If we know one thing, that thing is conquest. In literature we expect our heroes to conquer their adversaries, in history we take a perverse pleasure in the success of the conquerors -- and even in love, the word 'conquest' cannot be escaped. The entire cornerstone of our society is the ability to take from another that which he would otherwise have kept for himself, by hook or by crook. So it is with the submission ethic ascribed to females in literature, history, and society for time immemorial, and so it is in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. Comparison and analysis in these works will unearth the thread common among themselves and, indeed, most literature: the vital and reciprocal relationship between conqueror and conquest in the affairs of mankind.

Within Heart of Darkness, the figure of Kurtz is the quintessential conqueror: he is a 'universal genius', a trait admired among all European men he meets, which amounts to his ability to completely dominate any field to which he sets his mind. He is a painter, a philosopher, and an imperialist. A friend of his -- after his death -- describes him as someone who, in politics, would have made a good extremist, regardless of his actual political beliefs. He bends to his will everyone and everything he encounters ere he finds the Congo; it is his failure to spread the dominance perfusing every fiber of his being into the wilds of Africa that drive him mad. His fiancee was a European woman: attractive, empty-headed, and prone to the delusions that allow conquest without great effort. Kurtz used her belief in him as a superman to turn her into another of his mindless followers, a willing conquest and an unquestioning devotee. Her frail eyes can see nothing in Kurtz but that superman; to see anything else would break his spell and rob him of his omnipotence. The power of the conqueror is absolute or ethereal -- and beyond his death Kurtz remains all-powerful over his fiancee.

His power is derived entirely from his own experience -- as the universal genius, a European superman and imperial master, he has had long practice conquering himself; his every labor is formed on the European practices of international war, competition, and intrigue. He is a shadow-boxer and has become the creative master is because he can defeat his own simulacrum without fail.

His African mistress is an illustration of the failure of the European superman, convinced of his utter dominion over all things of the earth, to conquer even the smallest thing without first recreating it in his own image. She is described in splendor and attire which are a pygmy's pantomime of European royalty; the whole of her former savage person -- the likes of which are seen throughout the novel through its Eden-child Africans -- is stripped away and replaced with Kurtz's vision of perfection. In the process, he is sucked into the savagery that repulses him and his kind throughout the work. To turn his woman into the European princess he can vanquish and enslave, he becomes the very thing of the unknown, invincible darkness he has been fleeing all along. 

The relationship between conqueror and conquest is no clearer than here: all that submits to Kurtz he may conquer, but that which cannot submit to him conquers him instead. She and he are the same, save that he wears the pristine suit of spiritual nobility which he sheds so soon as it constricts him. She who submits to him must, in so doing, deny her place as his essential equal, and deprive herself of any humanity. The African and European mistresses here are clearly metaphoric for respectively the empires of Africa and the home countries of Europe, respectively, but as we move ahead half a century into Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, we discover a more personal dominion and submission. The Price family lives half a century later than Kurtz and Marlow, but are even further and more hopelessly mired in the submission ethic by the additional factor of leadership. Where Kurtz inspired reverence, Nathan Price demanded it; where Kurtz seduced, Nathan Price ravished. In fifty years the only progress has been the conquerors losing the good grace to give up and die when they meet their match.

The most overpowering stylistic difference between the two books is that the earlier is written through the eyes of the conqueror; the latter is written through the eyes of the conquest. And so the spiritual death of Nathan Price does not end Kingsolver's work as that of Kurtz did Conrad's. The binary state of the conqueror -- victorious or defeated, with his shield or upon it -- lead Heart of Darkness to seem like nothing so much as a long series of snapshots; many elements which are vital to the conquest dynamic are completely overlooked. We do not see the processes but rather the results, and we must fill in the blanks Conrad leaves entirely for ourselves.

Such is by no means the case in Kingsolver's work; we do not watch a man struggling to conquer, but a man struggling to maintain dominion. The conquest began long before the action of the novel; Orleanna Price was wooed as a young woman by the eccentric, domineering Baptist preacher, and the novel joins her in middle and old age, before and after the dominance of Nathan Price has been broken. His daughters, women a product of his conquest and therefore subject to him from the beginning, inferior by default -- they do not, as Orleanna does, continue to treat him as the God he has made himself. They can see his mistakes, they are disillusioned by those mistakes, and they move from him gradually, as one would a comrade in arms who has fallen from the right cause. But for Orleanna, it is not a battle of spiritual force, but one of slave against master. For a long time, too long, the master wins out, but in one jarring moment, the binary is flipped and Nathan is thrown instantly from omnipotent to powerless. She escapes him forever -- and never remarries. Submission has scarred her forever; she has become the subhuman she had to become to submit to her personal equal, and the specter of the man on the woven-reed pulpit haunts her for the rest of her life. She blames herself for her daughter's death, and maintains a loner's life among fruitless flowers.

Her daughters are four; one of them meets her end in the Congo thanks to Nathan's hypnotic sway over Orleanna. The oldest daughter becomes an unnerving mixture of her mother's submission to authority and her father's exploitation: the expatriate imperialist. Another of the daughters is taught by her mother's mistakes to live her mother's life: alone, self-loathing, and silent. Only Leah, the healthier of Orleanna's twins, fully learns the error of personal submission and lives with the equality in which man and woman, black and white, Europe and Africa, are born, live, and die.

The chief woe of human history has been the sorrow of submitting to an equal, by coersion of force or will; the ultimate tale of these works is of the folly of that submission -- and the path that must be taken to redemption.