조셉 콘라드의 소설에 나타난 제국주의와 여성 억압적 담론

As argued by many critics, the racial stereotypes that Conrad employed in Heart of Darkness in order to depict Africa and Africans served his project of defending the `ideals` of European imperialism. Subjected to a gender-conscious examination, these racial stereotypes are revealed to have `perverse` images of femininity as their essential component. The premise of this paper is that these antifeminist images, in addition to promoting Conrad`s imperialist enterprise, had important bearing upon the domestic politics of the Empire. Reconsidered within the context of the gender struggles at the turn of the century, Conrad`s imperial narrative reveals a gender anxiety, which is encapsulated with- in the text`s manifest concern about white men`s moral regression. This gender anxiety derives from the late Victorian patriarchs` sense of a threatening change that the New Woman endeavored to bring forth within the male-privileging gender hierarchy of their society. A historically-oriented, gender-conscious examination of the racist stereotypes in Heart of Darkness establishes a link between Kurtz`s black mistress and the New Woman. Among the common denominators between the two female figure is the sensual and simultaneously menacing image of woman as a savage seductress. In other words, the `perverse` and `militant` images of both the eroticized Africa and the African woman in Heart of Darkness correspond to what the fin-de-siecle sexist ideologues defined as evil femininity and attributed to the New Woman. Viewed in this context, the paradigms of wilderness versus civilization and of Africa versus Europe that have so far served many Conradian scholars as an interpretive framework for this novella contain within themselves another paradigm of male versus female, or more precisely, intellectual male versus sensual, diabolic female. The gist of this paper is that the antifeminist images in Heart of Darkness rendered valuable ideological services to the late Victorian pa-triarchy. One of the services is to provide the patriarchy convenient ground to condemn its independent and rebellious New Woman. By Having Kurtz condemn his past sinful life with his presumed African mistress, Conrad seems to suggest that men have moral resources to rely on in fighting against the seduction of women. The late Victorian anxiety about the expected reversal of the current power relationship between the two sexes appears to be exorcised when with the aid of his loyal guardians, Marlow and a Russian sailor, Kurtz breaks away from his sexual bondage to the African woman in question. However, this exorcism of the fear of the New Woman turns out to be incomplete in Heart of Darkness. Although Kurtz seems to have triumphed over his female opponent and what she represents, the African woman, instead of being killed off at the end of the narrative, is simply left behind. Even in Europe, Marlow is haunted by the image of this `savage, masculine` woman. The unavoidable, omnipresent image of this woman is reflective of the social presence of the New Woman at the turn of the century which Conrad and his contemporaries, despite their fervent wish to deny it, could not help out but acknowledge.