Such a reminder would have been particularly bracing to an English readership that had recently been steeped in the self-congratulatory excesses of Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee, which primarily took the form of an ostentatious celebration of Britain’s imperial might. Marlow’s prologue thus provides a sobering historical frame of reference for his ensuing tale about the seedy, hypocritical side of empire. And what we come to recognize as the story unfolds is that this is merely the first in a series of such rhetorical moves. In fact, much of the tale’s energy is invested in systematically dismantling those binary oppositions (civilization/barbarism, Europe/Africa, Christian ity/heathenism, white men/black men) that provided the ideological foundation of Anglo-European society of the era.

Noting the slim margin of difference that separates the vanquisher from the vanquished, Marlow remarks that the ability to subjugate another people is “nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” And, he continues, “[t]he conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (p. 41). He does, however, qualify these assertions by upholding—that is, by exempting from the logic of his tale—one binary opposition: that between what he terms “colonists” and “conquerors.” The Romans in Britain, like King Leopold’s agents in the Congo, “were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force.... They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale” (p. 41). When he proceeds to the action of the narrative, he vividly illustrates this distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of imperialism in his recollection of “a large shining map [of Africa], marked with all the colours of a rainbow,” which he has seen in the Brussels office of his new employers prior to his journey to the Congo:

There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow (p. 45).

Maps during this era often represented imperial territories according to this color-coded system—red for British, blue for French, green for Italian, orange for Portuguese, purple for German, and yellow for Belgian. Further, they served not merely as geographical but also as ideological tools; as Marlow demonstrates by singling out the red (British) territories for praise and the purple (German) territories for disapprobation, they enabled one to distinguish between different types of imperialism and morally to evaluate them accordingly. He has earlier asserted that what “redeems” imperialism—and hence what separates the colonists from the conquerors—“is the idea only.... ; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea” (p. 41), and it now appears that he believes it is the British who uniquely possess such an ennobling idea and an ethical commitment to it. How we are to interpret Marlow’s careful exclusion of Britain from his ensuing assault on the hypocrisies of imperialism is an open question. We have already seen how, in “Youth,” Conrad’s English alter ego tends to be Anglophilic, and it bears noting that, like “Youth,” Heart of Darkness was written for the pro-imperialist British readership of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Yet the evidence as to whether Marlow’s assertions wholly reflect Conrad’s beliefs is ambiguous. An essay on the British arch-imperialist Rudyard Kipling that Conrad wrote several months before beginning Heart of Darkness might have shed light on this question, but it was not published and the manuscript has not survived.

Regardless of how we are to interpret Marlow’s exemption of Britain from his attack on imperialism, he is unambiguous in his denunciation of those forms of imperialism that he views as illegitimate. This fact becomes apparent in the contrast between his outlook and that of his naively idealistic aunt during their farewell meeting before he sets out for Africa. Complaining to his listeners that she viewed him as an “emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle,” he points out that “[t]here had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time” (p. 48). Conrad had given a taste of what Marlow means by “such rot” in his ironically titled short story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), which, like Heart of Darkness, depicts the moral degradation of ivory traders in the Congo. In this story a Belgian newspaper “discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth” (Tales of Unrest, p. 94). (It bears pointing out that some of the most egregiously insincere instances of such Belgian propaganda came from the pen of King Leopold himself. It should also be noted that Conrad signaled the importance of the nationality of the story’s Belgian pro tagonists when he emphatically corrected a reader who mistook them for Frenchmen [Collected Letters, vol.