlow declares to his male audience, "must help them
to stay in that beautiful world of their own..." Marlow follows his own advice when he decides against telling the Intended
the truth of the horror and of Kurtz's share in it. Though Marlow insists that he does so to save the Intended, his words
here suggest otherwise, for the women must be kept in their world "lest (the world of men) gets worse" (YS 115). It can do
only when men realize the horror of their world and are forced to confront it.
In the relations between the colonizer
and the colonized or in that between men and women, knowledge plays a crucial role in demarcating the line between those who
have power and those who lack it. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha reveals that partial revelation
was a deliberate strategy on the part of the colonizer so that the colonized peoples would know only as much as
was necessary to make them useful and to facilitate the work of empire, but not so much that the division between them
and the colonizers would be forgotten (87). Responsible for this lack of knowledge, the colonizer may then proceed to use
it as an indication of the inferiority of the colonized people. It is for this reason that Marlow can look at the fireman
and see in him a "dog in a parody of breeches" (YS 97). And it is for the same reason that Marlow accuses women from whom
he withholds the truth of enabling colonialism, of fostering and cherishing those illusions in men that lead to empire.
Marlow's "dull anger" cannot be sustained
for long, because as he himself realizes it is the idea alone that redeems the taking away of land from people with different
facial features. The women become repositories of the idea, a physical embodiment of an illusion that helps to keep the horror
at bay. If Marlow admires Kurtz, it is because the latter can at the end admit the horror and acknowledge having been part
of it, something Marlow cannot bring himself to do. He lies to the Intended, keeps from his aunt and even from his seamen
friends, the truth of his Congo experience, preferring not to speak of it.
As the room in which he speaks to the Intended
grows progressively darker, with only the faith of the Intended shining like a "great and saving illusion...in the darkness,"
Marlow not only fuels her illusion, but takes sustenance from her light to lighten his own darkness (YS 153). Kurtz, Marlow
realizes, has used his mistress as a route to the ivory. She has unknowingly colluded in the rape and despoilation of her
own country. Equally horrifying is Marlow's realization that he too has used women to gain his object. Marlow begins his narrative
by telling us he was so eager to obtain charge of a steamer that he "set the women to work - to get a job!" (YS 53). Dismissive
as Marlow is of women and their illusions, without them he would never have been able to reach his goal or have experienced
some kind of an anagnorisis. Kurtz gains entry into the impenetrable jungle and becomes a successful agent because of his
African mistress. That men need the active help of women in gaining their object is a humiliating realization for Marlow.
For Marlow, who regards Jim's rescue of Jewel in Lord Jim in a romantic light, not only does this
awareness of women's agency render the male chivalrous role redundant, but there is a powerful realization that men either
cannot or for the most part do not adopt that role. Much of Marlow's ambivalence regarding women stems from an awareness of
their agency and a need to dismiss it. Both positions are problematic, for the former weakens men's roles and the latter makes
men wholly responsible in cases where women are the victims. There is a need in Marlow to view men in a more positive light
than is possible and thus to negate any positve qualities women have.
Kurtz's colonizing acitivity extends itself
through his African mistress to the metropolis. His mistress, the Intended, and the ivory are brought together by his use
of the possessive pronoun. That Marlow is implicated in this process is evident from the way he sees the African woman as
a possession, linking her to the land and to its spoil. Marlow's use of his aunt and his use of the Intended's illusions connect
him with Kurtz. In his capacity of male in the metropolis, Marlow is equivalent to Kurtz in his capacity of colonizer in the
colonized territory.
That Conrad, like Marlow, believed that
women sustained women's illusions is evident in Nostromo. Emilia Gould, who despite her "eager intelligence"
does not, Conrad reassures us, have a masculine mind (N 66), is praised for her "idealistic view of success" (67) which inspires
her belief in her husband and in the mine. Both action which "is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions"
(66) and Emilia inspire Gould. The idea that motivates Gould is powered by her "instinct of devotion" and his "instinct of
activity" (74).
Susan Jones in her book Conrad
and Women indicates that Conrad was drawing upon the Polish tradition, which valorized women who were cast in
the waiting role, in his portrayal of women (54). Mickiewicz's epic poem Konrad Wallenrod, for instance,
portrays a princess locked in her tower in self-imposed isolation (55). Although the genre functions to question while it
valorizes the role of the sacrificing woman, its real function is to expose the futility of the romance hero and his inability
to act. Charles Gould and Jim are also drawn from this tradition.
It is not so much Emilia's
faith or illusion that Conrad questions - and in fact he does not question them at all - as Gould's ability to act. It is
because her husband fails to live up to her expectations that Emilia's fate evokes sympathy and compassion.
Since Marlow's attitude to women is bound
up with his knowledge of colonialism, particularly Belgian colonialism, it is, I think, important to determine Conrad's own
attitude to empire. This will help clarify Conrad's own view of women. In a letter to William Blackwood of 31 December 1898,
Conrad was to write that "(t)he criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa
is a justifiable idea" for a novel (CL 140, nv). The letter reveals that it was not the work itself or women's belief in it
that Conrad was questioning, but the method employed to approach it. What Conrad exposes is the inability of the colonizers
to fulfill the promise they hold out.
Sympathy for women on such grounds is
not very empowering. That women do or should have illusions is unquestioned. Moreover, Conrad engages our sympathy for
these women through their faith which makes them admirable. Like Marlow, Conrad accepts and condones the idea which informs
the act of colonization. That men fail to live up to the idea is a sign of some lack in them, not in the idea itself. My point
is that the nature of the illusion in itself should be questioned, irrespective of who holds the illusion. The civilizing
mission that colonizers undertake puts them in a position of superiority and dominance, not unlike that which men occupy in
their relation to women in the domestic sphere. Condoning colonialism and the dominance of men in the Empire only serves to
condone and legitimize the dominance of women in the domestic sphere. Emilia Gould takes pleasure in Gould's attitude of benevolent
dictator (N 62) and the Intended, idealizing Kurtz, puts herself in a subordinate position. The illusion serves to place men
on a pedestal above women. That some men are not worthy of that position does not suggest there is anything wrong with the
pedestal or a man's natural position on it for the illusion that fosters that view remains unquestioned.
Conrad also, unlike Marlow, absolves women
from an implication in the process of empire. Marlow's cynicism which questions the illusions women have suggests that women
are as much involved in the making of empire as men are, for their illusions facilitate the process. But women are set free
from Marlow's judgement on the grounds of an ignorance or lack of awareness that is as damning as Marlow's accusation, for
it implies a lower stage or phase of development in which one's beliefs are as yet unsullied and nothing problematizes as
does Marlow's experience the apparently simple facts of the civilizing mission.
Though Conrad's focus was on an indictment
of Belgian colonialism, the structural positioning of the savage woman in the centre of the narrative and her connection with
the Intended point to a visual representation of another important discourse: that of gender. The position of the savage woman
at the centre of the narrative and that of the Intended at its periphery recall the frame narrator's metaphors regarding Marlow's
narratives, which in their relation to meaning are compared to a husk and kernel, to a glow and haze. Marlow's narratives
are like a glow and they bring out and are enveloped in meaning like a haze.
The savage woman occupies the position
that the story does in this metaphor. She is a visual representation not only of Africa, but also of the colonialist enterprise.
Colonialism and its discourse, then, are the glow which serve to emphasize gender issues in the metropolis that are embodied
in the person of the Intended.
 The discourse of colonialism
with its construction of the Other, in particular the feminine Other, emphasizes not merely the difference between the colonized
individual and the colonizer, but that between the colonized female and the woman in the metropolis as well. With this
alternative of savagery and barbarism held out to her, the latter is compelled to conform to the archetypal role of the woman
as passive, resigned, demure, and restrained. The discourse of the Other reflects back on the metropolis serving to reinforce
stereotypical gender roles.
This is necessary to prevent men from
entering the heart of their own darkness. In her essay, "Empire, Narrative, and the Feminine in Lord Jim
and 'Heart of Darkness,'" Padmini Mongia suggests that the African woman is threatening because she "threatens to consume
just as the land she represents threatens to engulf" (141). The desires within men are displaced and located in the land and
in women, so that men can speak in terms of being seduced by women. When Kurtz escapes from the steamer re-entering the impenetrable
jungle, Marlow referring to the incident uses the passive voice to denote Kurtz's actions: "the heavy mute spell of the wilderness...seemed
to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous
passions. This alone...had driven him out to the edge of the forest...had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of
permitted aspirations" (YS 144). Kurtz's agency is reduced to responding to these calls to his unlawful passions rather than
initiating action.
The threat is that what man has repressed
will be re-awakened by something present in the land and in women. The source of the temptation is in the women and in the
land. The responsibility of what happens here solely with them, for men will yield to their "unlawful passions" only when
they are tempted. The constant rape of colonized women brought to the fore men's attitude regarding women who were treated
thus because they tempted men. Women who efface all trace of sexuality are supposedly respectable and are therefore treated
with the respect they deserve. The Intended's lack of physicality would have prevented Kurtz from satisfying his unlawful
passions with her. This would only have served to reinforce a code of conduct that would have insisted women deny their sexuality
in order to be deemed respectable. Marlow seems to be of the view that the "powers of darkness" that assault Kurtz are located
not within himself, but in Africa (116). The noise and the din speak to Marlow and to other Europeans because they minds contain
traces of the past. This in itself indicates that they are removed from the past, susceptible to it when they come into contact
with it, but otherwise far removed from it.
Marlow's narrative and its positioning
of the two women suggests not only this connection between the discourses of colonialism and gender and the dual threats both
land and women represent to men, but is a visual representation of Conrad's development as a writer as well; specifically
the change in focus from colonialism to an exploration of women's roles in the later romances. The latter inevitably follows
from the former, leading to a natural development from an interestr in colonialism to an interest in gender issues. The construction
of a feminized Other is an indication of the light in which women were and are still regarded. The ambivalence of one discourse
recalls that of the other. Though Marlow evades the issues that his subject calls up, Conrad did not. The presence of the
two women in a narrative that does not call for the presence of women recalls to us these issues, allowing us to address them,
even if Marlow does not.
Yet in a sense Conrad does not deal with
these issues. Marlow can at least admit to the need for illusions and to the evasion of truth they involve. This is as close
as one can come to an honest grappling with the truth. It is certainly farther than Conrad himself goes. Conrad's view of
illusions as ultimately non-illusory, as elevated to the realm of the ideal to which we must all aspire, implies an inability
to confront the truth. Marlow is, I think, closer to a realization that men deliberately keep women out of "it" than is Conrad.
His remarks that men must keep women in their beautiful world reinforce this view. There is as far as gender is concerned
more hope in Marlow's cynicism than in Conrad's lack of it. To be in favour of women is not enough. The reasons why one is
in favour of them are far more important, for in these inhere the empowerment of women.
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