The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

Abstract

In a stirring but sketchy essay entitled Finding Feminist Readings: DanteYeats, Gayatri Spivak writes that alternative readings might well question normative rigor of specialist scholarship through a dramatization of autobiographical vulnerability of their provenance. Such autobiographical dramatization, Spivak points out, has already begun in work of Jacques Derrida and other male critics, but the privilege of autobiography to counter rigor of theoretical sanctions is accessible to very few of world's (47). The feminist reader's access to a text like Conrad's Heart of Darkness is especially problematic in terms Spivak considers. Not only is tale concerned with a kind of male experience associated with traditional Western high art (penetration into a female wilderness, confrontation with monstrosity, male rites of passage, life at edge), but those who write about it may be tempted to ally themselves with heroic consciousness that Conrad presents. The feminist reader, in contrast, is apt to be more skeptical about and alienated from this masculinist tradition, and her access to Conrad's text may be so inhibited that her commentary is thrown off its most responsive and useful center. Her pleasure-in-the-text in Roland Barthes' sense may be rendered uneasy. Her understanding of Marlow or Kurtz may produce not psychic plenitude but psychic penury. The question of readerparticipator's sense of self in imagined contexts obtrudes, and in reading Heart of Darkness she becomes aware of a particular kind of ambiguity. Even if sexism of Marlow and Kurtz is part of horror that Conrad intends to disclose, feminist reader cannot but consider that text is structured so that this horror-though obviously revealed to male and female reader alike-is deliberately hidden from Kurtz's Intended. If Heart of Darkness is one of Ur texts of modernist high art by which our reading (and teaching) habits are tested, it is a text which makes us tend to distinguish between women inside texts and women outside texts, between women as fictive characters and women as living readers. Conrad's tale thus opens several difficult questions: must woman reader neutralize awareness of her gender so that her reading becomes objective (non-autobiographical) in way that male readings supposedly are? Is this neutralization in any way a complicity with sexism of mainstream commentary? Might not disclosure of her own autobiographical vulnerability throw light on Heart of Darkness as an example of how high art functions, or on question of why, in Spivak's words, the traditions and conventions of art are so brutally sexist (60)?