![]() ![]() ![]() In doing so, I hope to insinuate some sense of how Marlow’s narrative is another text in a long tradition that reinforces these archetypes into the collective conscience of their readership. ’ Īlthough Conrad’s tale, originally published 1899, precedes Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic method by some two decades, I hope to reduce the literary archetypes to those of the mythic as Jung defines them. As such, Marlow does to the feminine what he does to the African, in Chinua Achebe’s words he ‘sets up as a foil to. Through a close reading of Marlow’s encounters with women and the suggestion that each instance can be interpreted as a literary archetype, one might conclude that women have been reduced to a prop-like state for the purposes of meaning. The present reading will hope to give a possible explanation as to why Marlow’s narrative espouses such a seemingly misogynistic position, and how this reading can redeem the text from reductive feminist criticism. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness reduces women to a tool for Marlow’s narrative purpose. ![]()
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