Marianna Torgovnick’s “Primitivism and the American Woman” lifts the mysterious veils concealing The Heart of Darkness and exposes perspectives that the novella cannot, or will not, say.

The “horror, the horror”—what has Kurtz actually done in Africa?

“Kurtz has allowed himself to be worshiped by his African followers.” Kurtz has becomes consumed by the fantasy of his ultimate superiority—unhinged from reality, drowning in a fantasy that is even more savage than his perspective of African primitivism.

He commits miscegenation (mates with a black woman, breaking a British code). The African woman is raised above the other Africans by wearing jewelry and leggings. She is beautiful, but she is not the Intended in that she is not “high of mind.” -- substitute/inversion for Kurtz’s ideal Intended woman. “She is presented as all body and inchoate emotion.”


Shrunken Heads
See passage at the top of page 398, which describes the collection of shrunken heads.

Shrunken Heads/Cannibalism in primitivism: absorption of a slain enemy’s courage and power, communal goals, provision of souls for boys at initiation, sense of renewal--all spiritual values that are primitive, yet not savage.

Western fantasy of savagery Westerners views of primitivism and head-hunting elicit a sense of savagery and animalistic, barbaric behavior—heartlessness, brute force.

Kurtz: completely disregards the communal, spiritual power of collecting heads. “In collecting heads, he acted out a Western fantasy of savagery, with emotions different from those typically found among primitive peoples.” (pg.399)


Erosion of Conventional European Values

“Africans became Kurtz’s grade fantasy theater for playing out his culture’s notions of masculinity and power through the controlled borrowed rituals attributed to certain groups within Africa, perverted to Western ends.” (pg.400)
Kurtz experiences a corrosion of European values, as asserted by the article. I disagree in some senses, however. Rather, he seems to be drowning in these European values, these Western presumptions of the African world. The only erosion of European values that I attribute to Kurtz is his unusual relationship with the African woman.

Marlow’s return to Brussels (pg.70)“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.”
Bitter, resentful, oppressed, jaded. He realizes, however, that he cannot express this bitterness, that he would be regarded as mad. Therefore, just one page later, he refers to those same, hurrying Europeans as “commonplace individuals going about their business.”