Willfull_Ignorance_of_Women

Willful Ignorance: For Women, By Men In his poem “Glory of Women,” Siegfried Sassoon lends narrative voice the solider men of England and their calculated hatred of the flippant attitude of women towards the war. It is through their falsely created sense of innocence and the failed recognition of the reality of war that the men find grounds for their scorn. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness a similar character is seen: like the women in Sassoon’s narrative, Kurtz’s Intended is willfully ignorant, choosing to disregard certain aspects of the violence of imperialism at will. While this feminine disregard is self-imposed, it is also important to look at the role that the masculine characters play in the maintenance of it. While all the male characters recognize the contradictory nature of women, it is only Sassoon’s men who choose to share this fact with the women themselves. For Marlow in Heart of Darkness, the ignorance of the Intended is facilitated by his ability to rationalize lying. In “Glory of Women,” the immediacy of the soldiers to the violence caused by war and imperialism allows them to refute the reign of jingoism caused by lying, originally perpetuated by Marlow, from within the Empire. The women in both narratives play the roles historically provided to them in a functioning, jingoistic society. For the women in Sassoon’s narrative, this means playing the picture of the loyal wife or lover of the men fighting on the fronts. The men narrating the poem make it immediately clear that this love is often choosy and limited, given only as “heroes, home on leave/Or when wounded in a mentionable place” (1-2). Here the women fail to understand the real implications of being a soldier: wounds become ‘mentionable,’ or socially trivial, those talked about but rarely seen. A wound of status eclipses the emotional wound. The women come to “believe/That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace” (3-4): it is clear that this is only a belief, a religious conviction. Chivalry becomes conceptualized and robbed of real meaning as a feminine excuse, not as a masculine reality. Like Sassoon’s women, Kurtz’s Intended makes an active choice in determining the extent of her understanding of the violence associated with imperialism and jingoism. When Marlow comes to see her after the death of Kurtz, she forces Marlow to revel in the memory of Kurtz. Asking him a series of questions, Marlow, “before the appealing fixity of her gaze…went on, ‘It was impossible not to—‘ “ ‘Love him,’ she finished eagerly” (69). It is like this that she asserts her ideas about Kurtz, choosing to remember him as a memory or image of the man he was before experiencing the heart of darkness. Like “Glory of Women,” she forces the man into the role of hero, thereby constructing her own falsified perception of imperialism’s greater affects on mankind. In the recognition of the ignorance of women to their own beliefs, it is also important to distinguish the role of the male narrative: without their personal reflection, it would be impossible to realize the complete hypocrisy of the female role in the Empire. It is, after all, only through Marlow’s internal observations that we come to understand that the duality of the Intended extents to her very appearance: “’she came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk” (68). This image of the disembodied head represents the social manifestation of imperialism: purism and innocence in a sea of darkness and savagism. She, herself, becomes just a face, an image of decapitation: the importance is placed on the lightness and purity of the face, as the blackness surrounding her is virtually ignored. This parallels the same focus of that in England, on the charity in Imperialism over the violence. For the men in “Glory of Women,” the recognition of the duplicity of woman comes only in the act of paralleling their actions besides images of the reality of war. The soldiers off-handedly tell the women “[y]ou make us shells” (4). While the act of making ammunition shells would have been recognizable to the women as a profession, to the men it represents the emotional ‘shell’ that is the imagined heroic soldier created by the women. They fail to recognize the greater role that their created shells are playing in the fight for Empire, both in a physical and mental regard. It is, after all, these ‘shells’ of men who are using the tangible shells as instruments of death and suffering. It is the women who are then fueling, however secondarily, the violence of war. What makes this moment of hypocrisy different from that in Heart of Darkness is the audience to which it is spoken to: unlike Marlow, whose internal dialogue relates to only him and the reader, the men in Sassoon’s narrative are focusing their critique directly at the women they are critiquing. In this regard, they do not spare any detail in shattering the feminine notion of heroic war, replacing them with images of war as “hell’s last horror” (10) and the running solider, “[t]rampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood” (11). These images of real men in a real war serve to point out the shallowness and irrelevancy of the images contrived by women in the first part of the poem. They do this seriously in content, though ironically in form, delivering their criticism in the form of a sonnet, traditionally used as a proclamation of love. This particular sonnet is an English sonnet that transitions into an Italian sonnet in the final sextet. While this sextet would normally signal a resolution to the poem, no real resolution is offered beyond the obvious shift in tone, focusing more on those real images of war. This form underscores the same ironic message seen in the content: what is seen is not, in any case, what is meant. Though the men of “Glory of Women” set about discouraging ignorance, Marlow does the opposite by facilitating the Intended’s conception of Kurtz as an honorable, heroic man. He never once contradicts her conception of Kurtz’s “greatness…of his noble heart” (70), offering only the ambiguous comfort that they “shall remember him” (70). In these silent lies, Marlow perpetuates the willful ignorance of women by failing to relay the truth of the memory of Kurtz—one of feral violence and darkness. While, before Africa, Marlow was once someone who “hate[d], detest[ed] and [couldn’t] bear a lie” (23), he now possesses the ability to rationalize sustaining it, explaining that men “must help them [women] stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest our gets worse” (44). With this statement, Marlow implies the knowledge that the ‘beautiful world’, England, has already begun to decline. In rationalizing the prevention of its decline, Marlow discovers that which fuels the willful ignorance and jingoism seen throughout the Empire: the vindicated lie. In this sea of jingoistic England, physically removed from the horrors of imperialism, Marlow can justify this lie as being “for the salvation of another soul” (68). Unlike Marlow, the soldiers of “Glory of Women” possess a much closer relationship to the violence happening under Empire: it was occurring straight across the channel, as opposed to isolated Africa. Similarly, Marlow’s exposure to violence was always in the role of observer; the soldiers’ fervor, on the other hand, came from the bloodshed experienced at their own hands. Historically, at the point of their narrative, England had declined to an all time low, with Empire on the way out. They had no ‘beautiful world’ to save from decline, failing to rationalize lying in the immediacy of the war and England’s looming downfall. Unlike Marlow’s individual isolation stemming from far-off Africa, these soldiers represent a chorus of voices announcing the rising displeasure with Empire from within its very heart: England. It is Sassoon’s soldiers that stop the perpetuation of jingoism that Marlow had once began.