The Role of Women in Heart of Darkness In the short story Heart of Darkness, Kurtz, a European "white knight", embarks on a crusade to win the hearts and minds of minor African peoples. Kurtz was unaware of the extent to which Africa was dangerous, wild, timeless, feminine, literary-free, religious and vibrant. His love turns to rape when he discovers how unfit he is to master the magnificent vitality of the natural world. The difference between Europe and Africa is the difference between two secondary symbols: the European woman who helped inflate Kurtz's pride and the African woman who helped deflate it. The Destined (nameless, destined for someone else, not for herself) is totally protected (defenseless), rhetorically programmed (words without matter), like a nun in her adoration (sexually repressed), living in black, in a dark place, in a pre-Eliot City of the Dead, in the wasteland of modern Europe. She, like Europe, is mainly external, because the simple black dress hides nothing. The native woman is Africa, entirely internal, despite her sumptuous way of dressing. While Kurtz is male, white, bald, oral, unrestrained, the native woman is female, black, extraordinarily coiffed, emotional and restrained. When Kurtz says "The horror! The horror!" rhetoric and reality merge; Europe and Africa, the Destined and the African, collide. Kurtz realizes that everything he was raised to believe and operate from is a farce; therefore, a horror. Even original nature is a horror to him, because he has been stripped of his own culture and stands both literally and figuratively naked before another; has been exposed to desire but cannot understand it through some established...... middle of paper......n. Marlow sums up the tragic relationship that developed between these three people well: “He stretched out his arms as if pursuing a retreating figure, stretching them backwards and with his pale hands clasped through the faint, thin shine of the window. I never see him! I saw it clearly enough then. As long as I live I will see this eloquent ghost, and I will see her too, a tragic and familiar shadow, resembling in this gesture another, also tragic, and adorned with helpless charms, stretched out naked brunettes on the glitter of the infernal torrent, the torrent of darkness». Empty words, empty gestures. Europe and Africa. A choice of nightmares. Works citedThe classics of the world Joseph Conrad , the end of the bond. Edited by an introduction by Robert Kimbrough. Introduction, notes, glossary.