'Heart of Darkness' and late-Victorian fascination with the primitive and the double - novel by Joseph Conrad

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1993 by Samir Elbarbary

Van Helsing and Dracula may also be considered a double, even if not so explicitly confirmed as Jekyll and Hyde. It matters that Van Helsing has an "iron jaw," "bushy eyebrows meeting" (126, 236), and a propensity for madness which recall Dracula's. Both men are old, alien, and threatening; they are related to vampirism--one by pursuing the mastery of vampire lore and influencing the endangered away from evil, and the other by deed--and Van Helsing, in a manner reminiscent of Dracula, tells Lucy, "No trifling with me! I never jest! There is grim purpose in all I do" (126). It is possible to regard Jonathan Harker as a shadow Dracula. Harker looks into the depths of his shaving glass at Castle Dracula expecting to glimpse the count's face reflected in it, "but, there was no sign of a man in it, except myself" (24). The woman whose child was stolen has, in her tragic position, a tacit assumption that Harker is the culprit, never suspecting the count, who is disguised in Jonathan's garb: "Monster, give me my child" (44). In Quincey Morris, too, we find a displaced Dracula. The reader's attention is drawn to him in the scene in which he occupies Dracula's physical position outside the window, and with his gun at hand strikes terror in Van Helsing and all the men, who "jumped to their feet" (232). Marlow remarks that duality has its collective--not merely personal--aspect: "The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future" (37)--which fits a Jungian perspective. This meaning is recognizable in Van Helsing's words, "All men are mad in some way or the other" (115). Prendick, speaking of the "metamorphosed brutes" (120) on Dr. Moreau's island, notes:

I would see one of the clumsy bovine creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-Bear Woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city by-way. (121)

When he returns to London he remarks of Londoners, "I feel as though the animal was surging up through them. . . . I shrink from them . . . they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be" (190-91). Jekyll learns "to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man" (82); and suggests that "the terms of this debate |the Jekyll-Hyde duality~ are as old and commonplace as man" (89). Such statements perhaps recall, if only distantly, Walter Pater's remark that "the mind of the race, the character of the age, sway him |man~ this way or that," and Coleridge's "the infinite I AM" (Appreciations 67, Biographia 1: 202).

The discourse of primitivism is at the core of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jekyll admits that the pleasures he "made haste to seek were . . . undignified. . . . But in the hands of Edward Hyde they soon began to turn towards the monstrous" (86). Jekyll attributes the brutality of Hyde to a vehement attachment of self: "His every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone" (86). Kurtz's "soul |is~ satiated with primitive emotions" (69), his primitive dehumanizing egotism--reversing his altruism--fills the self and causes otherness to be obliterated. He relates everything to his inflated self: "'My intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my--' everything belonged to him" (49). "My intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments" (69). Kurtz's is a discourse of unrestrained will; we are told that "He had kicked himself loose of the earth" (67), and the Russian tells Marlow of his rapacious greed: "Evidently the appetite for more ivory had got the better of the--what shall I say?--less material aspirations" (57-58). Typical of a thunderers's is Kurtz's belligerent demand for ivory (56), and he succumbs to homicidal mania: "those heads drying on the stakes" which were "only a savage sight" (59) and "showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts" (58).