Heart of Darkness: Symbols

Symbols are shown in red text whenever they appear in the Plot Summary and Summary and Analysis sections of this LitChart.

Women

Marlow believes that women exist in a world of beautiful illusions that have nothing to do with truth or the real world. In this way, women come to symbolize civilization’s ability to hide its hypocrisy and darkness behind pretty ideas.

The Sepulchral City

The white sepulchral city symbolizes all of European civilization. The beautiful white outside evokes the lofty ideas and justifications that Europeans use to justify colonization, while the hidden hollow inside the sepulcher hides the hypocrisy and desire for power and wealth that truly motivate the colonial powers.

Dark and White

Darkness is everywhere in Heart of Darkness. But the novella tweaks the conventional idea of white as good and dark as evil. Evil and good don’t really apply to Heart of Darkness, because everyone in the novella is somehow complicit in the atrocities taking place in Africa. Rather, whiteness, especially in the form of the white fog that surrounds the steamship, symbolizes blindness. The dark is symbolized by the huge and inscrutable African jungle, and is associated with the unknowable and primitive heart of all men.