Imperialism In Kingsolver's Heart Of Darkness

“The heart of darkness” is said only once in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Heart of Darkness, falling from the lips of Orleanna Price, the wife of Baptist missionary, Nathan Price. Contrary to most assumptions, her statement is not used to describe the Belgian Congo, but rather the state of her marriage, as they attempt to make her new home in the Congo the “heart of light” for Africa (184). In the novel, Kingsolver portrays the effects of patriarchal oppression within imperialism metaphorically through Nathan Price, the patriarch of an oppressed family.

In Kingsolver’s novel, Nathan Price is the only member of the Price family who does not narrate the novel. Before getting married, Nathan served in a war and was the only one out of his team

In the short story, the wife follows her husband timidly to a “haunted house” in which there are many confines. Gilman’s setting shows that the whole place around women is full on confinements and lines these females protagonists cannot cross. In The Poisonwood Bible, Orleana as well “wouldn't go against him” when her husband decides to move the whole family to Africa because of his own belief that he himself is selected to be the redeemer of the black men from their blackness. Timidly, like the female protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper, Orleana obeys her husband and has to follow him reluctantly to a confinement, the Congo. Throughout the novel, Orleana insists that she had been only “a captive witness” who is capable of showing the bitterness of voicelessness and subjugation (9). Gilman’s nineteenth- century woman eventually descends into madness because she could not rise the racing patriarchal confinement, just