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indigenous populations would have lived the same way they always had: unmolested. However,
Shelley portrays science as the ultimate evil in the modern world, calling its originator the
“modern Prometheus”. Although this theme is common in romantic literature and could be
considered more of a hypotextual extension rather than an intertextual one, it leads to the
transtextuality of Conrad’s work, as it is the first theme to which he makes a substantial
alteration, offering the opportunity to speculate that this is an extension of Shelley’s argument
against science to a critique of all western development (Cairney 24). Instead of an opinion
against science specifically, Conrad delivers a harsh opinion of all Western imperialism and
expansion.

All these parallels add up to defend the argument that Joseph Conrad intended his novella
to be a transtextual continuation, or the “true” version, of Frankenstein (Cairney 24). Though his
adjustments are generally not explicit, he makes subtle improvements throughout, such as
condensing the Doctor and his monster into one character, almost eliminating the page space
given to an utterly passive woman, and removing almost all positive word usage. These changes
have little material effect on the narrative, but they narrow the focus, making Conrad’s ultimate
message too dominant to miss and showing that he was considering and critiquing Shelley’s
novel through his own. Despite Umberto Eco’s theory of endless semiosis, it appears clear that
Conrad subtly changed Frankenstein’s ultimate message against scientific and exploratory evil
and extended its meaning to much of Western culture, making Heart of Darkness a distinctly
readerly text. This feeds into Conrad’s potential critique of Russia’s expansion into Poland: He
took Shelley’s message of progressive evil and applied it to the Belgian Congo, which represents
Western imperialism as a whole (Cairney 37). To him, as a Nineteenth Century Pole, the greatest
evil of imperialism was Russia’s conquest of Poland. Conrad’s assumption is that Shelley meant