How does Joseph Conrad use light and dark imagery to criticize King Leopold's actions in the Congo?
In his scathing novella Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad frequently employs symbolic imagery of light and dark to criticize the horrific abuses carried out in the Belgian-run Congo Free State under King Leopold II’s rapacious rule. Juxtaposing luminous language ironically against dark depictions of reality provides a damning indictment of imperial atrocities.
Illuminating Deceit - The Radiance of Colonial Propaganda
Conrad uses ironically radiant language in describing the Belgian company’s glossy pamphlet promoting colonialism’s supposed “light” bringing civilization to Africa. This satirizes the propaganda masking the brutal greed-driven activities in reality. Light imagery becomes shorthand for hollow pretensions of noble purpose.
The Dark Reality - Dehumanizing Effects of Belgian Rule
In contrast, the narrator Marlow’s first glimpse of conquered Africans shockingly depicts them as “black shadows of disease and starvation.” Conrad uses dark imagery to reveal the vicious effects of Belgian policies on the Congolese people, who suffered immensely under heavy taxation, forced labor, punishment, and rampant disease.
Kurtz's Darkness - The Irony of a Civilizing Emissary
When Marlow finally meets the agent Kurtz, who profits by terrorizing local villages, Kurtz is described as emanating “an impenetrable darkness” despite being an esteemed emissary of white civilization. This exemplifies Conrad’s use of irony and light/dark symbolism to expose darkness at the heart of imperialism.
Shattered Illusions - Dissecting the Symbolism of Light and Dark
Ultimately Marlow comes to see the sparkling rhetoric around colonialism’s civilizing mission as blinding and false, concealing the grim reality of Congolese people brutalized in the name of Belgian greed. Conrad dispels the “light” to reveal the horrors within the “darkness.”
Through layered light and dark symbolism, Conrad exposes the atrocities and (racial) moral hypocrisy sustaining King Leopold’s profitable Congolese regime. Conrad ironically inverts conventional racial imagery to argue true darkness dwells not in Africa, but within imperialism itself.
