While presenting a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe expressed his alienation from the imperialist and patriarchal themes of Heart of Darkness, famously disparaging the novel by Joseph Conrad as the work of “a damn racist.” Provocative and influential, Achebe's criticisms served as the impetus for a number of theoretical perspectives on the implications of Conrad's work, with some feminist critics suggesting that his fiction displays misogynistic undertones through the exclusion of women. Writers like Nina Pelikan Straus and Leslie Heywood identify a unique sense of “brotherhood” shared between a male author, male characters, and a largely male audience. This brotherhood, they argue, is largely the result of Conrad's use of overtly masculine language, coupled with his flat and superficial depiction of female characters and female dominance. However, it is important to recognize that the world of male activity depicted in the novel is far from ideal; rather, it is a matter of futility, psychological degradation and shameful cruelty. As such, interpreting the protagonist's narrative on a superficial level undermines the powerful skepticism at the heart of Heart of Darkness and overlooks the author's considerable discomfort with dominant British narratives. Furthermore, it could be argued that several female characters play an instrumental, if understated, role in the narrative; for example, Marlow's aunt secures him employment as a riverboat captain. When these factors are taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that Conrad's female characters are vital to his biting and satirical critique of the typically male rule of imperialism and exploitation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Taking the form of a “tale within a tale,” the story is told to the reader through an unnamed male companion of the protagonist, Charles Marlow. Several critics have argued that Marlow tells his story using a narrow and overly "masculine" form of language that largely alienates female readers. For example, he adopts the phallic metaphor of penetration when he recalls his journey along the Congo River: “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness” . By describing his mission in sexual terms, Conrad implicitly associates women with “darkness,” a word loaded with connotations of confusion and ignorance. For a female reader, this overly masculinized language can make the text inaccessible, an impression reinforced by Conrad's overt association of Kurtz's lover with the wild: "wild and proud, wild-eyed and magnificent"... " She stood watching us without a fuss, and like the desert itself” , Conrad is clearly equating black women with raw “nature,” thus evoking stereotypical images of indiscipline and uncontrolled sexuality, which, in turn, contrast sharply with the chaste “whiteness” of Kurtz's Intended (“This fair hair, this pale his face, that pure forehead, seemed surrounded by an ashen halo from which the dark eyes looked at me ”). Consequently, through the text's fetishization of the “wild” and “wild-eyed” nature of the native woman, Africa itself becomes a primitive female body, thus perpetuating the dominant patriarchal ideas that they associate women with a precarious sense of volatility and otherness. women as "otherworldly" come to the fore at several points in the novel. As he recounts his adventure on the deck of a ship – symbol of male virility –Marlow declares to his male audience: “It is strange how far women are from the truth. They live in a world of their own, there has never been anything like it, and there never will be. It's too beautiful all things considered, and if they put it up it would fall to pieces before the first sunset. We humans have some confusing facts: living contentedly since the day of creation would have begun to ruin everything." On the surface, this oft-quoted passage appears to subscribe to the popular notion of the time regarding the need for women to be protected from reality. However, it is necessary to carefully examine the author's motivations behind the inclusion of this challenging digression. Throughout the novel, it seems that, ironically, the men are the people who “live in a world of their own,” with their oppressive imperial activities depicted as relentlessly cruel and sterile. For example, Conrad exercises satirical distortion to great effect when he describes the unnerving sight of a French warship firing aimlessly at an uninhabited stretch of coast: “There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. .. In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there it was, incomprehensible, firing at a continent.” The absurdity of the Western colonists' actions illustrates the ineffectiveness of imperial warfare and exposes Marlow's sexist ramblings as examples of great irony. . As Cedric Watts argues, far from serving as an affirmation of women's inability to relate to the real world, "The joke is on Marlow, as it was on the boy who cried wolf." Indeed, if Conrad himself believed that a society under the influence of women would “fall apart before the first sunset,” his open advocacy of women's suffrage in the early 20th century strikes the modern reader as remarkably incongruous. It should therefore be remembered that it is not Conrad who speaks but Marlow and, as such, Conrad is not directly responsible for his protagonist's attitude towards women. Rather than patronizing the reader with a clinical, unambiguous account of Marlow's African journey, Conrad places the responsibility of moral judgment firmly in our hands through his deft use of doubly oblique narration. Consequently, the portrayal of women in the text is more subtle than some literary critics let on, and therefore must be regarded with some caution. In any case, however, feminist critics have carefully pointed out the lifeless and stylized form in which many of Conrad's female characters take. As inhabitants of a predominantly male world, women like Kurtz's lover and the Expected are given an almost statuary status, often serving simply as grotesque objects on which men can flaunt their material success: "she had leggings of fine brass to her knee, brass thread gloves up to her elbow, a crimson stain on her tawny cheek, countless necklaces of glass beads around her neck; bizarre things, spells, sorcerer's gifts, hanging on her, sparkling and trembling at every step." Kurtz's lover is given the description of an aesthetic object and is further denied the power of speech, thus suggesting that she is simply a passive, ornamental entity of little significance to the larger plot. Conrad's choice of names is also significant: while the protagonist and Kurtz are named, the two central female characters are simply Kurtz's “lover” and “Planned,” titles that highlight passivity and submission. On the surface, then, it would appear that the novel is predominantly focused on the concerns and activities of men, with Conrad's neglected female characters serving a superficial purpose and in.