Even those who set out to look for patterns in Heart of Darkness-whether they comment on the monochromatic description of “trade goods” such as “ghastly glazed calico” and confounded cotton handkerchiefs” or point out, in their study of animal imagery, that the “ominous ladies knitting in the waiting-room have a cat” (Mandel 308, 312)-overlook the obvious that is already beginning to unfold here before our eyes. And yet, scholars laboring in the confines of such discussions have proven oblivious to a certain set of images that runs through the narrative like a red thread. Since its first publication in 1899, Joseph Conrad’s conspicuously symbolic novel Heart of Darkness appears to have been under such close scrutiny that any attempt to provide further reflections on darkness and light, penetrating ventures into fog, or excavations of hidden truths entombed in “a whited sepulchre” must seem shopworn and threadbare. “A Sinister Back-Cloth”: The Fabrics of Heart of Darkness
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