If Marlow represents common sense and reason, then Marlow’s Aunt (like many of the women in the story) represents naivety, gullibility and lack of judgement. Marlow’s Aunt verbals many of the spurious Social Darwinist theories and Ethnocentric beliefs that much of Conrad’s 19th century readership may themselves have accepted – she considers the colonial mission to be one of humanism and philanthropy, and Europe a centre of enlightenment and intellectual refinement in comparison to the “savages” of Africa. In Marlow’s Aunt, Conrad associates femininity (unfortunately, typically connected to passivity and weakness) with innocence and sentimentalism, enabling the author to dismiss such imperial propaganda as fabricated and facile. By comparison, Marlow can be said to occupy a distinctly masculine sphere of logic, materialism, and virile imperial quest – but as Marlow becomes less certain and his narration more unreliable, Conrad destabilises Marlow’s authority, and in this way also uses Marlow to deliver a critique of the colonial cause. Through comparing Marlow and his Aunt, Conrad thus condemns colonialism on both an idealistic and materialistic scale. This is an interesting contrast to explore if you are undertaking a feminist or even Marxist reading of the text.
