Gothic Novel

      Joseph Conrad’s work Heart of Darkness can be considered a gothic novel solely based on how the setting is narrated. Much like other Gothic novels, Heart of Darkness places a significant emphasis on nature and landscape, usually unfamiliar to the protagonist. In the opening pages of the text, Conrad already begins to lay a dark foundation as he describes the environment with eerie diction “A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth” (Conrad 2). With descriptive phrases like dark air and mournful gloom, Conrad sets up how the greatest town on earth, in this case London, is not as great as we want to think. In order to not be considered Gothic Literature, Conrad would have instead needed to write about how incredible the town is rather than using such menacing terms. Conrad’s description of Africa follows a similar path as he explains the grotesque images of nature “All along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair” (Conrad 31). By using such cacophonous words and images that seem to suck the life out of characters in the novel, Heart of Darkness clearly falls in the Gothic category.

Works cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. n.p. n.d. Web.