Raymond Cazis – “Perspectives on Gender in Heart of Darkness & Season of Migration to the North”

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Dear Reader,

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 My central thesis was that women take a secondary role to men in Heart of Darkness and are portrayed as men’s possessions in Season of Migration to the North. I believe I communicated these points on pages two and five, respectively. My methodology was to assess how gender is portrayed in the text of each work.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 This paper is a completely unedited version. In my second draft I would like to thoroughly edit the text and polish it up. I would also like to give more length in analyzing Heart of Darkness. There are also a few passages in Season of Migration to the North that I did not fit into the first draft.

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¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Raymond Cazis III

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Professor Jeff Peer

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 ENG 2850

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 14 November 2016

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 1 “Perspectives on Gender in Heart of Darkness & Season of Migration to the North”

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¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 1 Imperialism is a practice ingrained in every period of human history and arguably still exists today even with the dissolution of the great colonial empires in the 20^th century. Taken together, Heart of Darkness and Season of Migration to the North concurrently provide us with the unique opportunity to view imperialization from both the perspective of the colonizer and the colonized. Both works depict certain stereotyped cultural elements, but at the same time they also show how differing cultural perspectives can possess similar elements. A common way of investigating a society is by inspecting its institutions (e.g. language, gender, family, economy, etc.). In this paper, I will focus on examining how gender is depicted in the two cultural perspectives contained in these novels. I hope to develop an understanding of how these two cultural perspectives differ and in what ways they are similar with respect to gender.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 As I read Heart of Darkness and Season of Migration to the North, two clear perspectives on gender emerged: 1) In Heart of Darkness, women occupy a secondary role in English society, and 2) in Season of Migration to the North, Arab-African society views women as possessions. Delving into the text of each work helps us to develop an understanding of how gender is viewed in two very different cultures that intersect as a result of British imperialism.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a fictional novel with historical overtones. We follow the story of a seaman named Charles Marlowe as he chases a boyhood dream of venturing into distant, uncharted territories. Marlowe fulfills his dream by securing a job with an ivory trading company based in Brussels. He quickly finds himself in the Congo, but his dreams are dashed by the reality of what he finds there—a racist paradigm in which locals are practically enslaved and drained of resources.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 1 But how is gender portrayed in the Heart of Darkness? Women took a secondary role in society and in the economy; this is portrayed in the book as well. Overall, women are simply not present, which in a way draws parallels to the status of women in early twentieth century England (and the rest of the Western world). The two women who appeared early in the book as Marlowe traveled to Brussels to sign his employment contract were simply secretaries who let visitor in to see the company’s president. Conrad also had them sitting in their chairs knitting, a more traditional picture of women’s duties. For the book’s purposes, they served only as omens of the horrors that Marlowe would find in the Congo; they had no active roles as characters in the plot.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 1 The only other woman in the book is the tribal leader in the Congo. Interestingly enough, it is in the foreign country that Britain was ruling where we see a woman with any social status. But even here, the woman was portrayed through the Western lens of imperialism and racism in which she has no language, culture, or identity. However, the views of women in Heart of Darkness, although they are still inappropriate, are more tolerable when compared to the views of women found in Season of Migration to the North.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Season of Migration to the North (Salih) provides us with a format in which we can analyze the Arab-African perspective on gender. The book is set in mid-twentieth century Sudan after the country had won its independence from Britain, and in fact, the author, Tayeb Salih, was born in Sudan in 1929 when the country was still under Britain’s rule. This text allows us to analyze the role of gender from the perspective of the colonized (but newly independent) Arab-African people.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 1 Early in Season of Migration to the North, the narrator is introduced to a mysterious character who is not from the narrator’s home town. This newcomer is named Mustafa Sa’eed. As the narrator continues to develop a relationship with Mustafa, Mustafa’s dark past quickly becomes apparent, and he emerges to the reader as a brilliant individual who had used his intelligence and the mystery surrounding his Arab-Africa descent to seduce European women for sport.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 Mustafa Sa’eed’s experiences with European women show that he views women as a sport. He describes himself as a hunter, his prey being females. Describing his methodology, Sa’eed says, “There were small electric lights, red, blue, and violet, placed in certain corners; on the walls were large mirrors, so that when I slept with a woman it was as if I slept with a whole harem simultaneously… My bedroom was like an operating theatre in a hospital. There is a still pool in the depths of every woman that I knew how to stir” (Salih 27). His modus operandi was to seduce these women false tales of deserts and jungles and then methodically sweep them into bed. But this blatant womanizing is not a quality solely Sa’eed’s.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 The unacceptable treatment of women as objects of men continues throughout the book. I will focus now on a conversation that the book’s narrator walks in upon at his grandfather’s house. The conversation takes place between his grandfather, other men in the village, and one female friend of the older men. This women, Bint Majzoub, is the only woman who takes an active role in the book, and she is the only woman who could possibly be seen as an equal or at least a contemporary of the other men. However, this woman is described as a very manly character. She does not maintain any feminine qualities but is stripped of them and given a manly identity. “’May I divorce,’ said Bint Majzoub, freeing the ash from her cigarette on the ground with a theatrical movement of her fingers, ‘if his thing wasn’t like a wedge he’d drive right into me so I could hardly contain myself’” (Salih 64). Majzoub smokes with the men and discusses sex and male genitalia just freely as the men discuss about women. The narrator further describes her: “She used to smoke, drink, and swear an oath of divorce like a man.

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 More disturbing sexism can be seen in the rest of the conversation between the small group gathered at the grandfather’s house. One of the men there, Was Rayyes, tells the story of how he raped a slave girl, albeit within the confines of Islamic law after forcing the girl to marry him.

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 And afterwards, Hajj Ahmed, I put the girl in front of me on the donkey, squirming and twisting, then I forcibly stripped her of all her clothes till she was as naked as the day her mother bore her. She was a young slave girl from downriver who’d just reached puberty—her breast, Hajj Ahmed, stuck out like pistols and your arms wouldn’t meet round her buttocks. She had been rubbed all over with oil so that her skin glistened in the moonlight and her perfume turned on giddy. I took her down to a sandy patch in the middle of the maize, but when I started on her I heard a movement in the maize…. (Salih 62)

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 1 This passage is so utterly detestable. A girl who is probably around the age of fourteen is forced to marry an older man so he can make a plaything of her and unleash his lust on her. The tragedy is that this practice is accepted in the village, and even the men and woman sitting in Rayyes’s audience say nothing in protest. The conversation then turns to women’s genitalia. Wad Rayyes continues with his horrific speech, “I swear to you, Hajj Ahmed…that if you’d had a taste of the women of Anyssinia and Nigeria you’d throw away your string of prayer-beads and give up praying—the thing between their thighs is like an upturned dish, all there for good or bad. We here lop it off and leave it like a piece of land that’s been stripped bare.” The talk about female bodies as if they are just sexual toys. This religious practice that these women are forced to endure deeply effects their health and lives, and the men only discuss how it effects their sexual stimulation. They then laugh off the story and wrap up the conversation by asking Allah to forgive them for their conversation.

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 I idea of women as men’s possessions is furthered yet when Wad Rayyes wishes to marry Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow. Sa’eed had left his wife and two children in the care of the book’s narrator, and Rayyes approaches the narrator to seek his approval to marry her. She expresses that she will refuse to marry Rayyes. Rayyes replies to the objections by saying to the narrator, “Why do you interfere? You’re not her father or her borther or the person responsible for her. She’ll marry me whatever your or she says or does. Her father’s agreed and so have her brothers. This nonsense you learn at school won’t wash with us here. In this village the men are guardians of the women.” This women has no voice even though she wishes not to remarry. The men decide her fate for her.

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0 In Heart of Darkness, women take a secondary role to men. This is evidenced by the lack of their presence in the story line. Also, in Season of Migration to the North, we find a view of women as solely the possessions of men. Men dictate their lives, and their speech as seen in the text of the book furthers the idea of women as sexual toys.

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¶ 44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0 Works Cited

¶ 45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0 Conrad, J. (1899). Heart of Darkness. New York: Global Classics.

¶ 46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0 Salih, T. (1969). Season of Migration to the North. New York: New York Review Books.

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h.ivey November 15, 2016 at 12:38 pm

Hey Ray, I don’t have a lot to add to this. it seems well organized, well rounded and a good use of the Claim/Evidence/Analysis. I think once you do the edit/polish you mentioned your probably in really good shape. Im Jelly;)

Jeff Peer November 16, 2016 at 8:10 pm

While your two “perspectives” seem thoughtful and mostly correct to me, they don’t seem to cohere into an essay with a distinct thesis. Though the prompt did allow for a “compare-and-contrast” style subject, the form itself requires an overall thesis, if only just for organizational purposes.

That is to say, how do your readings of these two novels connect? What does your investigation of gender in these two books reveal? Does it have anything to do with the historical relationship we call colonialism?

Once you have a clear argument, you will have a much easier time tying your arguments together.

You might confine your investigation to specific characters or passages from each book, to make things easier. Rather than using these books as examples of their respective cultures, you might – and it seems as if you are perhaps suggesting this already – consider their authors’/narrators’ problematic perspectives on gender.

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h.ivey November 15, 2016 at 12:32 pm

Great Thesis statement!

Jeff Peer November 16, 2016 at 7:46 pm

[Overall, women are simply not present]

There are some important exceptions, I think. Of course, the two secretaries at the Company headquarters are quite important symbolically – but they are not really characters. You might analyze what symbolic role they play (ie guardians of the gates of the underworld, or perhaps the fates weaving the threads of human life). But I don’t think you can ignore the two women who bookend Marlowe’s journey to the Congo: his aunt and Kurtz’s fiancé.

Marlow’s two meetings with them reveal the place of women in the whole business of Colonialism, and also Conrad’s gender bias. You might consider how Marlow and Conrad treat these two unnamed characters. They are both advocates of the Belgian colony in Africa, and they both seem unaware of the reality of what is done there. There may be some gendering of perspectives here, as though the idealistic perspective on the “civilizing mission” were a feminine one. He may be accusing his readers – English supporters of colonialism, presumably – that they are like these two women who have not glimpsed into the “heart of darkness” etc.

In any case, you should certainly address two passages in the book: 1) the passage where Marlow explicitly says that women must be protected from the darkness (I don’t have my copy in front of me so I can’t give you a page number); and 2) the ambiguous ending of the novel, where he decides not to tell Kurtz’s fiancé the truth, because it would be “too dark.”

How do these moments, and the aunt and fiancé characters, reflect your argument that: in “woman occupy a secondary role in English society”?

1 Comment on paragraph 28

Adam Marr November 15, 2016 at 3:57 pm

[Interestingly enough, it is in the foreign country that Britain was ruling where we see a woman with any social status]

That is an amazing point!

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1 Comment on paragraph 30

Jeff Peer November 16, 2016 at 7:49 pm

Not sure that this sort of plot summary is necessary to your argument. In the interests of brevity, you can assume that your readers are familiar with the story.

Jeff Peer November 16, 2016 at 8:01 pm

[This passage is so utterly detestable]

While I agree with your analysis of these passages from the book, I think it would be more interesting and more useful to consider the narrator’s perspective as well. After all, he is torn between his idealized love for the village and his horror at the sentiments, discussions and gender injustice which you, quite rightly, describe as “detestable.”

What exactly do you find detestable? Is it the author, for writing these scenes? If so, then you have to consider what purpose they serve, how they mobilize the reader’s sympathy and/or antipathy. Maybe what seems so “detestable” here is the culture of misogyny itself. If so, then I have to ask what this all has to do with colonialism and its legacy? Does the sort of “modernization” that followed upon colonialism and independence represent an end to such abhorrent cultural misogyny, and perhaps a positive note in a story we usually see as so bleak? How is that possible if your claim about English society based on Heart of Darkness is true?

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