Contemporary commentaries tend to either reduce
Heart of Darkness to a narrative of racism or an anti-colonial accusation of
Western hegemony. The issue of its textual ambivalence has been partially
excavated and scantily exhausted. In this essay, I will first challenge the
biased charge against Conrad as a racist, and demonstrate that the text is more
of a gender issue than a racial one. In this patriarchal narrative, white
women's and the black mistress' access to the colonial power is discursively
denied. The submissions of female characters suggest the narrative mechanism of
Conrad's patriarchal ideology, which conscripts them into the social mission of
colonialism. Then, I will further argue that Marlow's moral censure of
colonialism and his contradictory, pigeon-hearted connivance with it make Heart
of Darkness ambiguous, rather than unequivocally post-colonial. Despite his
narrative limitation and textual ambivalence, Conrad voices his post-colonial
discontent by critiquing colonialism as an example of madness, stressing the
materialistic impact on mankind. The spectrum of these diverse views presents a
hazy textual terrain, which is neither monochromatically racist nor
post-colonial and thus features the liminal nature of the novella.
Keywords: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, patriarchal ideology,
ambivalence.