Kurtz realices that all he has been nurtured to believe in, to operate from, is a sham hence, a horror. When Kurtz says "The horror! The horror!" rhetoric and reality come together Europe and Africa, the Intended and the African, collide. While Kurtz is male, white, bald, oral, unrestrained, the native woman is female, black, stunningly coiffured, emotive, and restrained. The Native Woman is Africa, all interior, in spite of her lavish mode of dress. She, like Europe, is primarily exterior, for the simple black garment hides nothing. The Intended (nameless, intended for someone else, not herself) is totally protected (helpless), rhetorically programmed (words without matter), nun-like in her adoration (sexually repressed), living in black, in a place of darkness, in a pre-Eliot City of the Dead, in the wasteland of modern Europe. The difference between Europe and Africa is the difference between two secondary symbols: the European woman who has helped to puff up Kurtz's pride and the African woman who has helped to deflate him. His love turns to rape when he discovers how unfitted he is to master the magnificent vitality of a natural world. Kurtz, a European "Knight", sets out on a crusade to win the hearts and minds of a lesser people, ignorant of the degree to which Africa is dangerous, wild, timeless, feminine, unfettered by letters, religious, and vibrant. All of Europe, we are told, contributed to the making of Kurtz-Europe: safe, civilized, scheduled, masculine, literate, Christian, and dead.
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