Truth and Other Phantoms

The 1997 edition of the Nelson Canadian Dictionary defines irony as an "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs." For example, a paper attempting to explain in an explicit manner the inevitable ambiguity of words, as perceived by modern writers, could be qualified as ironic.

Unlike this essay, which tries to extract a clear and objective meaning from a particular experience, modern novelists favour a subjective recreation of existence in all its inordinate and confusing complexity. Because words are merely symbols for what they designate and because they can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on one's experience and imagination, modern writers view objective truth as unattainable and impossible to directly convey. Truth is elusive. It is like a spirit that haunts the text itself and remains intangible.

This precise metaphor is used in both Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper. In Conrad's novel, Marlow is haunted by Kurtz, the man he seeks. In Gilman's book, the narrator is troubled by a presence inside her bedroom's wallpaper. In both texts, the "ghosts" reflect a hidden truth about the protagonists: Kurtz embodies the greedy and abusive nature of European colonialism, and the ghostly presence in The Yellow Wall-Paper is its narrator's repression given form.

This essay first examines how the hauntings take place in each story and what they represent in their specific contexts. It then explains in what ways they reflect modern writers' view of truth in the literary arts.

Though Marlow is only introduced to him in the third and final section of the novel, Kurtz remains an important presence throughout Heart of Darkness. The narrator's eagerness constantly leads the readers to believe they're about to meet him: "I was then rather excited at the prospect of meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean it comparatively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station." Marlow is obsessed with the notion of Kurtz. Meeting him becomes his only ambition: "I had traveled all this way for the sole purpose of talking with Mr. Kurtz."

At this point, Kurtz is not a person to Marlow but rather an elusive presence. He is intangible: "I didn't say to myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The man presented himself as a voice." This doesn't change once Marlow meets Kurtz. He still refers to him as a shade and as a wraith: "I am trying to account to myself [...] the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether."

Kurtz is the living embodiment of Europe: "his mother was half-English, his father was half-French" and his name is a German word. He comes to Africa "equipped with moral ideas of some sort", but once there, he lacks "restraint in the gratification of his various lusts". He is blatantly greedy: "You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my...' everything belonged to him." Kurtz symbolizes the true nature of European colonialism in all its depravity.

The same way Marlow fixates on Kurtz, the narrator of The Yellow Wall-Paper obsesses over her bedroom's wallpaper. At first, she is simply put off by its unattractiveness: "I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin." However, her harmless disgust quickly morphs into disturbing feelings of anger and paranoia: "There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness."

The wallpaper is personified. It is given malevolent intent: "This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!" The narrator cannot escape its aggression: "I find it [the wallpaper's smell] hovering in the dining room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me in the stairs [...] Even when I got to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell!" At night, the wallpaper's outside pattern "becomes bars", and she sees in it a woman shaking "the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out". The spirit that haunts her is actually her own.

The narrator herself is trapped. Her husband does not allow her house out of the house: "I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn't able to go." Also, he forbids her any meaningful activity. The narrator is not allowed to write. She is forced to do so clandestinely: "There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word." However, John is not the only character against her writing: "She [John's sister] is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!" Like the woman inside the wallpaper, the narrator is a prisoner. The patterns that hold her are those of a male dominated society.

In both Heart of Darkness and The Yellow Wall-Paper, the hauntings are manifestations of a hidden truth about the protagonists. These truths, for which the characters search long and hard, are elusive: Marlow journeys several months before finding Kurts, and John's wife relentlessly studies the wallpaper's "tiresome and perplexing" patterns before uncovering the subdued woman. According to modern writers, this elusiveness or intangibility characterizes truth in general. The latter is impossible to express through mere words:

"He [Kurtz] was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? [...] it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It's impossible. We live, as we dream—alone."

A word only symbolizes a concept; it is not the concept itself. For example, the word "wallpaper" is not wallpaper in itself. When reading The Yellow Wall-Paper, each reader has probably seen different wallpaper in his or her mind's eye. In this fashion, we are forever alone: no one can possibly share our existential perspective. Because of this, modern writers tend to depict experiences in an abstract manner, using symbolism to convey their ideas.

Nowhere in Gilman's story is the yellow wallpaper clearly described. Readers are told that the "outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus [...] an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions". This is all very ambiguous. However, every reader has likely imagined something unpleasant and upsetting because fungus and toadstools are generally associated with death and decay. Gilman uses the wallpaper as a symbol to communicate women's plight, a truth that oppression has made obscure, much like the colonial depravity Conrad expresses through the shadowy Kurtz.

Focusing on abstract concepts and symbols instead of clear depictions of the concrete, modern writers perceive truth as intangible, like a phantom that haunts our consciousness but never fully penetrates it. The same analogy is projected in Heart of Darkness and The Yellow Wall-Paper: in Conrad's novel, Marlow is haunted by the notion of Kurtz, a man who stands as a symbol for the true cruelty of European colonialism; in Gilman's tale, the spectre inside the wallpaper represents the narrator's true state, the repression she suffers as a woman. In both books, the truth manifested is an ugly, shameful one that had been denied by Western society. It is then ironic that Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, modern novelists, would be among the first to expose these truths, all the while advocating the elusiveness of truth itself.

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