Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein

Abstract

The unnamed narrator of Conrad's Heart of Darkness offers a well-known cautionary metaphor for reading narratives -particularly frame narratives, fictions like Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and The Turn of the Screw (as well Heart of Darkness itself that contain a story within a story. The narrator tells us that for Marlow the meaning of a story was not like a but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only a glow brings out a haze..... Conrad does not define precisely what inside and outside are, which leaves considerable leeway for the reader. But he does extend the metaphor, restating it by figuring it in the formal structure of the text. He offers us Marlow's story not by itself, but embedded in another-enclosed in a frame that completes it and is completed by it, as a glow brings out a haze. By tracing the narrator's conversion in the frame from a complacent faith in the superiority of the West to Marlow's antiimperialism, Heart of Darkness makes meaning something that happens on the margins, along the edges of a narrative, much something that we discover within it. We cannot hope to extract a single kernel of meaning from Marlow's story, nor from those of Frankenstein, Nelly Dean, or James's governess, but must attend instead to the relations between the stories in the center and those in the frame, and listen to the dialogue between the voices that speak them. If we consider Marlow's story by itself, it directs us insistently back to the frame that completes it. First, its imagery repeats and complicates the metaphor of absent (or hazy and spectral) centers suggested by the frame narrator. The jungle in which Marlow's quest takes place, like the objects it contains (a bottomless bucket, the broken-down steamer that Marlow commands)., is riddled with holes, trenches randomly dug and abandoned in the name of progress. At the dramatic center of the story is Kurtz, himself an enigma, whom we come to know more by what is revealed about him in his absence than through anything he says or does when he

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