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Student 3
Class 4
In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, three women are dressed in black who represent
the three fates. Marlow meets the fates on his two trips to Brussels. Each time Marlow
meets the fates his life is influenced or changed. When Marlow returns to Brussels the
second time, he meets the Intended, the third fate. His meeting with her, though brief,
completes the * ideas sparked by the first two fates. Marlow also realizes that the
Intended is the one most responsible for Kurtz’s death, because she is the one who sent
him out to the heart of darkness. The Intended sent Kurtz to Africa because she wanted
wealth, and she wanted Kurtz to get it for her. She sent him with selfish intentions and
she opened the door to darkness in his heart.
“Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting
black wool” (13). The two women knitting are the first two fates; they sit in front of the
door to the doctor’s office, knitting cloth. When Marlow walks into the room the slim one
gets up and walks to him, without looking up from her knitting, she stops right before
him and then just looks at him, or perhaps, it seems, through him. She then turns and
leads him into the waiting room (13). She and her companion are Clotho and Lachesis;
they spin the threads of life and determine how long each person’s is. The slim one walks
up to each person who enters the room and introduces them (14). She never seems to ask
people what their name is, she just introduces them continuously it is disconcerting to
Marlow how she always seems to know everyone who enters and how she always must
introduce people.
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The fat one is Lachesis; she determines what will happen to people and how long
their life will be. Whenever the slim one introduces a person Lachesis quickly glances up
at each person. Marlow says, “the swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled
me” (14). To him it is as if the woman does not look at him as much as she looks through
him. Marlow also says the looks were those of “unconcerned wisdom” (14), meaning that
it seems the woman knows everything about each person who enters the room, even
without the person having said anything, just as a fate would. Marlow feels that the
women seems “uncanny and fateful” to him it seems that she knows who each person she
meets is and what will happen to them.
His meeting with Lachesis and Clotho is brief, but it does influence him. He says
hthat the two women sit guarding the “door to darkness” (15). The door to darkness is
literally the door into the doctor’s office, but the doctor’s office is the start of everything,
it is the launching point of all the adventures which lead Marlow through the darkest
places of the world and the human heart. Before Marlow leaves the two women he thinks
“morituri te salutant” (15), which means, we who are about to die salute you. This shows
that after he meets the fates his outlook on the upcoming adventure is not as bright, the
two fates unsettle him, and they make him have doubts about what is to come.
When Marlow returns to Brussels after Kurtz has died he meets the third fate, the
Intended, Atropos. Atropos is the fate who cuts the threads of life. The Intended is the
one most responsible for Kurtz’s death. When Marlow meets the Intended he seems to
see her and Kurtz together, as she says she has survived he seems to hear Kurtz
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whispering ‘the horror, the horror’ (112). In this way Conrad links the Intended with the
horror, she is a part of the horror, and she is why Kurtz is dead. Throughout her
conversation with Marlow the Intended claims that she loved Kurtz, and yet when Kurtz
asked her to marry him she sent him to Africa to earn wealth for her. She was selfish, so
she sent him out to the heart of darkness and she expected him to come back wealthy and
just as he left. She claims to have known him best of anyone (113) yet she knows nothing
of what he did in Africa, she still thinks he was a great man who did good things.
However, he did not do good things, Kurtz did some of the worst things in Africa, and it
was all because of the Intended. When she sent him to Africa she opened the door to
darkness, she sent him to die.
Marlow’s meeting with the Intended changes him, the one thing he cannot stand is
lying, and yet, at the end of his visit he says what he believes to be a lie. The Intended’s
house unsettles him, it makes him think of a place of death, a tomb (112), by the time he
is near the end of his conversation with the Intended he is just ready to get out of the
house. So, to spare her from the truth of Kurtz’s last words he tells her what he believes
to be a lie. That is such an out of character thing for him, such an inexcusable thing, that
he expects something drastic to happen; he even says that he expected the sky to fall on
him (117).
The fates all change Marlow, they all make him look deeper into the darkness of
human nature and civilization, and they all help him see the dark truths and white lies that
are the basis of what must be believed to survive. The meetings with the fates make
Marlow realize how selfish and blinded civilization is, h willing it is to look away from
truth and believe what is easiest, to believe what makes the world seem good. The fates
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also make Marlow see the finality and the dark truth of Kurtz’s last words: “the horror,
the horror” (105).