Page 114 - Knighted_Issue2.0
P. 114
into his novella is the only European female, Kurtz’s fiancé (Cairney 34). She is the victim of a
misogynistic, hegemonic ideology and is weak in personality, just like Shelley’s primary woman,
Elizabeth. By the end of the story, Kurtz’s fiancé is the helpless recipient of whatever evils the
males in her life choose to leave to her, just like Elizabeth. Although she technically plays a
smaller part in Heart of Darkness than Shelley’s original, the fiancé could hardly be more
passive than Elizabeth. This difference, noted by Cairney, again shows Conrad making minute
adjustments rather than truly changing Shelley’s original novel (39).
Another important similarity between the texts is the repetition of certain words. Because
Frankenstein is significantly 163 pages longer than Heart of Darkness, there are simply more
words in Shelley’s story than in Conrad’s, meaning that Shelley repeats some words more times
because her book is longer. Taking this into consideration in a logocentric assessment, there is
still a remarkable similarity in the number of times certain words are either repeated or
neglected, as noted in Cairney’s lecture on the subject. For instance, Shelley repeats the word
“dead” twenty-nine times and is almost matched by Conrad at twenty-seven; however, Conrad
beats her out with “black”, as it appears in Frankenstein twenty times and in Heart of Darkness
forty-five times. Shelley repeats the word “dark” or “darkness” forty-seven times, and Conrad
outdoes her again with an incredible fifty-seven times. Positive words occur more proportionally,
as “light” or “delight” appear in the first story one hundred and thirty-three times and a
comparable seventy-one times in the latter, while “forgive” appears four times in Frankenstein
and only once in all of Heart of Darkness. These are just a handful of prominent words that show
a similar spirit in both texts, but Conrad again tweaks Shelley’s story, picking specific words to
make his a darker, more condensed version of her already bleak outlook for mankind.
