The Ambivalence Of Joseph Conrad's Colonial Discourse

Joseph Conrad came to writing after having been a sailor for nearly twenty years. Now he is considered one of the greatest British writers. His upbringing and his career as a sailor determined his choice of imperial settings and conflicts as his writing subjects. Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim are two of his best works on imperial issues. This thesis aims to elucidate the complexity of Conrad's colonial discourse.On the first level, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim show Conrad's anti-imperial attitudes. Conrad discloses the hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the colonialists. What is more, he points out that the victims of colonialism are not just the natives, but the whites too. Both the natives and the whites undergo a psychological chaos under the influence of colonialism. The encounter with an alien life-style causes one to lose his conviction in the beliefs and values of his own group. Hence, the dissolution of emotional and ethical bonds with one's own group causes him to be doomed to failure. On the second level, the readers will find the other side of Conrad if they look carefully at these two novels. While the surface of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim purports to represent specific encounters with the Congolese and the Malays, the subtext supports the superiority of European cultures. Conrad employs one of the imperial literary genre----the adventure fiction in both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim to justify the Europeans' presence in other lands. Meanwhile, Conrad's representation of the Congo and the Malay Archipelago as Otherness is typically European and his depiction of the whites is tinged with Anglophilia. In addition, Conrad's description of the women plays upon a familiar imperial trope-----a marginalized woman.Conrad's ambivalent attitudes on colonialism can be explained through a survey of the social context and the writer's personal experience. Though Conrad is ahead of his times, he is not entirely immune to the infection of the beliefs and ideas of his day. In the meantime, his personal experience determines the ambivalence of his writing. Furthermore, Conrad's adoption of English as his literary language partly undermines his intention to criticize the British culture because the English language itself was an important exploitative tool.Though Conrad's perspective on colonialism is so bipolar, it anticipates an important change in English attitudes towards colonialism. At the same time, he lays the groundwork for newly emerging authors within the former colonies.