THE EXPLORATION OF SELF IN CONRAD'S "HEART OF DARKNESS" AND WOOLF'S "THE

VOYAGE OUT"
Author(s): Rosemary Pitt
Source: Conradiana , 1978, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1978), pp. 141-154
Published by: Daniel Lees; Janet Leake (on behalf of the estate of Edmund Bojarski,
copyright holder); Texas Tech University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24633994

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 THE EXPLORATION OF SELF IN CONRAD'S HEART
OF DARKNESS AND WOOLF'S THE VOYAGE OUT

Rosemary Pitt

Points of similarity between the works of Joseph Conrad and Virginia

Woolf have long been commented on by critics, such as T. S. Eliot, who
wrote in May, 1927: "Of all contemporary authors Mrs. Woolf is the one
who reminds me most of Joseph Conrad,"1 or more recently by James
Naremore, who commented on a particular passage in The Voyage Out:
"here there is not only Conrad's insistence on mood, but even images that
seem to owe vaguely to his story."2 A close analysis of Heart of Darkness3
proves that the influence of Conrad on Virginia Woolf and the debt she
owes to him are considerable and seem to have been underestimated.
It is clear from Virginia Woolf s obituary essay on Conrad that she had
great admiration and liking for him as a writer and had a particular fond
ness for his earlier writings, which, she asserts, "are surely secure of their
place among our classics," with "their air of telling us something very old
and perfectly true, which had lain hidden but is now revealed."4 She also
refers directly to "Youth," which was published in 1902 in a volume
entitled Youth and Other Stories, one of which was Heart of Darkness.
Thus it seems inevitable that she read the latter, and she does indeed
borrow the title phrase, which appears in The Years5 and in Between the
Acts.6
In The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolfs first novel, published in March,
1915, the plot centers around a young woman of twenty-four years of age,
Rachel Vinrace, who travels on a ship to South America with her father
and her aunt and uncle, Helen and Ridley Ambrose. Rachel is from a
sheltered background, having lived with her maiden aunts in Richmond,
and her awakening begins when Helen persuades her to abandon her origi
nal plan of travelling up the Amazon with her father and to disembark at
the island of Santa Marina in Brazil to stay with Helen and her husband at
a villa. Here Rachel becomes friendly with Terence Hewet, an Englishman
staying at a neighboring hotel, and soon falls in love with him. Along
with a group of other English people, Rachel and Terence undertake a
short voyage up the Amazon, in the course of which Rachel contracts a
fever and dies. The dominant theme of the novel is Rachel's self-discovery,
and it is this exploration of the self which is the strongest link between
The Voyage Out and Heart of Darkness. In Virginia Woolfs novel, the
areas of discovery include the knowledge of the self as something unique
and apart, and knowledge of others, particularly of sex and what D. H.
Lawrence terms "the other," the male or female complement to the self.

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142 I Conradiana
Thus The Voyage Out can be seen as a bildungsroman in that it is
concerned with the education, largely on an emotional plane, of a young
girl. Rachel's aunt adopts the role of a mentor towards Rachel, having
been struck by Rachel's tale of the traumatic experience of being kissed by
Mr. Dalloway, an Englishman travelling on the boat (p. 73). Helen is
horrified by Rachel's obvious ignorance, and fear, of men and sex. She
tells Rachel that the Dalloways, of whom Rachel has been in some awe,
are really rather second-rate people, and that she must learn to discrimi
nate and become a person "on her own account." This statement is like a
revelation to Rachel: "The vision of herself as a real everlasting thing,
different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed
into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of
living" (p. 81). This process of self-awareness is then continued, and
extended, by Rachel's friendship with St. John Hirst and, chiefly, Terence
Hewet, as well as with some of the minor characters like Miss Allan and
Evelyn Murgatroyd.
In Heart of Darkness the central character, Kurtz, is a mature adult and
is thus at a different stage of self-awareness than that of Rachel. In Con
rad's work we do not see the development of the self, but the self revealed
in extremity. This gives Conrad's work a narrower focus which allows for
concentration on the central theme, which is the conflict in man between
admitting his kinship with the savages and their "wild and passionate
uproar" (p. 96) and denying it, and the lengths to which each extreme can
take one. The question raised by Conrad is how far man can control his
primitive impulses without sinking back into a primitive savage state where
"all that mysterious life of the wilderness stirs in the forest, in the jungle,
in the hearts of wild men" (p. 50). Marlow, the narrator, is aware of what
he terms "the fascination of the abomination" (p. 50), and of the need for
a "deliberate belief' (p. 97) to counteract this. For him, as for Rachel and
Kurtz, the voyage becomes a voyage into the self, since Marlow learns
about his own feelings and thoughts through response to Kurtz and what
he represents.
For Rachel, the discovery and acknowledgement of feelings are compli
cated by her fear of sex, which seems to be based on a dislike of man's
animal nature and possible brutality and on the fear of a loss of self
through the merging of one's identity with another. These fears are ex
pressed powerfully in the novel through a series of symbols which appear
in a recurring dream of Rachel's. After Rachel has been kissed by Mr.
Dalloway, she dreams of walking down a long tunnel "which grew so
narrow by degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on either side. At
length the tunnel opened and became a vault; she turned, alone with a
little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering, with long nails.

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 Exploration of Self / 143

His face was pitted and like the face of an animal" (p. 74). This vision of
entombment, which recurs at the end of the novel during Rachel's illness
in her fear of being buried alive, is expressed in the image of her lying "still
and cold as death." She feels herself being pursued by barbarian men, and
"the horror did not go at once ... she got up and actually locked the
door" (p. 74). This horror, as in the cry of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, is
associated with images of darkness and death, as well as the depravity of
man's nature. The image of the tunnel also has clear sexual connotations,
as well as suggesting the idea of a passage and hence a voyage. It is during
the first voyage that Rachel becomes aware of her own sexuality, and the
second voyage is the occasion of her first love-making with Hewet, an
event which arouses in her both joy and fear. Here Rachel imagines herself
drowning, and she and Hewet are described on two occasions as sinking
together to "the bottom of the world" (pp. 278,280).
In both works there is also the image of a snake present which acts as
an attraction. For Marlow, as for Rachel, a tropical river has long held a
fascination, "as a snake would a bird" (p. 52), with the river itself resem
bling "an immense snake uncoiled," and being part of "a place of dark
ness" (p. 52). Rachel too is attracted to the Amazon, saying: "One might
discover a new reptile" (p. 90). The image of the snake also has sexual
connotations, as well as suggesting the temptation of forbidden knowledge
in the Garden of Eden, which is an important theme in both works. C. B.
Cox wrote of Heart of Darkness that: "The novel can be interpreted in a
Freudian manner as a journey into the wilderness of sex, a fantasy shaped
by Conrad's own divided impulses. The pilgrims penetrate down a narrow
channel to find, in the darkness, a violent orgiastic experience. Kurtz, the
outlaw-figure, has dared to transgress the restraints imposed by civiliza
tion. He represents Marlow's shadow self, the secret sharer, and the voyage
of exploration is a night journey into the unconscious, or a discovery of
the Freudian id."8 Thus there is the reference in the novel to "certain
midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites" (p. 118) which are never
specified.
Death is present in an ominous way from the beginning of both works.
Thus Marlow thinks of the time when the Romans first came to Britain
with "death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush" (p. 49), while in
The Voyage Out, almost the first words that Rachel hears on board ship
are a gloomy reference to the chance of falling to one's death down the
steep stairs (p. 10), and Helen's assurance to Mr. Pepper that one does not
die from rheumatism (p. 11). Like the darkness which is constantly juxta
posed with light in both works, death is an ever-present possibility. As
Marlow says, looking out from a vessel over the Thames at night: "this also
has been one of the dark places of the earth" (p. 48), while the same

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144 I Conradiana

situation in The Voyage Out provokes the remark that: "No darkness
would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them
for hundreds of years" (p. 13). The darkness, however, has been present
and can easily return, as it does in the voyage, "into the heart of the
night" (p. 269), as the second voyage is termed. It is over this second
voyage that Helen Ambrose expresses her fears most intensely for the
safety of the two lovers, in accordance with her rather clumsy status as a
woman "of the earthly world, spinning the thread of fate" (p. 206). She
blames the other members of the party for arranging the second expedi
tion, during which Rachel contracts the fatal fever, and thus for "having
ventured too far and exposed themselves" (p. 290).
Virginia Woolf s debt to Conrad is shown most clearly in their shared
theme of this journey into the heart of darkness, a journey which is both
literal and metaphorical. The darkness is the unknown, both in the sense
of a strange and unfamiliar country inhabited by dark natives or savages,
and in the sense of the unrecognized areas of experience which these
countries symbolize and reveal to the individual.
For the physical descriptions of the voyage, and the South American
landscape, it seems that Virginia Woolf had to resort largely to literary
models, particularly the Discovery of Guiana (1596) by Sir Walter Raleigh,
although she did go on a trip to the Iberian Peninsula in April, 1905,
which involved a week-long sea journey, and, according to Quentin Bell,
made some "permanent impression"9 upon her. It was for the idea of
entering such far-off regions, and for the possible consequences of this,
that Virginia Woolf was most indebted to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Indeed one of the main differences in their respective works is the treat
ment and presentation of landscape. Conrad had travelled up the Congo in
1890 for seven months in command of a Belgian river steamer, and wrote
in the "Author's Note" to his story that it was based on "experience
pushed a little (and only a very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."
His descriptions of the landscape and its inhabitants have an immediacy
and vividness which are absent in Virginia Woolf s rather rarefied settings.
As Winifred Holtby observed: "No ferocity lurks in her forest. Her travel
lers encounter no wild beasts. They are not even bitten by mosquitoes,"
adding that "Rachel's fever might have been contracted in West Kensing
ton."10 One of the members of the group on the second voyage, Mr.
Flushing, even compares part of the jungle to an English park (p. 283).
Virginia Woolf does try, however, to convey the sense of a meaningless
universe which is indifferent, or even hostile, towards man, through a
series of images. She refers to the "senseless and cruel churning" of the
river water (p. 276), and to a bird which "gave a wild laugh," and "a
monkey who chuckled a malicious question" (p. 272), while the trees and

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 Exploration of Self / 145

the undergrowth are also menacing as they "seemed to be strangling each

other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle" (p. 271). Conrad creates
a similar image of the wildness and hostility of the jungle environ
ment, as in the reference Marlow makes to "the overwhelming realities of
this strange world of plants, and water, and silence" (p. 93), which suggests
"the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable inten
tion," but in Conrad's work the more abstract descriptions are balanced by
those of a more concrete and brutally realistic nature such as the death of
Marlow's helmsman where "the shaft of a spear... had caught him in the
side just below the ribs... the blade had gone in out of sight, after making
a frightful gash; my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming
dark-red under the wheel; his eyes shone with an amazing lustre" (p. 112).
The ghastly image of the shoes filled with blood which makes Marlow
"morbidly anxious" to remove them (p. 113) is haunting because of its
harshly realistic quality.
The hostile, elemental forces in nature which both writers evoke are
thus partly used to support a theory of the futility of human endeavour
and hope, particularly in The Voyage Out where Rachel is largely a passive
victim of death and these hostile forces, which lend support to Helen s
theory of life as one which .. made chaos triumphant, things happening
for no reason at all, and everyone groping about in illusion and ignorance"
(P- 224).
There is also a striking contrast between the two works in the presenta
tion of the natives. Virginia Woolf s vision of them is a romanticized one.
They are seen as the noble savage incarnate, as in the reference to a "lean
majestic man, whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the
Englishman's body appear ugly and unnatural" (p. 288), while the group
of natives are described as "soft instinctive people" (p. 289). Their role in
the novel seems to be mainly symbolic, both of an alien form of life going
on "for ever and ever" (p. 289), dwarfing Rachel and Hewet in a menacing
way, giving Helen Ambrose "presentiments of disaster" (p. 290), and also
suggesting the frailty of the human body, as in Helen's thought: "How
small the little figures looked wandering through the trees" (p. 290). To
Conrad, however, the natives are men in a savage state, whose most fright
ening characteristic is that they cannot be viewed in a romantic or sym
bolic light, nor be dismissed as inhuman. Marlow vividly describes a chain
gang of six men: "All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently
dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me
within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indif
ference of unhappy savages" (p. 64). They do indeed serve to suggest to
Marlow the presence of a "flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a
rapacious and pitiless folly" (p. 65), but they themselves possess a

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146 I Conradiana
naturalness and inevitability which contribute an element of realism to
Heart of Darkness, which is lacking in The Voyage Out.
In reply to Lytton Strachey's charge that her novel "perhaps lacked the
cohesion of a dominating idea" not "in the spirit" but "in the action,"
Virginia Woolf wrote, in a letter dated 28 February 1916: "I suspect your
criticism about the failure of conception is quite right. I think I had a
conception, but I don't think it made itself felt. What I wanted to do was
to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various and disorderly as
possible, which should be cut short for a moment by the death, and go on
again—and the whole was to have a sort of pattern, and be somehow
controlled."11
Many critics and readers have, however, felt that Rachel's death comes
as a shock of an arbitrary and unexplained nature, despite the existence of
an obvious death wish in Rachel, which seems to be caused chiefly by her
sense of the transient nature of life, and the inadequacy of any human
relationship. This death wish is expressed in terms of drowning, an image
also connected, as mentioned earlier, with the experience of love-making
with Hewet. At one point Rachel imagines a kind of Liebestod, when she
and Hewet have a fantasy about a death struggle on a rock in the sea, and
for Rachel: "To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither, and
driven about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful"
(p. 303).
It is on this question of the reasons for Rachel's death that Conrad's
story proves particularly illuminating. It seems to me that the real reasons
for Rachel's death are twofold: first, the sense shared by Conrad and
Virginia Woolf of the fragility and vulnerability of human beings in the
face of primitive, elemental forces which lack any logic in human terms,
and second and more important, the fact that Rachel, like Kurtz, is ven
turing too far into unknown areas of the self and experience and has to
pay through extinction. Both Rachel and Kurtz are Faustian figures in the
sense that they are not content with human limitations. Thus Rachel
expresses a desire for "many more things than the love of one human
being-the sea, the sky" (p. 307), just as Marlow's first view of Kurtz is of
him opening his mouth wide "as though he had wanted to swallow all the
air, the earth, all the men before him" (p. 134). Rachel also has a desire to
see behind the outer appearance of things. She dislikes the perpetual blue
of the sky and the sea and protests: "It's like a curtain-all the things one
wants are on the other side of that. I want to know what's going on behind
it" (p. 307). Among the other members of the party, it is she who is most
eager to see the tropical river, and so embark on the second, fatal voyage.
For Kurtz too, the jungle entices to the unknown, as in Marlow's observa
tion that the jungle seemed to draw Kurtz "to its pitiless breast by the

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 Exploration of Self / 147

awakening of the forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of grat

ified and monstrous passions," adding that "This alone, I was convinced,
had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the
gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this
alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted
aspirations" (p. 144).
The main difference in the situations of Rachel and Kurtz, which
affects markedly the relative success of the two works, is that Rachel has
not transgressed in any real personal sense, although her vague dissatisfac
tion with life and the limits which it imposes, particularly for women to
whom marriage can seem the only outlet for self-expression, does consti
tute a mild form of rebellion. Kurtz, however, does acquiesce in the
process of "awakening... the forgotten and brutal instincts" (p. 144)
and, in allowing them a free rein, is described as having "kicked himself
loose of the earth" (p. 144). He also takes part in the "unspeakable rites"
referred to earlier, in which he is idolized by the people he is supposed to
be reforming in his role as civilizer, as well as adding the postscript "Exter
minate all the brutes!" to the paper written for the International Society
for the Suppression of Savage Customs (p. 72). He inspires terror in those
around him as is suggested by the row of heads which confront Marlow
near Kurtz's camp (p. 130). Thus he does transgress in a concrete way, and
his death can be seen as a kind of expiation for the crimes he committed.
His death also forms a necessary climax for Marlow since it frees him from
succumbing to the powers of darkness and evil through his active attempt
to rescue Kurtz, and then in the work of preserving his memory.
Just as with Kurtz the jungle "whispered to him things about himself
which he did not know" (p. 131), the jungle, or wilderness, becomes the
instrument of self-discovery for Marlow, as well as Rachel. What the
voyage reveals to Kurtz and Marlow is man's capacity for evil and the
moral abyss which lies under the thin veneer of civilization. Marlow, like
Kurtz, has felt the power of the wilderness to awaken these evil instincts
and is thus able to identify with Kurtz, partly against his own will. His
attitude to Kurtz is ambivalent since he cannot help admiring the fact that
Kurtz "had something to say" (p. 151) and did at least have the ability to
recognize and judge the horror of his own actions. As Marlow says of
Kurtz's last words, "he had summed up-he had judged. 'The hor
ror!'... After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief," and to
Marlow this is better than indifference, or the petty plotting of the
manager of the station and his ally the brickmaker, a "papier-mâché
Mephistopheles" (p. 81), who are trying to get rid of Kurtz whom they see
as a rival for positions of power. At the same time, Marlow is fully aware
of the enormity of Kurtz's moral transgressions and condemns them

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148 I Conradiana

accordingly, as in his description of Kurtz as "a shadow insatiable of

splendid appearances, of frightful realities" (p. 155) whose soul was "sati
ated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of
all the appearances of success and power" (p. 147). Kurtz has gone further
"beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations" than he would have dared
himself. As he notes of Kurtz: "It is his extremity that I seem to have lived
through ... he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge,
while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot" (p. 151).
This motif of "stepping over the edge" occurs in both works in dif
ferent forms and is central to the theme of the dangers of exceeding the
accepted limits of experience. Thus in The Voyage Out there is the figure
of the dead explorer whose hut is sighted near the beginning of the second
voyage. He "had died of fever some ten years ago, almost within reach of
civilisation" and is described as having gone "farther inland than anyone's
been yet" (p. 281). He left behind him "his body and his skins and a
notebook" (p. 283), a description which recalls the notebook in Heart of
Darkness which Marlow also finds in a hut and which impresses him by its
"singleness of intention" and "honest concern for the right way of going
to work" (p. 99), both qualities which seem to be conspicuously lacking in
the nihilistic and at times, positively evil, atmosphere of the jungle. This
notebook is then linked with the figure of the harlequin who had read the
book, had made notes on it in Russian, and had then left it behind by
mistake. The harlequin also comments significantly about being in the
jungle: "I went a little farther, then still a little farther—till I had gone so
far that I don't know how I'll ever get back" (p. 126).
In Heart of Darkness it is, of course, Marlow, the narrator, who recog
nizes the abyss of evil which draws Kurtz down to its depths, and which
Helen in The Voyage Out sees present in the jungle landscape and then
mirrors in the statements of her philosophy of life. Marlow is able to face
and finally to overcome the "powers of darkness" (p. 116) which have
conquered Kurtz, despite the persistence in the latter of some vestiges of
his original idealism, expressed on his death bed. He speaks here of the fact
that he "had immense plans" and "was on the threshold of great things"
(p. 143), words which now seem sadly empty. What saves Marlow is his
recognition of the need for a "deliberate belief' (p. 97), with which to
fight the powers of darkness and which is strong enough to conquer the
latter. In the case of Kurtz, belief was not sufficiently strong, and thus his
journey brought him to what Marlow describes as "the supreme moment of
complete knowledge" (p. 149), embodied in his final cry "The horror! The
horror!" when he seemed to "live again in every detail... desire, tempta
tion, and surrender," while the expression on his face was one "of sombre
pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless
despair" (p. 149).

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 Exploration of Self / 149

Thus, although his final knowledge of the horror unleashed by his

actions comes too late to save Kurtz, his death, unlike Rachel's, has a
conclusiveness which is satisfying both artistically and morally, and the
novel has a stark ethical dimension which is lacking in The Voyage Out. In
the latter work one feels that Rachel's fears about life and her sense of
horror at the idea of sex and marriage could be tamed and diluted through
a successful union with Hewet and a consequent reduction in the scale of
her desires, which have arisen partly through her immature confusion
about what life involves. One sympathizes with her comment to Hewet:
"It isn't as if we were expecting a great deal—only to walk about and look
at things" (p. 306). One has the sense that Virginia Woolf was not alto
gether sure how to end her novel, a charge which could not be made
against Conrad in Heart of Darkness.
The death of Kurtz is conveyed, of course, through the narrator Mar
low, and the abyss of evil which is exposed to him through Kurtz and the
jungle is exorcised to some extent in the course of the story. It seems that
one of the functions of a narrator can be to act as a buffer between the
emotions aroused by the tale and the response of the reader. This is
illustrated also in Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier (1915),
when the narrator, Dowell, makes such comments as: "Forgive my writing
of these monstrous things in this frivolous manner. If I did not, I should
break down and cry,"'2 and thus offers an outlet for the reader's own
emotional response. In Heart of Darkness the reader identifies in part with
Marlow's response to Kurtz and can thus come through the experience of
what Kurtz represents with Marlow himself and achieve some kind of
resolution of the evils shown. Thus when Marlow lies to the Intended over
the nature of Kurtz's last words, substituting her name instead, he allies
himself once more with the necessary half-truths which living in society
demands, and this compromise is seen as preferable to the "choice of
nightmares" (p. 138) with which Marlow was confronted in the hollowness
of the survivors in the jungle, such as the manager of the station, and the
extremism of Kurtz.
In The Voyage Out there is no such mediating influence as Marlow
between Rachel's death and the responses it may arouse, and the trite
comments of the people at the hotel, such as Evelyn Murgatroyd's words:
"I honestly believe Rachel's in heaven" (p. 363), are inadequate and add
to the feelings of dissatisfaction created at the end of the novel. It is
interesting to note that the feelings of horror experienced, and expressed,
by Marlow about Kurtz are similar to those experienced by Virginia Woolf
in a directly personal way after the writing of The Voyage Out. Both
Conrad and Woolf clearly identified to some extent with their protag
onists. As Albert J. Guerard said of Conrad's story: "this is Conrad's
longest journey into self."13 Likewise, in his biography of Virginia Woolf,

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150 / Conradiana
Quentin Bell stated that she wanted her second novel, Night and Day, to
be "a fairly pedestrian affair... she wanted to do something which would
not bring her too close to the abyss from which she had so recently
emerged. In the final chapters of The Voyage Out she had been playing
with fire. She had succeeded in bringing some of the devils within her
mind hugely and gruesomely from the depths, and she had gone too far for
comfort."14 Referring to her nervous breakdown and her attempt to
commit suicide after completing the novel, he adds: "That novel and the
final effort of giving it to the world had taken her over the edge of sanity
and she could not yet risk a repetition of that appalling operation."
Virginia Woolf also noted in her diary, in an entry dated 27 March 1919:
"I don't suppose I've ever enjoyed any writing so much as I did the last
half of Night and Day Indeed, no part of it taxed me as The Voyage Out
did."15 It is clear that Virginia Woolf must have identified quite closely
with Rachel, especially in the descriptions of her mental state during her
illness, a state which borders on insanity, as in the obsessive image of an
old woman cutting off a man's head (p. 338), which recalls Rachel's wit
nessing of women cutting off a chicken's head outside the hotel (p. 255).
Conrad too was affected emotionally by his experience in the Congo, as
seen in his description in A Personal Record16 of his last journey down
the Congo where he writes: "I got round the turn (between Kinshasa and
Leopoldville) more or less alive, though I was too sick to care whether I
did or not, and ... I arrived at that delectable capital Borna, where before
the departure of the steamer which was to take me home I had the time to
wish myself dead over and over again with perfect sincerity" (p. 14).
Jocelyn Baines comments that: "It would be absurd to attribute his
[Conrad's] long periods of despair to the Congo experience-there had
been enough previous experiences to confirm an innately gloomy
disposition—and his remark to Garnett that 'before the Congo I was a mere
animal' is an obvious exaggeration. But ... Heart of Darkness, with its
tone of outraged humanism and its consciousness of evil, shows how
deeply he was affected emotionally by the sight of such human baseness
and degradation."17
The theme of the exploration of the self can thus be seen to have direct
reference to the lives of both authors in an interesting and instructive way.
It is also interesting that both writers felt a need to deny charges of
gloominess or despair in respect to these two works. In a letter to William
Blackwood, dated 31 December 1898, Conrad wrote: "the narrative is not
gloomy. The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling
the civilizing work in Africa is a justifiable idea. The subject is of our timè
distinctly," while Virginia Woolf wrote: "if one is to deal with people on a
large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I

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 Exploration of Self / 151

don't admit to being hopeless though."18 However, in his statement,

Conrad does not allude directly to the darker moral dimension of his tale,
while in her statement, Virginia Woolf half admits to a feeling of pessi
mism. Conrad's statement about his work also points to a further area of
the exploration of the self—the self in relation to society. He was con
cerned in Heart of Darkness with exposing the colonial exploitation taking
place in the Congo, which he referred to as "the vilest scramble for loot
that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical
exploration."19
Both Heart of Darkness and The Voyage Out begin with ships leaving
the Thames in London and entering far-off areas, associated with darkness,
and remote from civilization. In Heart of Darkness we do see the society
of Brussels, the "whited sepulchre" (p. 55) to which Marlow goes at the
beginning and end of the novel, and the stations along the river have a
minimal kind of social organization which seems rather incongrous in the
jungle setting, but Conrad, unlike Virginia Woolf, is more concerned with
stripping away the layers of civilization, than with re-creating them in an
unfamiliar environment. Kurtz has deliberately shaken off the restraints of
civilization, and Heart of Darkness then explores the results of his actions.
Conrad saw Kurtz primarily as a symbolic figure, as is evident from the
fact that he does not really try to give him a personality. We know very
little of him as a person, apart from the fact that he had been educated
partly in England, and his mother was half-English and his father half
French. Marlow noted that: "All Europe contributed to the making of
Kurtz" (p. 117), and he is intended partly to be a representative of the
decadent aspects of Belgian imperialism, as he goes further and further
away from his original colonizing mission, summed up in the statement he
writes that: "we whites ... can exert a power for good practically un
bounded" (p. 118). Our picture of Kurtz is otherwise developed and tinged
with expectation through the remarks people make about him, and Mar
low's own eagerness to meet him and hear his reputed eloquence first-hand.
Both Conrad and Virginia Woolf were concerned about the success of
their portrayal of character in these two works. Conrad expressed his
doubts to Elsie Hueffer: "What I distinctly admit is the fault of having
made Kurtz too symbolic or rather symbolic at all."20 Even if, like
Marlow, we are left largely with the mere words of Kurtz, rather than any
more solid image of his character, it seems to me that his presentation in
the novel is both adequate and effective since his experiences do raise and
embody ethical questions and are of interest as a result. It could indeed be
argued that a greater concentration on character portrayal in the novel
would be a distraction from the central issues. This could not be said,
however, of The Voyage Out where Rachel is intended primarily to be a

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152 I Conradiana

realistic figure, except in so far as she symbolizes the development of

maturity and self-knowledge in a young girl whose interests are centered
on love and marriage. Thus her naive question to Helen early in the novel:
"Why do people marry?" (p. 57), is answered in the novel through her
experience, and discovery, of love. Like Conrad, Virginia Woolf was
anxious about her presentation of character, as seen in her comment to
Clive Bell: "I want to bring out a stir of live men and women against a
background. I think I am quite right to attempt it, but it is immensely
difficult to do."21 Rachel's character remains rather nebulous, as Clive
Bell asserted in a letter to Virginia Woolf where he wrote that she seemed
"mysterious and remote, some strange, wild creature who has come to give
up half her secret."22 The presentation of her character in the novel
reflects the difficulty that Virginia Woolf found when confronted with the
task of describing people. This difficulty is actually voiced by Rachel
herself when she is trying to tell Terence about her aunts and is "overcome
by the difficulty of describing people" (p. 140). Her personality cannot be
said to be fully developed, and this does detract from the success of The
Voyage Out as it makes it more difficult for the reader to identify with
Rachel, or believe in her fully as a person. It is difficult also to share
Virginia Woolf s own enthusiasm about Rachel suggested by her comment
in her diary when she re-read her novel: "On the whole I like the young
woman's mind considerably."2 3
Virginia Woolf, like Conrad, was also involved in presenting the self in
relation to society, but in her case the mores of the society remain more or
less operative and Rachel does not rebel against them in the same way as
Kurtz. The Voyage Out presents a picture of English colonial society in
1908 seen in the microcosm of the ship, and then in the hotel and villa at
Santa Marina. As Dorothy Brewster comments: "The world of the novel is
pre-1914 England: distinct classes, a politics of progress, awareness of the
Empire, a leisurely atmosphere,"24 a world which is aptly represented by
the aristocratic Dalloways, and the society of Santa Marina, however much
it may lack "the supporting background of organised English life" (p.
223). Thus, as with their presentation of the landscape and inhabitants of
the foreign countries in question, Conrad's treatment of his subject is more
starkly realistic and vivid than that of Virginia Woolf, particularly in his
evocation of the demoralising effects of a more primitive society caused by
the knowledge of the darkness which it reveals as latent in all men.
Virginia Woolf, who was of course writing a full-length novel rather
than a novella, as in Conrad's case, also treats other themes in her novel,
such as the position of women in society, and the respective merits of
intellect and intuition, embodied in St. John Hirst and Hewet respectively.
Thus her work is more diffuse in its content than Heart of Darkness and

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 Exploration of Self / 153

lacks the latter's intensity. Moreover, the drama of Rachel's self-discovery

is more personal than that of Kurtz. The experiences of Kurtz, as said
before, give rise to moral questions such as the misuse of power, or the
purpose of self-restraint, and this makes Heart of Darkness of more univer
sal interest and application than The Voyage Out.
However, although Virginia Woolf was unable to carry through
Conrad's model of a voyage leading to a death with such conviction and
originality, both works are of great psychological interest as an exploration
of the self. It is clear that Virginia Woolf gained much from her acquaint
ance with Heart of Darkness, and she succeeds, like Conrad, in creating a
powerful evocation of the self, which Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse
refers to appropriately as "a wedge-shaped core of darkness."2 5

City and East London College

NOTES

1. T. S. Eliot, "Le Roman Anglais Contemporain," Nouvelle Revue Française,

28 (May 1927), 672-4.
2. James Naremore, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 45.
3. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth, Heart of Darkness, and The End
of the Tether (London: Dent, 1974). Subsequent references to this work will be
included parenthetically in the paper.
4. Virginia Woolf, "Joseph Conrad," The Common Reader (London: Hogarth
Press, 1925), I, p. 296.
5. Virginia Woolf, The Years (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 312.
6. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 152.
7. Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London: Penguin, 1972). Subsequent
references to this work will be included parenthetically in the paper.
8. C. B. Cox, Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination (London: Dent, 1974),
p. 46.
9. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), I,
p. 104.
10. Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart and Co., 1932), p. 78.
11. Lytton Strachey, letter to Virginia Woolf, 25 February 1916, in Virginia
Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters (London: Hogarth Press, 1969), p. 56.
12. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 60.
13. Albert J. Guerard, Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1969), p. 33.
14. Bell, II, p. 42.
15. A Writer's Diary (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), p. 11.
16. Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record (London: Dent,
1972).
17. Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (London: Penguin,
1973), p. 151.
18. Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, ed. William Blackburn
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1958), p. 37; Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
(London: Hogarth Press, 1972), p. 10.

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154 I Conradiana
19. Joseph Conrad, "Geography and Some Explorers," quoted by Baines, p. 143.
20. Quoted in Baines, p. 227.
21. Bell, II, 211 (Appendix D).
22. Bell, II, 210 (Appendix D).
23. A Writer's Diary, p. 24.
24. Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), p. 87.
25. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 72.

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