Abstract
The authors posit syphilis as the source for Kurtz’s affliction in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and argue for understanding the novella as a deployment of the rhetoric of disease, which yokes together medical fears and problematic sexual morality with a global violence infecting self-congratulatory European benevolence and charity. Conrad’s tale is both implicitly and explicitly eroticized as well as steeped in gothic representation of the hidden and revealed to manage an unsayable horror. As such, the language of the story parallels pervasive late nineteenth-century syphilis discourse that likewise relies on obfuscation and silences. Descriptions of Kurtz’s megalomania resonate with the symptomatology of syphilis and perceived syphilitics, such as Nietzsche and Columbus, who might have served as models for the character.
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Notes
- 1.
Conrad’s use of women characters also fits with Showalter’s schema for the pervasive presence of syphilis in fin de siècle literature: By the 1890s the syphilitic male had become an arch-villain of feminist protest fiction, a carrier of contamination and madness, and a threat to the spiritual evolution of the human race. In men’s writing of the period, however, women are the enemies, whether as the femmes fatales who lure men into sexual temptation only to destroy them, the frigid wives who drive them to the brothels, or the puritanical women novelists, readers, and reviewers who would emasculate their art (1990, 88).
- 2.
While Roberts and others read this as evidence of same-sex desire , it is of course possible to read it as masculine appropriation and trivialization of the feminized discourse of love. Marlow’s “amusement” at the prospect of Kurtz and the Russian discussing love can equally suggest that it is not a sufficiently masculine topic worthy of discussion between men about ideals. Thus, the Russian hastens to add the adverb “generally,” to suggest it was an abstraction worthy of philosophical engagement.
- 3.
See Alexander (1980) for a discussion of the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine as a model for the Kurtz/harlequin relationship.
- 4.
Watts’s (2012) analysis focuses on the Blackwood’s Magazine text published in 1899 under the title “The Heart of Darkness” (our emphasis).
- 5.
This passage about the reanimated dead with its emphasis on Kurtz’s height—that he was at least 7 feet tall—also suggests Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, especially when we consider it in light of the “whited sepulcher” motif and Marlow’s assertion that “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (Conrad 2008, 81–82). As such, Kurtz is assembled from the metaphorical charnel house of European culture’s degeneration in the same way Frankenstein’s progeny was produced from parts of forsaken corpses.
- 6.
The inward facing heads suggest a metaphor for the madness of tertiary syphilis that is reinforced by Marlow’s description of Kurtz’s soul, “But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad” (Conrad 2008, 111). It is also another moment in the story where appearances from a distance are deceptive, and it is not until Marlow takes a closer look that he understands that the harmless looking objects are abominations. This process interestingly parallels the deceptive nature of the disease of syphilis that is elusive in presentation and manifestation.
- 7.
One of Conrad’s letters in Volume 8 indicates a more than cursory acquaintance with the details of Columbus’s voyages as he invokes the name of “Pinzon” (sic) in humorous analogy. Pinzon was the captain of the Nina on the first voyage (Conrad 1986, 48).
- 8.
As the Russian harlequin tells us, “There hasn’t been a drop of medicine or a mouthful of invalid food for months here. He was shamefully abandoned. A man like this, with such ideas” (Conrad 2008, 98).
- 9.
Despite its association with illicit sexual activity, because syphilis transmission was not entirely understood, the erroneous belief that syphilis was passed onto the child through the father’s sperm was entertained by many and thus raised the specter of a hereditary possibility for the disease, a situation that evoked fears of degeneracy. Heart of Darkness is obviously deeply enmeshed in the discourse of degeneracy.
- 10.
Interestingly, according to N.F. Lowe, the connection between syphilis and madness was not established until the nineteenth century, and prior to that madness and sex were linked through the concept of excessive stimulation. A shaved head could help “cool the brain and relieve the pressure caused by overstimulation.” According to William Battie’s 1758 Treatise on Madness, the “endless thinking” engaged in by what Battie termed “infirm and shattered philosophers” was also a source of madness (qtd. in Lowe 1996, 181).
- 11.
Marlow references the idea of a choice of nightmares in three other instances (104,108,114).
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Cosentino, N., Ryden, W. (2018). Unspeakable Horror: Outing Syphilis in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Syphilis and Subjectivity . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66367-8_7
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