Common Themes & Different Perspectives Between Heart of Darkness & Poisonwood Bible
Although both Heart of Darkness and Poisonwood Bible take place in different time periods and with very different characters, both novels have common themes derived from different perspectives throughout each book.
Poisonwood Bible, written by Barbara Kingsolver, is the story of a desperate missionary who drags his family from their comfortable life in Georgia to the Congo. The story is told from the perspective of each female member of the Price family and the struggles that changed in their different “home” settings. Aside from struggling to have members of the Kilanga village to accept the Christian pathway, the Price family struggle to survive from day to day. Poisonwood Bible also shows the struggles of a patriarchal society and the growing tension of politics in 1960’s Congo.
Heart of Darkness, written by Francis Conrad, is the story of Marlow, a sailor from England who is sent to Congo by the Belgian Company in order to retrieve a man named Kurtz who has skipped out on his employment with the Belgian Company. Marlow goes through many hardships in order to reach Kurtz; from fighting with cannibals to his boat being completely unusable for months.
Poisonwood Bible is told by the perspective of each Price women in the 1960’s while Heart of Darkness is told by a male sailor in the late 1800’s. However, they both share common themes that relate each novel. One of common theme is the idea of apocalyptic changes in the psyche or lifestyle; both protagonists struggle with encountering a new place with differing ideas. In Poisonwood Bible, Orleanna, who is the mother of the Price family says,
“ Maybe I’ll even confess the truth, that I rode in with the horsemen and beheld the apocalypse, but still I’ll insist I was only a captive witness. What is the conqueror’s wife if not a conquest herself?”.
After the death of her youngest daughter, Orleanna starts to change how she views her life and the people in it. She decides to leave Congo with one of her other daughters and completely start over in Georgia. Orleanna lost almost everything and started over. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow changes his views on the world after going on a trip on the Congo River. Marlow says,
“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?”
Marlow is trying to understand the natives of Congo but is trapped behind how indifferently human they are compared to him. Before his trip, Marlow had a narrow-minded way of thinking about the world, but during this trip, he saw other humans that were completely different than him, and his naive sense of mind was destroyed.
The different perpectives from women and from men of different time periods lead to different story plots but still have common themes.