Heart Of Darkness Gender Roles

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness doesn’t feature many women throughout the work, and those that are featured are either deemed unimportant or are belittled by the narrator. The word, “woman” appears in the novel seven times, six if you exclude the description of a painting. Throughout these few descriptions of women, Marlow either marginalizes European women or eroticizes the native women of the Congo. Through these narrations, Heart of Darkness illustrates the natural oppression of women in the late nineteenth century. The first women we meet in the novel are the two sitting in the Company office when Marlow goes to receive his orders after landing the job. He describes these women in an impolite manner, “...one fat and the other slim, sat on straw bottomed chairs, knitting black wool.” This is the beginning of a recurring theme for Marlow when it comes to women, to describe their looks first and foremost. When, “the slim one got up and walked straight at [Marlow]” to show him where the waiting room is, he described her as a, …show more content…
It is possible that Conrad was trying to critique Marlow’s attitude towards women with the sexism, as he did with his lack of development. Conrad expects the readers to conclude that Marlow is an unreliable narrator, and perhaps he expected the readers to come to the conclusion that Marlow is sexist as well, but that is not likely. It was accepted, even expected, for a man to joke about women being unable to understand the struggles of the world. Women at the time weren’t expected to do a man’s work, or understand a man’s world. Because there was no backlash or counterargument for Marlow’s narration, it causes an aura of subtly around his attitudes. The subtlety of the oppression is what truly illustrates this underlying attitude towards women of the early nineteenth century, at least from the perspective of a white European