摘 要 约瑟夫•康德拉是一位备受争议的作家，以讲述男人的故事，关注男性世界而著称。康德拉的《黑暗的心》一经问世就引得世人瞩目，因题材涉及冒险、航海、对外殖民扩张等因素，曾一度被认为是讲述男人故事的小说。但是，评论界对作品中的女性角色多重视不足，认为她们充其量是男性角色的陪衬，忽视了女性的重要地位。本文从康德拉的生平入手，运用解读法和文本分析法进行分析得出结论，在重新审视《黑暗的心》中几位重要女性形象的基础上，对康德拉在小说中体现出的女性主义作出新的诠释。文章通过对小说中女性的象征意义的分析，强调了女性主义在小说中的重要性。40714
毕业论文关键词：康德拉；《黑暗的心》；女性主义
Abstract Joseph Conrad is a controversy writer, who is well-known for telling man’s story and focusing on male. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness attracted attention when it was published. The critics do not pay enough attention to the female characters, regarding them as accompanies of the males and neglect the important roles played by the women, in the depth of the novel. This paper cuts over the whole experiences of Conrad by close-reading and text analysis and makes new annotations based on several important female figures in Heart of Darkness. Through the analysis of the symbolic meaning of the female figures, the paper strengthens the importance of female roles in this novel.
Key words: Joseph Conrad; Heart of Darkness; feminist
A Feminist Reading of Heart of Darkness
Contents
摘 要 i
Abstract ii
I. Introduction 1
Ⅱ. Conrad And Feminism 2
2.1 Feminist Criticism 2
2.2 Bias against Joseph Conrad 3
Ⅲ. Female Figures in Heart of Darkness 3
3.1 Important Females in Heart of Darkness 4
3.2 The Symbolic Meaning of Marlow’s Journey 6
Ⅳ. The Symbolic Meaning of Female Images 7
Ⅴ. Conclusion 10
Bibliography 11
Acknowledgements 12
I. Introduction
Heart of Darkness is regarded as the classics literature of the twentieth century, which makes the colonial mentality portrayed most vividly just like peeling onion skin. This book has the distinctive characteristic of modernism. The author Conrad describes Marlow as a narrator and makes him appear in this novel as a recall. His narrative shuttles between the past and the present, between themselves and the audience, allowing the readers to share all kinds of his emotions. This alternate of narrative angle creates a new narrative mode, instead of the traditional linear narrative method. Heart of Darkness describes a story that Captain Marlow told in a ship docked in London along the Congo River. In addition to Marlow’s youthful experience in Africa, he also told a story of a white settlers named Kurtz—a idealist who had the ambition to transfer the civilization to Africa, later degenerated into a greedy colonizer.
This paper makes analysis of Heart of Darkness from a feminist perspective to a new view on the study of the text. It has set up three tasks to undertake: the first, is to give a brief glance on Conrad and Heart of Darkness；the second, following the female figures in Heart of Darkness, aims to expose the misreading of Marlow and the male chauvinism existing in his narrative discourse; the third, through the analysis of the female figures in the novel, reveals the symbolic of the female figures.
This novel opens a man’s world. There are only four female characters in the book, they are the neglected ones living in the man’s world. They have no name, only identity. In Marlow’s narrative, they are just Eve that to be blamed, ignored and the symbol of nature. The reason is that the man is faced with the existence of a broken order. In the colonies, morality, culture, civilization, humanity and all of Western civilization's most fundamental spiritual structure have gone. Man’s superior confidence has also disappeared. In the Western civilization that they accepted before, it is a kind of culture that focuses on men who are willing to conquer nature. Thus, the man once again transfers their guilt that they fall in the colony to the women in order to rediscover their confidence. They arbitrarily control the facts, tightly holding something they know. They consider women with natural as one, so as to make themselves stand on the side of culture and civilization. In short, the man were “one”, the woman became “other”. Based on the female image analysis in the novel, it reveals how women's images are degraded in the male and female dual structure abuse. It also shows that this dual structure is rooted in the Western culture, indicating the difficulty of the preaching of feminism. 《黑暗的心》中的女性主义解读:http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_39133.html