The Women Characters in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

The present research paper is an attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the female characters in Joseph Conrad’s well-known novella Heart of Darkness. The real interest of this study lies in what Conrad has to say about female characters, conduct and also the way in which he projects them. Thus, I have here attempted to examine the female characters in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to set these characters against their male counterparts, and so, to allow an increased awareness of the depiction of female characters as submissive, dominated by men, often deceived by others and with lack of their own identity. Clearly, it would be little short of a marathon task to do the study of all Conrad’s major fictions with feministic perspective, and so, this study limits its concern to his masterpiece novella such as Heart of Darkness