re things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it has been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. (77)The wilderness is figuratively embodied in the form of the native woman, and simultaneously personified as a particular type of femininity. The woman becomes a figure for the fearful consuming embrace of the wilderness and darkness which Marlow identifies as having been the cause of Kurtz's collapse, and from which he is protected only by his restraint:Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. (78)The woman spoken of in the above quotation is seen as being Kurtz's mistress throughout the novella. Marlow realizes the sexualized nature of Kurtz's fall through the feminization of the wilderness. This aspect is emphasized when the Russian harlequin tells Marlow that the woman is a confidante of Kurtz himself-she was his mistress, his queen.The suggestion that Kurtz's relation to the native woman is a sexual one is ...
