ABSTRACT
The strength of argument and rich suggestiveness of this analysis of Heart of Darkness have made it an inspiration and starting point for much recent work on gender and sexuality in Conrad's fiction. Straus seeks to demonstrate that a feminist reading of this classic modern text is 'central to the enterprise all readers share' (p, 186) because it reveals both the hidden agenda of the text and the hidden motives of a masculinist critical tradition. She uses concepts derived from reader-response criticism and from psychoanalysis, as well as elements of 'personal' or autobiographical criticism, to identify how the symbolic structure of the text and the conventions of mainstream criticism exclude women readers and satisfy the desire of male readers for heroic identification. At the same time she produces a striking new reading of Heart of Darkness as a text about 'art's relation to horror' (p. 184), about the guarding of secret knowledge and about the expression and repression of male narcissism, homoerotic desire and homocentric loyalty.
