It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

Leaving aside for the moment the improbability of an entire sex, and that the child-bearing sex, being permanently ‘‘out of touch with truth,’’ we might assume, for argument’s sake, that Marlow is speaking critically of a financially well-off, minimally educated class of women who, being denied the possibility of careers and any measure of autonomy apart from fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons, were kept in a perpetual state of childish dependence upon men—the ‘‘fact’’-bearing sex. In the gothic-melodramatic final scene of Marlow’s tale, in which he visits Kurtz’s fiancée, the very emblem of Victorian moral hypocrisy and delusion, Conrad’s misogyny is disguised by an air of pity and condescension; a full year after Kurtz’s ignoble death, his intended is still in mourning, a neurasthenic apparition in black, with ‘‘a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. . . . She carried her sorrowful head as if she were proud of that sorrow.’’ The valiant Marlow, who detests lies, for lies are ‘‘tainted with death,’’ nonetheless ‘‘laid the ghosts of [Kurtz’s] gifts at last with a lie’’ by telling Kurtz’s intended that, at the end of Kurtz’s life, it was her name he uttered. (In fact, ironically, Kurtz’s last words were ‘‘The horror! The horror!’’) Men must lie to women, Conrad argues, to preserve women’s childlike state of delusion. In Conrad’s ranked moral universe, men of a certain class are custodians of truth, facts, ideas, and the respect for tradition outlined in the British Navy handbook An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship; women are associated with lies, subterfuge, hypocrisy. (Caucasian women, that is. For a portrait of a black woman, consider Marlow’s description of Kurtz’s native mistress, of whom Marlow speaks awkwardly as ‘‘barbarous’’— ‘‘savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent’’—with a face that communicates a ‘‘tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve’’—‘‘like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.’’ Words piled upon words, suggesting a generalized allegorical figure, a carved wooden sculpture symbolizing African Woman, and not a living, breathing individual woman who is supposed to be passionately in love with the dying Kurtz.)

Conrad has been criticized more sharply for his presentations of men and women of color. Consider Marlow’s astonishment and amusement when a black African emulates ‘‘white’’ behavior:

I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. . . . [T]o look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. . . . [H]e had filed teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft.

Elsewhere, African natives are ‘‘dusty niggers,’’ ‘‘surly niggers,’’ ‘‘cannibals.’’ Conrad, the moralist, the artist for whom prose fiction is a vocation like the priesthood,painfully reveals himself in such passages, and numerous others, as an unquestioning heir of centuries of Caucasian bigotry. Yet it might be argued that Marlow, for all his condescension, represents a degree of humanity not found in the other Caucasian Europeans who are intent upon wresting from black Africa all they can get. Marlow isn’t in the Congo for ivory, or money, or to advance his career; he takes on the captaincy of the steamboat for adventure’s sake, and becomes fascinated with the demonic figure of Kurtz, the very embodiment of European civilization. Marlow’s sharp, cinematic eye brings alive for us these suffering black men, whose plight is meant to move the hearts of Conrad’s educated, well-to-do English readers:

Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. . . . I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. .