The language of age in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century imperial adventure fiction for boy readers is known for its depiction of British travelers’ attempt at their own imperial regeneration, which takes the form of conquering Africa. In reducing Africa into an empty space that is immature, primitive, and therefore ahistoric, the travelers wish to separate the modern present in England from the prehistoric past in Africa. However, by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness (1899) through the lens of age and postcolonial criticism, my article shows that it is the British Empire’s own age consciousness that is projected onto her agent’s perception of Africa as a symbol of immaturity in the late nineteenth century, a time period marked by anxieties of degeneration. The article looks at how Conrad questions childish aspects of the European traveler’s fantasy of imperial regeneration in letting him feel oppressed by—fail to destroy—the power of the old landscape in Africa. Ultimately, the article contends that in Conrad’s Darkness, the old African landscape acts as an antagonist, who puts on display the traveler’s vulnerability to degeneration and therefore testifies to the impossibility of unstoppable development on the part of European empires.