By Ethan Cobb, Class of 2017

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow, a European seaman, tells the story of his journey up the Congo River to the heart of Africa, where the famed and mysterious Kurtz, a trader in ivory, resides. In the novella, Conrad develops the dichotomy of  the savage versus the civilized and twists that binary upside down: he undermines the idea that white imperialists are superior to Africans. The acts of savagery are committed by white Europeans, rather than native Africans; it is the Europeans who kill and plunder. The dichotomy between the savage and the civilized is also the dichotomy between nature and civilization. Conrad collapses this binary as well; in his dark vision, nature and civilization are both deadly forces.

In the beginning of the novella, Conrad simultaneously sets up and undermines the dichotomy of the civilized versus the savage through the unnamed narrator’s description of the Europeans who explore and trade with the “savage” world. The narrator describes the Company Director, who is also the captain of the ship he and Marlow are travelling on, in admiring terms: “He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom” (1). This brooding gloom is not the savage, wild sea though; it is actually London, a commercial and cultural European center, the “biggest, and the greatest, town on earth” (1). And the true work of the apparently admirable and trustworthy Captain/Director is business, presumably with the merchants and bankers of London. Darkness does not surround the “luminous estuary;” it surrounds the center of civilization.  In this sense, the binary between savagery and civilization seems to collapse. Similarly, the narrator’s description of great British explorers also simultaneously establishes and reverses the dichotomy of savage and civilized.  The narrator calls them “the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea” (2). Sir Francis Drake, the “great knight-errant,” was also a slave trader and privateer who was involved in an English action in Ulster where the English massacred 600 Irish men, women, and children after they surrendered. Conrad collapses the binary, showing the savagery that exists inside civilization.

There is another aspect of the dichotomy between savagery and civilization: the binary between the vitality of nature and the deadliness of civilization. Conrad establishes the Company headquarters in Belgium as a symbol of civilization- science, commerce, ideas of progress, cold white reason- but also as a symbol of death. The Company is located in a city that Marlow compares to a “whited sepulcher” (7), thus associating white European civilization immediately with death. The Company is colorless and silent, unadorned and seemingly passionless.  It sits on a street characterized by “dead silence” (13). The only colors Marlow mentions are black and white. The staircase is “swept and ungarnished, as arid as a desert” (13). The woman in the outer room wears a dress “as plain as an umbrella-cover”  (13) and the chairs Marlow sees are also plain. The only note of color, in contrast, is the “shining” map of Africa, full of reds, blues, orange and purple. The colors mark the places where the Company is doing business, extracting wealth.

     The Company is also associated with science and reason, prime components of the European civilization. Marlow is examined by a doctor who measures his head with calipers and quotes Plato. But everything - science, reason, courage - is subordinated to the motive of profit. Marlow notes that there is “something ominous” about the atmosphere: “It was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy” (8).  The conspiracy is the scheme to plunder Africa while pretending to civilize and raise up its native population.  The doctor conversing with Marlow over civilized vermouths “glorified the Company’s business” (8) and the profit-seeking Company dominates the city: “It was the biggest thing in the town” and everybody Marlow meets “was full of it” (7).  The Company intends to “run an oversea empire, and make no end of coin by trade” (7).   However, the Company claims its motives are to civilize the natives, an idea which is widely accepted. Sitting with his aunt next to a cozy civilized hearth, Marlow says his aunt sees him as “Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk … she talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’” (17). This is another dichotomy: between what is said and what is actually done.

The Company’s hypocritical veneer of a humanizing and civilizing mission is central to its success as a commercial enterprise. The Company, in effect, is the doorway to the riches of Africa, and at that doorway, sits a guardian, a woman, who seems to be the epitome of civilization with “a starched white affair on her head… and silver rimmed spectacles” (13). The woman, like his aunt and women in general, is, according to Marlow,  “out of touch with the truth” (10). Sitting alongside her is another woman; the two are “guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall” (8). Marlow notes that the face of the woman in spectacles expresses an “indifferent placidity” (13).  Marlow is troubled by that look; the woman is indifferent both to the human suffering the Company is causing thousands of miles away and to the likely possibility that the men- “ youths with foolish and cheery countenances”- who are employed by the Company will die while serving it (15). In their naiveness and indifference to human suffering, the women are enabling death.

In contrast to the cold, sterile, criminal “civilized” European environment is the so-called savage land of Africa. Africa is expansive and teeming with life: “The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life… ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence” (26). In contrast to the “white sepulcher” of civilization, Marlow describes Africa frequently as dark and ominous- its coast “so dark-green as to be almost black” (10), its interior “the depths of darkness” (15). Although the historical meaning of darkness in relation to Africa is that Africa is primitive and removed from the “light” of reason and civilization with people therefore, closer to dark primal emotions, darkness actually has many meanings in the story. Darkness is related to nature; nature is often a kind of dark, malign force that resists human efforts, including colonialism: “Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair” (11). Nature, which is the force that brings life into the world, also brings death. The vital vegetation of the jungle both thrives and rots.  Nature is not just the colorful life that the map at Company headquarters symbolizes, it is also death and darkness.

Another meaning of the darkness may be that Africa is dark because white imperialists are both metaphorically and actually projecting their dark, evil impulses on the land: “this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” (30). However, the white imperialists don’t just project evil onto the idea of Africa, they commit evil by their actions. While claiming to bring civilization to Africa, the Europeans cause human suffering and create wreckage.  On his journey up the river to the outer station, Marlow describes a scene of “inhabited destruction”: “mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs, amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity”  (12). He sees an overturned railway truck, a product of civilization that is useful in Europe and could be useful in Africa except that it is wrecked and “looked as dead as the carcass of some animal” (12). Furthermore, European contact with the Africans, far from raising the Africans up to a higher level, often results in bringing the Africans down to a lower lever. Kurtz creates followers through his charisma and his followers are the ones who carry out his dark crazed commands. It is not clear whether Kurtz - and by extension, the white imperialists - are corrupting the Africans or just taking advantage of the Africans’ own savage impulses. In either case, the civilizers are not ennobling or elevating the natives; they are corrupting or exploiting them.

In addition to the physical and moral wreckage the Europeans create, they brutalize the natives savagely. Marlow describes an incident where Fresleven, a Swede, beat an elder African chief because he thought he was wronged over a deal involving two hens. Marlow sarcastically provides a reason for Fresleven’s petty brutality: “He had been a couple of years already out there engaged in the noble cause, you know, and he probably felt the need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way” (6). Marlow’s direct speech to the reader (“you know”) seems to suggest that he actually finds the rationale quite absurd.  Later, when Marlow is with the manager of the central station, they hear a groan from an African. To this, a European remarks, “What a row the brute makes!... Serve him right. Transgression—punishment—bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That’s the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations for the future” (22).  The Europeans force the Africans to work to the point where they destroy their will to live. Marlow describes a “grove of death” (16) where the African workers “had withdrawn to die” (14). The Africans there are “nothing but shadows of disease and starvation” and are suffering “pain, abandonment, and despair” (14). Whether their actions or deliberate or impulsive, the Europeans, in search of profit,  are bringers of  death to Africa, transforming a grove - a place where things grow - into a graveyard.

Kurtz represents the ultimate inversion and collapse of the dichotomy between the savage and the civilized. Kurtz is half British and half French; as Marlow says, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (45).  Additionally, he embodies the achievements of civilization; the manager of the Company remarks that Kurtz is “a great musician” (66) and “an emissary of pity and science and progress” (67).  However, this model of civilization is also the epitome of savagery in the novella. Kurtz goes to Africa, supposedly on a civilizing mission, proclaiming that each trading outpost  “should be like a beacon on the road to better things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing improving instructing” (29). However, in Africa, he is consumed by power; he feels “there was nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased” (51). Kurtz throws himself into savagery and evil behavior that is so dark, it’s unspeakable. There are shrunken heads outside his hut and bloody savage rituals he leads the natives in, but Marlow won’t spell out what they are. Kurtz, the most successful ivory extractor the company has and a charismatic spokesman for the civilizing mission shows how savage the Company’s agenda really is. According to the Company manager, Kurtz’s inconceivable acts of savagery have “closed” the region to the Company, disrupting the Company’s flow of ivory and therefore have “done more harm than good to the Company” (57). In the face of Kurtz’s insanity and savagery, the Manager’s complaint is not that Kurtz brutalized the natives, but that his “method” was “unsound” (57). The true savages are the white European Company men. As Kurtz lays dying, Marlow provides an apt epithet for the civilized savage; he says he sees “a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear” (61).

In seeing how the dichotomy of the savage and the civilized is collapsed in Heart of Darkness, I realized that the relevance of this idea is not at all restricted to the period of history the novella depicts. Every form of imperialism throughout history has involved this binary. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin explore this concept in Postcolonial Studies; The Key Concepts: “the binary logic of imperialism is a development of that tendency of Western thought in general to see the world in terms of binary oppositions that establish a relation of dominance” (26). The imperialist power always claims that it is civilized and that the colonized need to be educated and raised up to their level. The United States used this kind of rhetoric in its annexation of Philippines, as it did, more recently, in a different way, in nation-building in Iraq. Political and social changes since Conrad’s time have been enormous; but what hasn’t changed is the savagery inside the human heart.  

Works Cited:

• Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. "Binarism." Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts., 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. pp.  25-28.

• Conrad, Joseph.  Heart of Darkness.  Dover Thrift ed., New York City, Dover Publications, Inc., 1990.