Kurtz's Intended and African mistress in "Heart of Darkness"
When Josef Conrad was writing his classic work on colonization, Heart of Darkness, it was during the turn of the century, from the 19th to the 20th, and therefore, the society just began to change into what it would become in our days. Therefore, in Heart of Darkness, Conrad wrote - and actually denounced - such human evils as social inequality based on race, and possibly the beginnings of the early racism too, for to Kurtz and his peers the native Africans are just a source of brute labour at best and a waste of space at worst.
Yet, besides the social discrimination based on race, as well as the beginnings of political racism, there was at least one more type of inequity existing in the European society at that time: gender-based sexism; it is still a matter of years, even decades, for the suffragette movement to start in England, and Heart of Darkness shows it:
"It's queer how out of touch with truth women are! They live in a world of their own and there had never been anything like it and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over." (Heart of Darkness. 12-13)
At this point of the story, Conrad, or rather, Marlow is talking about his aunt, or perhaps the female relatives of his peers in general, rather than about Kurtz's Intended in particular. Yet, in hindsight, these words do foreshadow the poor woman's fate: she does fall apart once she learns that Kurtz is dead and gone after all, and she did live in a world of her own that fell apart - and Marlow has to see her during a period of dusky sunset... And yet Kurtz's Intended is not unique - Marlow's aunt, probably more experienced and grown-up than the Intended, too shows this living, sheltered from the actual reality of their world, as Marlow hints in describing her. Naturally, this is so because Kurtz's Intended and Marlow's aunt play similar roles as women, if not identical: wives and perfect companions to the manly men of imperialist Europe. Yet, this is not the case in Africa: the African queen, Kurtz's mistress, behaves in a completely different way than all other women of the novel, because she is different in other ways than just socially and culturally. This essay is going to examine the differences and similarities of these two women as well as their roles in this book, including their relationship with Mr. Kurtz.
Mr. Kurtz, of course, has a part in this essay, because the state of affairs hinted at in the novel had come to be not because of actions of women, but of men, because at this point in time (Heart of Darkness was published in 1899, at the very end of the 19th century) it was the world of men - literally. In addition, since it was a world of white men, it meant that anyone else, especially men and women of the other races, were treated as second-rate people at best. As a result, this state of affairs is shown in a very interesting way regarding how Marlow compares and contrasts Kurtz's African mistress with his Intended, who too is from Europe, like him. The differences between the two women are obvious and immediate: the Intended has the social role of Kurtz's perfect female counterpart in the society and all (at least until Kurtz had died), while the African cannot be considered to have any other role but that of a savage, irrelevant to the story, being so far socially beneath Kurtz, who, being a white man, is on the top of the world.
Despite this attitude, when Marlow meets Kurtz's African mistress for the first time, he describes her immediately as
"...a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.
"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high, her hair was done in the shape of a helmet, she had brass leggings to the knees [...] She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate process. [...] the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her". (Heart of Darkness. 60)
In other words, it is probable that Kurtz's African mistress plays the role not just of a person, but also of an actual incarnation of Africa and its dark mysteries, so to speak. Marlow's description of hers seems to support this idea, for this native woman is dark and savage, but she is also "gorgeous"; furthermore, she is gorgeous because she is full of life, the hot, passionate kind of life that has vanished from Europe and its cities, which Marlow compares to sepulchres and tombs even before he has left for Africa. Naturally, this theme is also evident, even if not as openly, when Marlow finally meets with Kurtz's Intended:
"The dusk was falling. [...] A grand piano stood massively in a corner with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened--closed. I rose.
"She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning. [...] I noticed she was not very young--I mean not girlish. [...] The room seemed to have grown darker as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked at me". (Heart of Darkness. 73-74)
Once again, the immediate differences and contrasts between the two could not be more obvious. The differences and contrasts between their roles may not be so obvious, but it does not take much looking to discover them. The African native may be dark of skin, but she carries on her body all sorts of flashy beads, charm and decorations as well as tattoos of various colors. This corresponds with her roles both as a mistress and of an avatar of the African continent - on one hand, she is full of life, but on the other, it is a dark, dangerous, mysterious type of life. Conversely, though, her European opposite, the Intended, is pale; completely pale in fact, as even her hair is the color of ash - i.e. dusty grey, but she is dressed completely in black or in a similar dark color. While appropriate for mourning, and for her role as Kurtz's bereaved spouse, a year has gone since Europe learned that Mr. Kurtz is dead, and perhaps it is time to move on. That is the Intended's problem and not just in her role of Kurtz's bride/spouse, but also in her role as the metaphor for the imperialist Europe.
As Marlow has mentioned before on pages 12-13, Kurtz's Intended got so detached from the reality as it was, that Kurtz's death probably caused her to experience a complete nervous breakdown. (However, whose fault is it? Not just her alone, that is for sure.) Moreover, this state of affairs suggests, or even implies, that there is a deeper difference between the two of them, deeper, really than the color of their skins, black vs. white. These are differences of the "inside" of the heart vs. mind, of the civilized vs. the savage (at least as seen by Marlow and his contemporaries): Kurtz's Intended seems to be a perfect spiritual counterpart to Kurtz; Marlow, in fact, all but literally sees them melding together when he meets the Intended, who with her tomb-like dwelling, "floating" walk and black clothes also resembles a Classical vampire from an 1890s tale, or perhaps a ghost or a fallen angel of some sort, with "an ashy halo". In modern terms, the Intended of Kurtz is compared to some sort of an "undead" creature, a "proper" inhabitant of a sepulchre-city, so to say. There is another characteristic of the "undead" - they are sterile, they cannot reproduce. Therefore, for Kurtz's Intended in regards to this feature of life, due to her high level of dead-Kurtz-worshipping, she is highly unlikely to ever marry for real, and is even less likely to have children of her own - she is sterile for all purposes and effects, after all. Naturally, this means bad news for the Intended in her roles as both a woman and as Europe: as a woman this decreases her worth (for her contemporaries at least), for she can give no children to carry on her husband's name, and as imperialist Europe this means that she has no long-term political or social future and must perish into dust.
Meanwhile, while Kurtz's Intended is meek, fragile, detached from reality and probably barren, Kurtz's African mistress is very much alive and hot-blooded. True, she too grieves for her loss of Kurtz:
"...she opened her bared arms and threw them rigid above her head as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky [...] A formidable silence hung over the scene." (61)
"Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and glittering river." (67)
Once again, there is a stark contrast to the dramatic, incidentally impractical, and probably overdrawn actions of Kurtz's Intended and the way she conceives her role of a grieving woman: while she is stretching mourning of Kurtz for a year and beyond, Kurtz's African mistress, whereas being quite practical and down-to-earth, manages to convey the depths of her feelings to Marlow and his crew just by stretching her naked arms. She is clearly not living in an imaginary world as her European counterparts do; the problem here is that her world is foreign, even alien to the Europeans, such as Marlow or Kurtz.
This leads to the next difference between her and Kurtz's Intended back in the roles as women: while the latter has been hinted heavily of being infertile, Kurtz's mistress is not only "gorgeous" and "superb" (and neither epithet is used on Kurtz's Intended, even if Marlow does sympathise with her loss) she is the image of Africa's "tenebrous and passionate soul" (60), a soul that has a "colossal body of fecund and mysterious life" (60) - something that hints at her being neither "undead" nor infertile ("fecund" means lush or fruitful). Note that Africa itself is never compared to a sepulchre or a tomb, except for the parts where the European pilgrims, settlers, colonists, etc., have settled in and began to attempt to establish their own ways of life - thus, when Kurtz's African mistress is examined in her role as an allegory of Africa, it is clear that it is suggested that Africa, unlike the imperialist Europe, may have a future, though it is not as clear-cut as with Europe in the person of Kurtz's Intended later in the novel.
Politics aside, there is one final area in which Kurtz's mistress and Intended compete and differ - in their roles with Kurtz: while the Intended pined and withered with only her mental image of Kurtz in her life, his mistress had the rest of him - the whole deal, so to speak. As the Russian sailor tells Marlow:
"...She got in one day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I picked up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I wasn't decent. At least it must have been that, for she talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour pointing at me now and then. I don't understand the dialect of the tribe. Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or there would have been mischief." (Heart of Darkness. 61)
In a European's eyes, this behaviour is suitable not for a role of an illegitimate mistress, but of a legitimate wife, who also feels that her words count for something around the house and has no qualms of telling her husband this fact. Furthermore, this household situation - a wife scolding a husband over a servant's actions - is very different from what Kurtz's Intended believed: that Kurtz was just as lonely and unhappy over their parting as she. Sadly, this is not likely to have been the case, as Marlow never found any mention of her until he got back from Africa with Kurtz's last documents.
Therefore, it is safe to say now that the only way the two women have ever been similar, that they even had similar roles in life, is by their eventual treatment by Kurtz, their only shared area of the novel; Kurtz is the only reason why they have a reason to be compared or contrasted against each other, for they are just too different otherwise. As said before, Kurtz's Intended is also acting-out the role of imperialist Europe of the late 19th-early 20th century: a sickly, barren woman who has no future and is moaning about the lost opportunities in her life like a ghost in a crypt. Kurtz's mistress is also playing the role of Africa - savage but gorgeous, terrible yet superb in her awe-inspiring terror, and very much fecund and fruitful in her awesome savagery, despite all the damage and abuse inflicted on her and her people by the Europeans, like Kurtz. Conrad's treatment of the two women in Marlow's narration reflects this as well: in the end, despite his own conflicted feelings over the whole "Kurtz situation" he lies to the Intended - straight to her face. (The fact that he was lying with the best intent only makes it worse, because this proves that the women of his society are living in a fragile surreal world and cannot handle reality - or at least the men think that they cannot and do their best to prove themselves right.) It appears unlikely that he would have been able to do the same thing with Kurtz's African mistress - that woman would have seen right through his clumsy lies and would not have shied to call him upon them.
For that reason, this enables to make a conclusion: Conrad was just as critical about the English society's treatment of women, as he was scornful or unimpressed about their treatment of African natives. He uses the stark contrast between Kurtz's African mistress and his European fiancИe as well as their roles to show that Europe in general was dying, slowly but surely, despite all the damage that the aforementioned Europeans wrought upon their African colonies, and he used their unexpectedly and oddly similar different relationship roles with Kurtz to show the main culprit: the white man, who put his woman in the same place as he put the people of another race: into a position submissive to him. Therefore, that is the way Conrad found to show his audience not only the differences between the two women, but also their similarities, albeit in a rather sly way and in a probably unpleasant area of male dominance. Conrad may not have consciously intended to show this similarity at all - but there it is, making people wonder, just how much the society has changed from the times of Mr. Kurtz, if it had changed at all.