Articles for Heart of Darkness

“Social Progress and the Rivalry of the Races” by Benjamin Kidd; pg 229
- How do the background of progress and the rivalry between races contribute to Heart of Darkness?
- “This orderly and beautiful world . . . always has been the scene of incessant rivalry between all the forms of life inhabiting it—rivalry, too, not chiefly conducted between different species but between members of the same species” (229).
- Kidd points out that the Anglo-Saxon race may not use wars to “exterminate the less developed peoples” but instead, use laws “not less deadly and even more certain in their result” (230).
- The leading colonist of South Africa said, “The natives must go; or they must work as laboriously to develop the land as we are prepared to do” (231).
- Are the virtues of our civilization indeed virtues, or vices? “We often in a self-accusing spirit attribute the gradual disappearance of aboriginal peoples to the effects of our vices upon them; but the truth is that what may be called the virtues of our civilisation are scarcely less fatal than its vices” (231).
- Similar to the previous idea, Kidd points out that the Western civilization’s most proud features “are almost as disastrous in their effects as the evils of which complaint is so often made” (231).
- One common theme: “Progressive peoples have everywhere the same distinctive features. Energetic, vigorous, virile life amongst them is maintained at the highest pitch of which nature is capable . . . the individual is freest, the selection fullest, the rivalry fairest. But so also is the conflict sternest, the nervous friction greatest, and the stress severest” (232).

“Race, Ethnicity, Nationality, Empire” by Peter Edgerly Firchow; pg 233
- Does Heart of Darkness support racism and imperialism? If so, to what extent?
- People then [at the time Conrad wrote the novel] thought very differently about the subject of race than we do in current times (234).
- Racialism is defined as the “belief in the superiority of a particular race leading to prejudice and antagonism towards people of other races” (234).
- Conrad’s own life gives us a hint at his point of view: “Given the many years—half a lifetime, practically—that Conrad has spent wandering the world in ships or being stranded for weeks in remote places in the Pacific, often sharing close quarters with people from a wide variety of national and ethnic backgrounds, it is not surprising that he should seek to reflect this multinational, multiethnic experience in his work” (237).
- Frank Reeve separated racism into 3 categories: weak, medium, and strong racism.
- Weak racism: belief that races do exist and that they help to account for social phenomena.
- Medium racism: identical to weak racism, but added is the belief that certain races are superior and others inferior.
- Strong racism: prescribes a course of action based on alleged racial superiority, i.e. elimination of the inferior races.
- Firchow believes that Heart of Darkness displays a weak racism “with respect to its attitude toward Africans, for it recognizes their difference from Europeans as a separate race but does not suggest an essential superiority to them (it does, however, imply a temporary cultural superiority)” (238).
- However, Firchow believes the novel in conjunction with Belgians demonstrates a medium racism: “the British characters, Marlow and his audience aboard the Nellie, are consistently viewed as superior in intelligence, ability, and honesty to their purely Belgian equivalents. The essential superiority of the British is also suggested in characters who possess less-well-defined associations with Britain, such as the Russian who speaks English and reads British books or Kurtz, who had a partly English mother and was educated in Britain” (238).
- Colonialism vs. imperialism: “Conrad is anticipating the distinction made a few years later in J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) between colonialism, or emigration to relatively unpopulated areas and the establishment of a culture attempting to reproduce that of the home country (e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Canada), and imperialism, in which the settlers form a ruling caste among an overwhelmingly native population” (239).
- Firchow believes that “Conrad seems to be claiming that there are two kinds of imperialism: one is British and good; another is non-British and, to varying degrees, not good” (241).