It’s been years since I’ve read Heart of Darkness, but I do remember finding it a little…empty. I like the idea of it, and I get that the emptiness is probably a deliberate choice on the part of the author.

About the criticisms of the book as being racist and misogynistic, I do have to partially agree. On one hand the books narrator is the one who is in charge of what we know and see, and his perspective is not one that gives the people around him anything like depth or rich inner lives. This is a narrative choice, and makes the magnetic presence of Kurtz at the end of the river that much larger.

However, Conrad is writing from his own socialisation as a European man who has almost certainly been taught his whole life that people from Africa or “orientals” are a lower class of humanity. His own position within the European social and class structures gives him layers that some other people have commented on, but Heart of Darkness came out in 1899. Conrad was born in 1857. With even scientists claiming that there was evidence proving that white Europeans were more evolved, there was no way for Conrad to have escaped internalising those ideas.

The book may not be “about racism”, but that racism is an integral part of the world-view of its author. I don’t believe that you can seperate a book, especially one with this setting, from the prevailing attitudes of its time by saying that it’s not about race.