tters, the Aunt, the Wife of the High Dignitary, the Splendid Savage Mistress, and The Intended. In addition to these "characters," Marlow also makes several pronouncements about women as they define or threaten men; moreover, Marlow's (or Conrad's) figurative language also images women, likening literal objects to the feminine, or the feminine to literal objects. The purpose of this essay is to trace and analyze these references to and about women, which function to locate chauvinism, like racism, in an unknowable Other.
Many people define chauvinism as a kind of misogyny--a conscious antagonism toward, and dismissal of, women. But this definition is no more accurate than one which says racism is limited to the KKK: both chauvinism and racism occur when women and Africans are "used" as literary and symbolic backdrops for the spiritual journey of white men. The black civilization in Marlow's narrative is a convenient canvas on which to project the civilized man's darkness of mind and soul; women similarly function as a symbolic background for the action, values, and ideology of men--all male authors in the text, including Conrad, Marlow, and Kurtz.
The first and most important commonality of the women in the text is that not one of the six exists autonomously. Each exists only insofar as she is identified with a man: the Aunt with Marlow, the Splendid Savage Mistress and the Intended with Kurtz, and the Knitters with the "pale plumpness" (Conrad 14), or the man who owns the company. The Wife of the High Dignitary, mentioned once, cannot exist, since she has neither name nor personality, without the High Dignitary (Conrad 15). In a story in which nameless characters are frequently reduced to their functions (bricklayers, helmsmen, the Accountant, the Lawyer, the Director, etc.), it is significant that the only thing the Wife actually does is gossip, a traditionally "female" quality. It is through the Aunt's social interc...