Gender in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness colludes with Western patriarchal gender prescriptions. Women are ominously absent from most of the narrative, and when they appear they are identified through the powerful narrative point of view of the character Marlow, who constructs them in terms of the values ​​of the dominant ideologies of the British gentleman. The contrast between Kurtz's intention and his lover reveals to the contemporary reader this undeniable Victorian provenance: women are effectively marginalized by power and silenced by the text's endorsement of British values. “Women,” Marlow declares, “are out of it.” Indeed, the five women of Heart of Darkness make only brief appearances and are only mentioned in passing in Marlow's tale. His aunt, who is given a cameo role in the text, is extremely naive and "out of touch with the truth"; she reminds him to "put on his flannel" when he is about to "depart for the center of the earth." The black wool knitters at the Company's headquarters are defined by classical mythology, taking on a symbolic meaning as they "guard the door of Darkness"; they are not characters in their own right. Kurtz's lover is identified as a product of the wild, "like the wild itself", and is described in terms of natural processes, a "fruitful and mysterious life". Kurtz's Intended, by contrast, lives in a place of death rather than life, of darkness rather than light, of illusion rather than reality. A feminist reading identifies that women are silenced and presented as cultural archetypes in Heart of Darkness. The juxtaposition of Intention with Kurtz's lover highlights the traits of the culturally constructed Victorian woman. He has built for himself a dark tomb, where everything personifies the barren and lifeless existence of his species. The Victorian woman was expected to adhere to high standards of behavioral decency and adhere to Puritan ideals of sexual and emotional restraint. Kurtz's lover brings these characteristics into focus because she is vibrant, vital and lives out her sexual impulses. The sexual language used to describe the lover highlights the fact that she is a social "other" and foregrounds the dichotomy between European and African women. Although the Expected embodies the characteristics of a Victorian woman, her behavior is also enormously hypocritical. She stays alive only by deceiving herself; his condition, as CB Cox suggests, "symbolizes that of Western Europe".