ABSTRACT
Of the many mythic feminine figures in Conrad’s novels and stories, one in particular has elicited fervent reactions: Kurtz’s “small sketch in oils,” in Heart of Darkness, “representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch” (46). As Marlow tells the men aboard the Nellie, “The background was somber—almost black. The movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister” (46–7). The figure in the painting recalls personifications of Liberty and Justice, who are associated with the amazonian ideal. Yet with the paired attributes of torch and blindfold this woman appears both potent and disturbingly powerless. Although Marlow mentions the painting only once in his embedded narrative, critics have been drawn to its paradoxical imagery as perhaps to few other word portraits in Conrad’s writings. In their efforts to trace the painting’s symbolic resonances, critics variously have seen the blindfolded, torch-bearing figure as a symbol for Kurtz (Karl 132, Sexton 388, DeKoven 113), for Europe “blinded by the light of her civilization” (Shaffer 2), or even for all “mankind, groping blindly through the darkness of his existence” (Dowden 158).
