EnglishOpenAccess 

 home

 

Comparison of 'The Turn of the Screw' and 'Heart of Darkness'

Grid
Summary of 'The Turn of the Screw'

Summary of 'Heart of Darkness'

Topic

similarities

  

differences

  

genre

 Both use pre-existing, 'popular' forms of story as a place to begin.  Both forms - the ghost story, the tale of adventure and exploration - had no great literary pretensions.  Both forms would be known by the original readers - who would have a fair idea what to expect.  Both 'Turn of the Screw' and 'Heart of Darkness' depend then on the actual text going beyond those expectations. Turn of the Screw:
  • uses the form of a ghost story
  • but then goes on to make problematic the reader's identification of who is 'good', what the nature of the threat may be.

Heart of Darkness:

  • uses the form of a 'tale' - of exploration (it comes at the end of a century of the opening up by European explorers of Africa, and the building of Empires by the European powers)
  

 

 

 

 

 

There are differences between the type of popular genres used - which will inform the effects of each of the stories:

  

 

 

 

 

 

Turn of the Screw:

  • a ghost story is usually just an entertainment (the story itself opens with a house party at Christmas amusing themselves by exchanging ghost stories) - that is, it does not usually have any intention beyond producing a momentary frisson of fear.  James perhaps intends to subvert the form by 'smuggling' in a more radical form of uncertainty - but this can happen behind the reader's back, as it were.

Heart of Darkness:

  • like a ghost story an adventure story might just intend to have an immediate and momentary effect, but the adventure stories Conrad is mimicking were 'true experiences' (indeed, some of the book is based on Conrad's own experience of captaining a boat up the Congo).  The form is thus more related to what is the case - ie, a factual account - and some of the writing in H of D will be like reportage; indeed, it will be an 'exposure' of the actual conditions in the Congo then - like a piece of campaigning, investigative journalism.
    (an example of Conrad's more 'journalistic' style
    in H of D.      Of course, elsewhere he uses an almost diametrically opposite style of abstract vagueness)

       

  • Hof D is also related to a more 'spiritual' form: the pilgrimage. (One of the most widely read book, by all classes, in the 19th century was A Pilgrim's Progress by the 17th century preacher John Bunyan).  A pilgrimage - in Bunyan's usage - is an allegorical tale in which there is a journey towards some resolution, some final answer.  (Pilgrim's Progress ends in the city of Heaven).  This informs H of D directly as an allegory - characters become representative types; as a pilgrimage towards an answer, H of D ironises the form: it is Kurtz who lies at the end of Marlow's journey.
  • So Conrad uses both a more concretely factual and a more abstractly 'spiritual' form than T of the S.
the use of framing narratives Both begin by presenting the audience of the 'real' story within the book - with both initial narrators unnamed.  In both, this perhaps heightens the reader's sense of the process of the reception, the understanding of the main narrative. Turn of the Screw:
  • the unnamed narrator has been one of a party listening to ghost stories on Christmas Eve when Douglas introduces 'his' story - that is, the document supposedly written by the governess.

Heart of Darkness:

  • the unnamed narrator is one of a party of businessmen cruising on the Thames on the yawl, called Nellie.
 In Heart of Darkness, the audience is present throughout - and do sometimes comment on the story - although as the story goes on and darkness falls, Marlow becomes increasingly just a voice from the darkness - disembodied.
In Turn of the Screw the 'real' text is written: Douglas gives it to the 'narrator' to read - at which point all the narration is in the governess's 'voice'.
This is important in T of the S in that part of its uncertainty is due to the fact that the reader has no way of going beyond what the governess sees.  The question of her narrative is how far that single point of view is dependable - but without the possibility of going outside that point of view, no proof either way can be had.
By contrast, Marlow's judgements, his authority, become more dependable, more underwritten by the book, as he goes on.
(The difficulty of his judgements then are not a matter of whether he can be trusted - but how difficult it is to accept, to live with, what he has glimpsed.)		  
the text's self description Both texts use the frame to allow a description of the nature and effect of the main story - a sort of 'priming' of the reader.
But both use this to set out the ambitions of the text - in its revision of what the reader expects.
Both authors want their texts to seem something unclassifiable.		 Heart of Darkness:

Turn of the Screw: