At the same time, the women of the text have remained nearly invisible because so few critics have chosen to examine their roles when women are considered, critics have focused mainly on Marlow's lie to Kurtz's Intended. First, Conrad invites his readers to participate in Marlow's insistence that the women are 'out of it' (49) by figuring women as palimpsestic, ghost-like, half-presences. The women of Heart of Darkness have, in fact, suffered from a double invisibility. They tropologically illuminate the relationships of difference and distance that Conrad establishes between Europe and the Congo, and they figurally represent the incommensurability between different ideologies and different genres of speaking and knowing that are so central to the text's status as a framed oral narration. However, despite women's near invisibility-a half-presence that echoes the text's preoccupation with shadows and darknesses 1 -they are an always-palpable presence in the background of the text. Yet Conrad allows women scarcely any narratological or thematic attention in Heart of Darkness instead, women appear to function primarily as ancillary details to Marlow's narration about Kurtz and his adventure to the 'heart' of Africa. Fisher Unwin in 1896 that there would be 'no love interest and no woman' in Heart of Darkness, or at least 'only incidentally,' the novella he produced two-and-a-half years later is radically preoccupied with women and the ways they influence his 'story of the Congo' (199). There is no love interest in it and no woman-only incidentally.ĭespite Joseph Conrad's anxious confession to his publisher T. Gender, Difference, and Incommensurability in Conrad's Heart of Darkness Gabrielle McIntire In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Women in heart of darkness