How did you feel after reading Heart of Darkness?
1. Examining Heart of Darkness from a postcolonial perspective has given way to more derisive critiques. As Achebe put it, Conrad was a "thoroughgoing racist," one who dehumanized Africans in order to use them as a backdrop against which to explore the white man's intrinsic value. Achebe is right: although Conrad rebukes the evil of colonialism, he does nothing to dismantle the racism that undergirds such a system, instead of positing the indigenous people of Africa as little more than part of the natural environment. This work has been held up as one of the West's most insightful books on the evil of European imperialism in Africa, and yet it fails to assign any particularity to African people themselves.
2. Feminist discourse has offered similar critiques, that Conrad has squashed his female characters similar to the way he's done so with his African ones. Women are deployed not as multidimensional beings, but as signifiers undistinguished from the field of other signifiers that make up the text. They are shells emptied all particularity and meaning, such that Conrad can fill them with the significance he sees fit: the African queen becomes the embodiment of darkened nature and an eroticized symbol of its atavism. Kurtz's Intended, meanwhile, is just a signifier for the illusory reality of society that Marlow is trying to protect against the invading darkness of human nature. Neither woman is internalized, and neither is named a rhetorical strategy that seems less about Conrad illustrating the failures of language than it does about him privileging his masculine voice above any possible feminine ones.
京公网安备 11010802032529号