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PARTISAN REVIEW
One of the secondary themes "locked in" to the conclusion is
presumably Marlow's view of women. At the very beginning of the
story Marlow was quite unable to convince his "excellent aunt" who
got him a job with the Trading Company that it was run for profit; and
this led him to interject: "Il's queer how out of touch with truth
women are. They live in a world of their own.... " Marlow makes a
similar comment when he first mentions the Intended: "Oh, she is out
of it-completely. They-the women I mean-are out of it-should be
out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their
own, lest ours gets worse." In the manuscript Conrad made this
passage even more explicit, and anticipates Marlow's final lie to the
Intended about Kurtz's actual end, by adding: "That's a monster-truth
with many maws to whom we've got to throw every year-or every
day-no matter-no sacrifice is too great-a ransom of pretty, shining
lies. "
Marlow 's misogyny may seem a somewhat less disabling prejudice
if it is set in the context of his general view of life. What he says clearly
refers, not to the women who work in the office of the Trading
Company, for instance, or to Kurtz's native mistress, but quite specifi–
cally to women of the well-to-do and leisured class to whom his aunt
and the Intended, and presumably the womenfolk of his audience,
belong. Marlow's perspective, in fact, assumes the Victorian relegation
of leisure-class women to a pedestal of philanthropic idealism high
above the economic and sexual facts of life. Since Marlow believes that
it is only through work-more generall y through a direct personal
striving to master some external and objective force-that anyone can
find "his own reality," it follows that the practical truths of life are not
transferable from one individual to another, whether verbally or
otherwise; and it further follows that, merely by a llotting its women a
leisure role, bourgeois society has in effect excluded them from dis–
covering reality.
It
is by no choice or fault of hers, therefore, that the
Intended inhabits an unreal world; but because she docs, Marlow at the
end finds himself forced to lie to her about Kurtz. One reason is that if
he told the truth she would not have the necessary grounds in her own
experience to be able to understand it; another is that since for all his
seeking Marlow himself has found no faith which will move moun–
tains, his nostalgia inclines him to cherish the faith that ignores them.
Work versus words is an even commoner opposition in Conrad
than in life; and in
Heart of Darkness
the cognitive role of work is often
made the dialectical opposite of another secondary theme-the self–
deluding tendency of verbal communication. Kurtz is the most obvious
example; he is, Marlow discovers, "very little more than a voice," a
