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By Root 9199 0

“redeems” imperialism—and hence what separates the colonists from the conquerors—“is the idea only.... ; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea” (p. 41), and it now appears that he believes it is the British who uniquely possess such an ennobling idea and an ethical commitment to it. How we are to interpret Marlow’s careful exclusion of Britain from his ensuing assault on the hypocrisies of imperialism is an open question. We have already seen how, in “Youth,” Conrad’s English alter ego tends to be Anglophilic, and it bears noting that, like “Youth,” Heart of Darkness was written for the pro-imperialist British readership of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Yet the evidence as to whether Marlow’s assertions wholly reflect Conrad’s beliefs is ambiguous. An essay on the British arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling that Conrad wrote several months before beginning Heart of Darkness might have shed light on this question, but it was not published and the manuscript has not survived.

Regardless of how we are to interpret Marlow’s exemption of Britain from his attack on imperialism, he is unambiguous in his denunciation of those forms of imperialism that he views as illegitimate. This fact becomes apparent in the contrast between his outlook and that of his naively idealistic aunt during their farewell meeting before he sets out for Africa. Complaining to his listeners that she viewed him as an “emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle,” he points out that “[t]here had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time” (p. 48). Conrad had given a taste of what Marlow means by “such rot” in his ironically titled short story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), which, like Heart of Darkness, depicts the moral degradation of ivory traders in the Congo. In this story a Belgian newspaper “discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth” (Tales of Unrest, p. 94). (It bears pointing out that some of the most egregiously insincere instances of such Belgian propaganda came from the pen of King Leopold himself. It should also be noted that Conrad signaled the importance of the nationality of the story’s Belgian pro tagonists when he emphatically corrected a reader who mistook them for Frenchmen [Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 93-94].) Significantly, however, whereas Marlow freely discloses to his male listeners his disgust for “the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern” (p. 61 ), to his aunt the most he has done is “ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit” (p.48). His recollection of this exchange leads him to reflect on the differences between men and women in a passage whose condescension is ringingly primitive:

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. 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 (p. 48).

Precisely the sorts of ugly truths that women are allegedly incapable of stomaching are what Marlow will be subjected to in the Congo. Upon his arrival he is struck by the perfidiousness of the white company agents, whom he terms “pilgrims” in order to underscore the hypocrisy of the quasi-religious rhetoric that masks their criminal conduct. They are ruthless schemers who view Marlow (as they do Kurtz) with mistrust, as he has been represented to them by his aunt’s friends as one of “the new gang—the gang of virtue” (p. 62); that is, they believe him to take seriously the civilizing propaganda associated with the company’s endeavors and thus worry that he may impede their ability to generate profits. Marlow is also appalled by the condition of the indigenous workers. In one episode a chain gang of Congolese laborers overseen by an African collaborator with a rifle passes by: