20 March 2007

Joseph Conrad sure loves the ladies!

Well, at least I could laugh at it:
It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
Oh, Joey. (From Heart of Darkness)

1 comment:

Sycorax Pine said...

This is interesting, because when you noted in an earlier post that everyone else you knew had been forced to read it in high school, I began thinking about how everyone I knew who was forced to read it in high school had a very strong reaction that fell out along gender lines (men were entranced, women were repelled). I was reluctant to draw any essentializing conclusions from this ("women are repelled by the style or content just like men are put off by Jane Austen" - ugh), so I found the whole thing rather baffling. But maybe it is the misogyny that does it...

Or maybe women are just too caught up in their too beautiful world to appreciate the truth of "Heart of Darkness." HA!

All the same, it might be time for me to reread this, after all this years, and see whether it still puts me off. I will be interested to see what you think of it when you have finished the novel!