The Inability to Embrace Reality in Heart of Darkness
Humanity consistantly believes in various societal stereotypes without considering the legitimacy behind them. Students are taught from a young age that America is the shining beacon of light to which all other countries compare themselves. However, few have actually experienced the nuances of another country’s culture or learned to recognize the faults in their own. Joseph Conrad portrays Western civilization’s inability to embrace reality through the contrasts of the Mistress and the Intended in his novel Heart of Darkness.
The Mistress and the Intended represent the dichotomy of the Dionysian and Apollonian. Being a part of the African society already casts the Mistress into a lesser, …show more content…
The Mistress is “stately in her deliberate progress” (113), and “the movement of the woman [the Intended] was stately” (43). The overlapping characterizations may seem inconsequential, but they actually provide a direct link between the Mistress and the Intended, forcing a comparison of the two. The Mistress is not shielded from the truths like the blinded Intended. Like Apollo and Dionysus, the two women act as foils of each other. Kurtz connects the two women, but Kurtz represents different concepts to each of them. The Intended sees Kurtz as the man that “[is] impossible to know and not to admire”, the man that she knew before he left for Africa (140). However, the Mistress has observed how Kurtz’s intentions have been morphed by his relation to the inefficient and cruel European colonization companies. Marlow acknowledges the differences and chooses to lie to the Intended about Kurtz’s last words, in an attempt to hide “the horror” that Kurtz had to live through in Africa (130). Because the Intended represents Western civilization, Marlow believes that the Western world cannot embrace the cruel reality. Marlow must protect the civilized world from the truth of the European atrocities in Africa because “it would have been too dark- too dark all together” for European civilization to accept
Humanity consistantly believes in various societal stereotypes without considering the legitimacy behind them. Students are taught from a young age that America is the shining beacon of light to which all other countries compare themselves. However, few have actually experienced the nuances of another country’s culture or learned to recognize the faults in their own. Joseph Conrad portrays Western civilization’s inability to embrace reality through the contrasts of the Mistress and the Intended in his novel Heart of Darkness.
The Mistress and the Intended represent the dichotomy of the Dionysian and Apollonian. Being a part of the African society already casts the Mistress into a lesser, …show more content…
The Mistress is “stately in her deliberate progress” (113), and “the movement of the woman [the Intended] was stately” (43). The overlapping characterizations may seem inconsequential, but they actually provide a direct link between the Mistress and the Intended, forcing a comparison of the two. The Mistress is not shielded from the truths like the blinded Intended. Like Apollo and Dionysus, the two women act as foils of each other. Kurtz connects the two women, but Kurtz represents different concepts to each of them. The Intended sees Kurtz as the man that “[is] impossible to know and not to admire”, the man that she knew before he left for Africa (140). However, the Mistress has observed how Kurtz’s intentions have been morphed by his relation to the inefficient and cruel European colonization companies. Marlow acknowledges the differences and chooses to lie to the Intended about Kurtz’s last words, in an attempt to hide “the horror” that Kurtz had to live through in Africa (130). Because the Intended represents Western civilization, Marlow believes that the Western world cannot embrace the cruel reality. Marlow must protect the civilized world from the truth of the European atrocities in Africa because “it would have been too dark- too dark all together” for European civilization to accept