What Does Heart Of Darkness Symbolize Imperialism

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad is a story that explores the idea of darkness in a colonial world. The story itself is a framed within the context of the main character, Marlow, recounting his adventures in the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary. Heart of Darkness explores the issues that accompany imperialism. As Marlow travels along the Congo river, he is treated to visions of tortured, near enslaved locals. At the very least, the incidental scenery of the book offers a harsh picture of colonial enterprise. The impetus behind Marlow’s adventures, too, has to do with the hypocrisy inherent in the rhetoric used to justify imperialism. The men who work for the Company describe what they do as “trade,”
In portraying Kurtz worshipping ivory, being worshipped as a god, taking part in savage rituals, and controlled by Africans, he translated a body of commonly shared knowledge into a myth. Like Hobson, who claimed that Jingoism was a particular form of primitive passion, Conrad defined Belgian colonialism as a savage force. At a time when Kipling, in the short story ‘At the Tomb of his Ancestors’, for example, celebrated the white man as a god before native populations, and believed that tribal values were important for the modem empire, Conrad revealed the bankruptcy of these notions. It is in this sense that he takes his place beside anti-colonialists like Hobson and Spencer, for although he did not share their sociology or economics, he too saw jingoism and colonialism as re-barbarization. As a concrete record of Belgian colonialism, Heart of Darkness takes its place alongside the works of E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. As a myth it rallies moral indignation against colonialism. At times Conrad’s myth gets out of hand and he would have done well to remember Hobson’s point that the colonialist was not corrupted by the native, but by the colonial situation, through contact with ‘merchants, planters, engineers, and overseers’. And this, of course, is the sort of corruption we see in the early section of the novella. As fiction, Conrad’s myth was harmless, but in the political world, where many arguments rested on the notion that in Africa the white man became savage, it could be dangerous. Perhaps, too, Conrad was not careful enough with his analogies between civilization and savagery and his myth had its distorting effect. Edward Tylor spoke to this point when he wrote of comparisons between civilized and savage standards and criticized those who claimed that the evils of civilization were savage. ‘But it is not savagery’,