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wretched evils Europeans have committed, and Marlow appears extremely upset about the
situation in the Congo, calling it “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grate scale”
(69), but he still goes to the Congo and completes his task of finding and retrieving the accursed
Kurtz. Though both Dr. Frankenstein and Marlow claim to abhor the results of their immediate
and symbolic actions, they are both still a part of the system they so loudly despise.

The wrongdoings of these important male characters lead to the victimization of each
story’s female entities. This is clear in the sense that both Elizabeth and Kurtz’ fiancé are the
ultimate victims of their men’s mistakes—Elizabeth is eventually strangled, and Kurtz’ fiancé is
misled and broken-hearted for the rest of her life. Although Elizabeth has more page time than
her “doppelganger,” they are both poignant characters deceived and destroyed by their male
counterparts, which further pushes the message that science destroys the innocent (Cairney 34).
Furthermore, beyond strictly human victims, both Frankenstein and Kurtz victimize entire
countries—traditionally considered female—through their scientific zeal. In Frankenstein this is
mostly Switzerland, as the Monster terrorizes the countryside with his shadowy bulk (112). This
theme is more explicit in Heart of Darkness, where Kurtz and his white counterparts stop at
nothing until they have bled the land of all the ivory in its veins and Kurtz himself, a
representative of expansionists, has “kicked the very earth to pieces” (166).

The constant abuse of female entities makes even more sense within the ultimate message
of both texts, which is the argument that progress is humanity’s ultimate enemy. The
stereotypically male ideal of progress—scientific, political, and cultural—is the ultimate
destroyer in both books. Had this evil never struck the hearts of the Doctor, Kurtz, and the
Western culture they symbolize, London would have never become “one of the dark places of
the earth” (Conrad 66), women would have never been murdered and destitute, and nature and