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to say that the West has no business sticking its fingers where they never belonged, but she
accidentally made her message too narrow.

According to Roland Barthes, ideas are “never original” (Chandler 199), and
intertextuality between Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein supports this opinion so strongly
that authorship of the later novel could almost be shared between Conrad and Shelley. At the
time Shelley wrote her book, her message was fresh and of great concern to her readers. By the
time Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness one hundred and fifty years later, his readers were
struggling with an advanced form of the same essential problems. Accordingly, he updated
Shelley’s message to fit a new, maybe darker, day. That being said, the ultimate message in
Conrad’s work is, as Cairney argues, not the same as Shelley’s, but an extension of it (46). By
making large parts of his book parallel to Frankenstein, Conrad adds to the original and advances
Shelley’s social critique, applying it to his homeland’s invaders. Though not as dramatic as the
Polish epic Pan Tadeusz, Heart of Darkness similarly laments the lost innocence of Conrad’s
country at the hands of the Russians (Cairney 37-8). Unfortunately, the great irony of Heart of
Darkness is that, rather than endangering imperialism or pushing Russia out of his homeland,
Conrad, like Kurtz and Frankenstein, became a part of what he despised, burying himself in the
heart of Western literature and becoming a spoke in the wheel he so ardently opposed.