Conrad’s Sensational Heroines: Gender and Representation in the Late Fiction of Joseph Conrad

174 Pages·2017·1.96 MB·English

by  Ellen Burton Harrington (auth.)

Conrad’s Sensational Heroines
Ellen Burton Harrington
Conrad’s Sensational
Heroines
Gender and Representation in the Late Fiction
of Joseph Conrad
Ellen Burton Harrington
Department of English
University of South Alabama
Mobile, AL, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-63296-4 ISBN 978-3-319-63297-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63297-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948261
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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A
cknowledgements
I am grateful to those generous colleagues and dear friends at the
University of South Alabama who read drafts and talked through possi-
bilities—John Halbrooks, Susan McCready, Chris Raczkowski, and Steve
Trout. The support of the English Department and the College of Arts
and Sciences enabled me to travel to present papers and confer with col-
leagues, and the university’s Arts and Humanities grant program funded
the indexing of the book. I appreciate the enthusiastic research assistance
of Frank Ard several years ago when he was a graduate student and I was
just beginning this project, as well as the tireless work of Debbie Cobb
and the staff at the Marx Library to secure distant volumes to augment
our local collection. I am fortunate to have many other colleagues at the
university who have offered their encouragement and advice over the
years, including Kristina Busse, Richard Hillyer, Cris Hollingsworth, and
Justin St. Clair.
My sincere thanks to my mentor at Tulane, Geoffrey Galt Harpham,
for introducing me to Conrad when he was working on One of Us all
those years ago. The Conrad community has been a warm and welcom-
ing one, and I very much appreciate the interest and support of my fel-
low scholars since my student days. Debra Romanick Baldwin and Jack
Peters have shared their work with me and encouraged my work in
Conrad studies over the years. Thanks to Joyce Wexler for sharing the
unpublished manuscript of her essay on The Rescue with me as I drafted
the sixth chapter.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Allie Bochicchio and Emily Janakiram, as well as Ryan Jenkins, at
Palgrave have been particularly helpful, and the anonymous reviewer
provided thoughtful constructive advice that helped refine the project.
Earlier versions of two chapters were published in Conradiana
and The Conradian: “‘Dead men have no children’ in Conrad’s ‘The
Idiots’ and ‘Amy Foster.’’’ Conradiana: 43 (2–3) in 2011 and “Suicide,
Feminism, and ‘the miserable dependence of girls’ in ‘The Idiots,’ The
Secret Agent, and Chance.” The Conradian 37 (2) in 2012. I am grateful
to be able to incorporate them here.
My heartfelt thanks go to my parents and my sister for their encour-
agement; to my children, Patrick and Anna, for their joy in the idea of
this book and the distractions they frequently provided from it; and to
Dan for his unfailing goodwill, support, and care.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Conrad’s Sensational Women 1
2 The Passionate Mother and the Contest for Authority:
“The Idiots” and “Amy Foster” 17
3 Pornography and Representations of Women: The Secret
Agent and Victory 31
4 The Victorian Woman Suicide: “The Idiots,” The Secret
Agent, and Chance 59
5 The Fallen Woman and Sexuality as “Their Own Weapon”:
Victory, “Because of the Dollars,” and The Arrow of Gold 77
6 The Adulteress and the Confines of Marriage: “The
Return” and The Rescue 107
7 The Embowered Woman as Enchanting Commodity: “A
Smile of Fortune” and The Rover 133
8 Conclusion: A Woman Alone 155
Index 163
vii
A
bbreviAtions
The following abbreviations have been used for Conrad’s published
works. Unless indicated otherwise, quotations are from the widely avail-
able Doubleday, Page, and Company editions published in the early
1920s (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1920–1925).
AG The Arrow of Gold
C Chance
HD Heart of Darkness
Res The Rescue
Rov The Rover
SA The Secret Agent
SL The Shadow-Line
TLS Twixt Land and Sea
TU Tales of Unrest
TOS Typhoon and Other Stories
V Victory
WT Within the Tides
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Conrad’s Sensational Women
For the reader unfamiliar with the range of Joseph Conrad’s work, the
author’s late fiction makes a surprising turn: the familiar writer of sea sto-
ries centered on men moves to consider repeatedly the plight of women
and the challenges of renegotiating gender roles in the context of the
early twentieth century. Conrad’s rich and conflicted consideration of
subjectivity and alienation extends to some of his women characters,
and his complex use of genre allows him both to prompt and to sub-
vert readers’ expectations of popular forms, which typically offer recog-
nizable formulas for gender roles. “But Conrad’s best works are never
well-wrought,” Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan comments in The Strange Short
Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1999): “It is, in fact, their very defiance of the
aesthetics of closure, solidity of structure and generic containment—their
‘strangeness’, as it were—which makes them so powerful and compel-
ling” (2). This sort of “defiance” on the level of form, a refusal of the
aesthetics of nineteenth-century literature and of its generic expectations
particularly illuminates Conrad’s late work, even when it is not consid-
ered his “best” work.
Conrad’s fiction draws on multiple genres, including popular fiction,
anthropology, and Darwinian science, to respond to Victorian repre-
sentations of gender in layered and contradictory representations of his
own. He uses this generic hybridity to treat gender and femininity in
complicated and sometimes conflicting ways. This study seeks to demon-
strate how Conrad uses Victorian gender tropes to expose the ways that
characters’ attitudes about gender and sexuality are shaped by pervasive
© The Author(s) 2017 1
E.B. Harrington, Conrad’s Sensational Heroines,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63297-1_1
2 E.B. HARRINGTON
familiar representations, representations that his fiction both takes part
in and appraises. By self-consciously alluding to formulaic figures and
taxonomies and by portraying representation as a cultural as well as an
authorial act, Conrad’s late fiction highlights the textual consequences of
his aesthetic choices and facilitates a nuanced and contradictory critique
of Victorian and fin-de-siècle assumptions about women and femininity.
Though this study does not address Conrad’s political views, Conrad’s
poetics has political implications as he considers the negative effects of
these generic representations, critiquing circumscribed Victorian gender
roles framed primarily through the European women characters that are
central to a critique of patriarchy as it is practiced in Britain and in the
West more generally. His uncompromising and often ironic treatment of
representations of women demonstrates their artificiality and the absurd-
ity of the gender hierarchies that underlay such generic figures and tax-
onomies. Conrad’s late fiction displays a willingness to experiment with
genre, to inhabit familiar forms and recall sensational figures only to dis-
rupt the preconceptions about gender and genre that his own represen-
tations evoke.
It hardly seems controversial to argue that a writer celebrated for
his complex treatment of male subjectivity might devote some part of
his oeuvre to considering the status of women and the subtleties of
men’s perceptions and preconceptions about women, yet this perspec-
tive requires a shift in the way critics view Conrad in terms of his autho-
rial positioning and his place in modernism. While Conrad addresses
gender and subjectivity throughout his work, his later fiction markedly
emphasizes women’s situations and experiences and men’s perspectives
on women. Resonant female characters—Susan Bacadou, Winnie Verloc,
Flora de Barral, Lena, Alice Jacobus, Rita de Lastaola, and Arlette,
among others—are central to Conrad’s later works. In these portrayals,
he demonstrates a humane sensitivity to his characters’ struggles for self-
determination in situations that limit their autonomy. Conrad alludes
to popular renderings of women’s roles in part to consider and critique
the expectations of women they create, particularly the issue of women’s
sexuality, without advocating or envisioning women’s liberation within
these conventional frames.
In crafting these characters, Conrad responds to a range of representa-
tions of women culled from contemporary literature and culture, includ-
ing the Victorian sensation novel, criminal anthropology, Darwinian
science, sentimental fiction, and romance. By evoking pornography and