Supremacist Ideologies in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness Essay

Supremacist Ideologies in Heart of Darkness   Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness colludes with the ethnocentric attitude of Europeans towards the indwelling people of Africa. At the turn of the century, European imperialism was viewed as a crusade worthy of this century of progress by King Leopold of Belgium. Although Conrad was critical of imperialism, his novella reveals to the commentator an undeniable Victorian provenance. It endorses cultural myths of the period and reinforces the dominant ideology of the British gentleman. Its Victorian provenance is revealed in the representation of race, which is constructed through the character Marlow. His powerful narration viewpoint reinforces what Chinua Achebe called Europes comforting myths about Africa and Africans.   The text consistently constructs black people as other. This is achieved primarily by Marlow, who acts to construct the natives from the vantage point of the British gentleman. When he looked at them, he search ed not altogether for their impulses, motives, capacities but also for restraint, a value that he champions throughout the retelling of his story. When he cant find it, he remarks Restraint? What feasible restraint? Marlows first encounter with the natives is at the Outer Station, where his ambivalence towards them is foregrounded by his obsession with the miraculously efficient first-class agent. The natives atomic number 18 effectively dehumanised because they are presented as nothing more than black shadows and acute angles and Marlow is far more interested in the fact that the accountant kept his books in apple-pie order than with the dying black men outside. Similarly, when Marlow stumbles across a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the... ...t inexorably associates the continent and its people with darkness. We have the natives described as black shapes, draw of dusty niggers and a whirl of black limbs. This imagery also often associates Africans with supernatural evil. Near the Inner Station   A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms, across the glow. It had horns... some sorcerer, some witch-man, no doubt it looked fiend-like enough   The African landscape is not only culpable for Kurtzs wrongs, but it is also a place of darkness and of evil, a place of paganism, with the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations a place of lurking death, cannibalism, indisposition and insanity - all of Marlows reality is filtered through the European consciousness, and all of his narrative serves to endorse European supremacist ideologies.