Heart of Darkness: Marlow and Racism
Written October 25, 2002

As one of the most well known and analysed stories of the post-colonial genre, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is often accused of being a work with underlying racist ideologies. There is some merit to these accusations, for as the narrator Marlow tells the tale of his harrowing journey through the rivers of the Congo he frequently makes derogatory and dehumanizing observations of the black natives whom he encounters and ultimately leaves them without a real voice or identity. However, Marlow’s opinion of the aboriginals changes markedly and visibly for the better during the course of his journey, as each subsequent encounter with natives in the Congo results in a description of black people that increasingly equates them with the humanity that Marlow acknowledges and respects. While he initially disregards natives as mere objects or parts of a whole, Marlow gradually begins to attribute individuality and humanity to the unfamiliar blacks as he travels deep into the Congo and essentially becomes less racist through his experiences in the jungle, revealing a positive aspect within Conrad’s much maligned short story.

The first segment of Marlow’s journey takes place largely in and around the Central Station, on the outskirts of the sprawling and engulfing Congo jungle where the colonizing British have taken an uneasy hold of the land and struggle for a definitive foothold. One of his first, and most striking, encounters with the natives takes place when he stumbles upon a collective of aboriginals who have been left to die in a grove of trees, too weak to continue labouring in the mines under the watchful eye of their British enslavers. Marlow’s first statement upon noticing this was “‘Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, all in the attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair’” (Conrad 264). It is important to note that he refers to them as black shapes rather than individuals or people and instead of directly attributing the human emotions of pain, abandonment and despair to the natives he says that they possessed the attitudes, or mere representations, of these elements. Marlow almost seems to be projecting human feelings onto beings he clearly does not believe to be naturally capable of such things at this point, similar to how people will exclaim that a dog looks sad while never really thinking that such a complex emotion is actually possible for a canine. Marlow even seems reluctant to examine the natives as whole creatures, constantly making reference to various body parts but avoiding the complete package. For example, one description of a dying native stated that “The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me...” (265). Here he talks about multiple body parts and their interaction with the outside world but any sense of unified action amongst them is clearly missing in his description, creating more of a sense of random, jumbled elements of humanity than of a complete individual. Most references to the natives as a whole at this point are completely devoid of human relativity, instead taking the depictions of “moribund shapes” (264), “bundles of acute angles” (264), “phantom” (264), and finally “creatures” (264). Marlow seems to be going out of his way to keep his description of the dying aboriginals plainly separated from any connection to humanity whatsoever, demonstrating his incredibly derogatory opinion of blacks at this point.

In the second section of Marlow’s journey, when he is actually travelling down the river on his steamboat with a handful of white pilgrims and company of native cannibals, his opinion of natives is noticeably improved and he begins to attribute elements of individuality and humanity to them. The first example of this appears when he is describing the cannibal enlisted with the job of watching the vertical boiler of the ship, and calls him an “improved specimen” (283). The fact that Marlow indicates that this native is somehow different and better than the rest of the cannibals shows that he is attributing elements of individual merit to the fireman, which is a step towards recognizing personal individuality and is a definite leap forward in his opinion of blacks. Although far from recognizing the fireman as an example of humanity, Marlow equates him as a kind of mockery of a person, stating that looking at him was like “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs” (283). This description, along with references to the fireman such as “fine chap” (283) and “fine devil” (283) convey a sense of condescending amusement and attachment that, while still decidedly racist, is still an improvement on the detached coolness shown towards natives by Marlow earlier in his journey. Marlow’s later description of the ship’s black helmsman mirrors this attitude, bestowing a sense of individuality upon the native through the recognition of various character traits but at the same time limiting him as a decided inferior by focussing on the helmsman’s personal stupidity and egotism (290). At one point on the river, Marlow notices the overwhelming odds that the natives possess on the ship compared to the whites and wonders why they don’t simply overcome and consume the foreigners given their ravenous hunger. He contemplates their restraint, wondering “Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear–or some kind of primitive honour?” (287). The fact that Marlow is considering the motivations and needs of the aboriginals, and more importantly comparing their possible restrictions to decidedly human traits, shows that he is beginning to consider the natives as a portion of humanity albeit a primitive one. These examples prove that Marlow is beginning to attribute the rudimentary aspects of individuality and associations with his idea of humanity to the natives he encounters in the Congo, rendering his opinion of blacks as being decidedly less racist than earlier in the novel where he refuses to allow the aboriginals he encounters any sense of character or association with mankind.

The final step in Marlow’s understanding of native people occurs near the end of the novel, when his steamboat reaches the end of its voyage at the heart of darkness and finally comes into contact with the infamous Kurtz. As they reach their destination, Marlow speaks of seeing a “gorgeous apparition of a woman” (305) prowling up and down the bank of the river. While this is nothing particularly remarkable in and of itself, Marlow’s description of the woman as “savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress” (305) and the way in which he conveys a sense of this woman as a representation and cumulation of the enormous wilderness represents a kind of respect that Marlow had never given a native person in his telling of the story before this point. In fact, Marlow almost talks of the woman with a sense of awe, which is a marked change from his previous attitudes of detachment and condescension towards blacks. Marlow also states that the woman “had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve” (305). This, coupled with Marlow’s observation that the woman had an “air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose” (305) makes it seem like Marlow is actually attempting to earnestly comprehend her motivations and thoughts with a genuine interest. For the first time, Marlow appears to recognize a native as someone worthy of deeper consideration, even going so far as to attribute cultural elements of humanity such as tragic directly to her. Although definitely not associating the woman directly with himself or his ideas of humanity, Marlow considers this woman to be significant in a different way, one in which he cannot fully comprehend with his limited scope of experience but that he can sense nonetheless. Her impressiveness is magnified to his audience when he describes the steamboat’s hasty departure back up the river and the way in which the woman was the only native who did not cower at the sound of the boat’s whistle, but rather “stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and glittering river” (312). Once again he uses the world tragic to define her, cementing her association with humanity and its concepts despite her enigmatic separation and isolation from the rest of the species. Marlow’s brief connection with the wild, barbarous native woman and the way in which he describes the encounter shows that by the end of his journey down the river he has managed to see a member of the black race as a complex individual, one whom he may not be able to identify with but is a part of humanity nonetheless.

While Marlow never achieves complete freedom from racism within the novel, his encounters with natives as he travels down the river reveal that he becomes decidedly more understanding of aboriginals as individuals and humans as the story progresses. From his beginning opinion of blacks as inhuman objects or body parts to his recognition of the barbarous woman as a complex individual with her own motivations and purposes that lie beyond his own understanding, Marlow makes a significant progression in tolerance and comprehension of different ethnicities. Although Marlow’s steady alteration of opinion is subtle, positive character growth of this nature should serve as a firm rebuttal to any who believe that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a racist work with no merits as a post-colonial work.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” Short Fiction: An Introductory Anthology. Ed. Lynch, Gerald, and David Rampton. Toronto: Harcourt Canada, 1992. 251-321.