Shedding Light on Conrads Darkness :: Essays Papers

Shedding Light on Conrad's Darkness "My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav'd of light." -William Blake "The Little Black Boy". "Bereav'd of light" is the quintessential idea one encounters when reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness. We enter the Congo, a place filled with Keats' "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways," a place where Conrad calls "the farthest point of navigation." From whence comes our source of light? Who is this source of light? In order to enhance our understanding I propose that we look into the one who is "out of place". To clarify my proposal, I mean to say that we will look at the Black man in the "White setting", and vice versa. In Book VII of his famous poem, "The Prelude", William Wordsworth tells of his encounter with "The Beggar" on the streets of London. In my opinion, the Beggar is representative of the Black man in London. He is seen as a beggar, treated like one, and respected, or rather, disrespected, like one. He is merely a spectacle, a nuisance, living off the mere scraps of the English. Wordsworth describes the beggar saying, "...a blind Beggar, who, with his upright face, stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest wearing a written paper, to explain the story of the man and who he was. My mind did at this spectacle turn round as with the might of waters, and it seemed to me that in this label was a type, or emblem, of the utmost that we know, both of ourselves and of the universe; and on the shape of the unmoving man, his fixed face and sightless eyes, I looked, as if admonished from another world." We find the Beggar out of place, in a world clearly not his own. He is labeled, shunned, outc asted. He lies blind, desolate, unmoving. This is what the English society has done to him. Like the African natives in Heart of Darkness he is silenced, yet he screams a powerful image. His label says it all. Wordsworth, the Englishman, is unable to reach out to him, as he is "from another world." Yet he cannot help but be caught, trapped, by the "spectacle" of the Beggar. His message cannot be overlooked, just as Conrad's message is not to be overlooked either.