SOURCE: Wilson, Donald S. “The Beast in the Congo: How Victorian Homophobia Inflects Marlow's Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 32, no. 2 (summer 2000): 96-118.

In the following essay, Wilson investigates elements of homophobia and homoeroticism in Heart of Darkness.

Writing in 1899 about the serial publication of Heart of Darkness in Blackwood's Magazine, Joseph Conrad claimed: “One was in decent company there … and had a good sort of public. There isn't a single club and messroom and man-of-war in the British Seas and Dominions which hasn't got its copy of Maga.”¹ Evidently Conrad had written his novel exclusively for a male readership.² However, there were actually two male audiences present for Marlow's tale: Conrad's literal, predominantly male readership, and Marlow's “crowd of men”³—entirely male (from stem to stern, so to speak)—who bear silent witness to the narrator-within-a-narrator's discourse. These four men—a lawyer, an...