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This book is about Freud and the heart of darkness. Brickman takes her title from Freud's essay, “The Unconscious” (1915): “The content of the Ucs. may be compared to an aboriginal population in the mind” (p. 195). Six years before he wrote that, a fellow middle European wrote, “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest [in the estuary of the Thames]. … ‘and this also,' said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth'” (pp. 45, 48). Then, in narrating Heart of Darkness, Conrad (1902) goes on to tell a very dark story indeed. The idea that in Roman times the Thames was as dark as the Congo seems to imply that the darkness is due to the primitivity of the inhabitants, but in Marlow's account it is the Romans on the Thames and the Belgians on the Congo who are the real savages. A thin veneer of altruism, the supposed mission to enlighten the aborigines, was the excuse for looting, exploitation, and mass murder on a grand scale.
Hochschild (1998) has shown that though the book has been regarded as a fictional metaphor for all kinds of darkness of the heart, Conrad intended it as an exposé of genocide and that “whatever rich levels of meaning the book has as literature … [it is] a precise and detailed description of the actual facts of the case” (p. 143). There were real versions of Kurtz with real collections of severed heads decorating their gardens. Why was Kurtz such a savage? Did he go native and become like the primitive Africans around him? Conrad's descriptions of the Africans are not complimentary, and though he certainly was appalled by Belgian colonialism he remained devoted to the British version.
In her study, Brickman shows the origins of the notion of the primitive in the colonial exploits of the various models for Kurtz, in their reports to the people back home in Europe, and in the theorizing of the