Abstract
Joseph Conrad’s late fiction makes a surprising turn to focus on 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. Conrad draws on multiple genres, including popular fiction, anthropology, and Darwinian science, to respond to Victorian representations of gender in layered and contradictory representations of his own. Conrad persuasively uses Victorian gender tropes to expose the ways that characters’ attitudes about gender and sexuality are shaped by pervasive familiar representations, representations that his fiction both takes part in and appraises.
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Notes
- 1.
Moser’s view is challenged by a range of critics, including ones pertinent to this study like Ruth Nadelhaft in her feminist monograph Joseph Conrad (1991), Robert Hampson in Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992), and recently Katherine Isobel Baxter’s Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance (2010). Indeed, recent scholarship focused on Conrad’s late work must always contend to some extent with this presumption of decline.
- 2.
Jones (1999) establishes that Conrad’s appreciation for these earlier popular women writers continued despite his “disparaging” view of the contemporary women writers Sarah Grand, Margaret Louisa Woods, and Marie Corelli (193).
- 3.
See Kathleen Montweiler’s essay in Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (2000) for a discussion of the conflation between greed and sexuality in Lady Audley’s Secret.
- 4.
According to Hunter, Conrad could have become familiar with Lombroso’s most influential work Criminal Man in its 1895 French translation, in partial translations, or in Havelock Ellis’s influential book The Criminal (1890), since it was not fully translated from Italian into English until 1911 (Hunter 1983, 196–197). Lombroso’s The Female Offender was translated into English in 1895 and thus would have been available to English-language readers (Rafter and Gibson 2004, 33).
- 5.
Nicole Hahn Rafter and Nicole Gibson (2004) argue that The Female Offender “constitutes perhaps the most extended proof of women’s inferiority ever attempted” (32), and they note the intriguingly contradictory nature of Lombroso’s argument that women are less evolved than men despite the fact that his female subjects show fewer of the kind of anatomical abnormalities that he believes are significant to crime and that women are much less likely to commit crimes (Lombroso and Ferraro 1915, 110–112).
- 6.
This term is used by Lombroso and Ferraro in The Female Offender (1915) (255), as well as by Conrad in the Author’s Note to The Secret Agent (xii).
- 7.
- 8.
Though created in the 1890s in The Woman’s Herald as a positive image for women of the coming twentieth century (Tusan 1998, 169), the term New Woman was often used pejoratively, a contradictory figure who was “a seductive temptress and a man-hater, over-educated and empty-headed, mannishly athletic or languidly anorexic” (Mitchell 1999, 583). So, Conrad’s allusions to the New Woman in these novels fall into a familiar turn-of-the-century paradigm.
- 9.
Of Conrad’s novels after The Secret Agent, I do not address Under Western Eyes (1911), the short novel The Shadow-Line (1917), and Suspense (published posthumously in 1925). While fascinating and deserving of more scrutiny, Conrad’s treatment of women in Under Western Eyes is indebted to Russian literary representation and politics to an extent that complicates its reading in the context of the Victorian gender representations that are the subject of this study. See Keith Carabine’s chapter “The Dwindling of Natalia Haldin’s ‘Possibilities’” in The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1996), 128–173. The Shadow-Line more closely resembles Conrad’s earlier fiction in form and content and is frequently considered in the context of Conrad’s earlier work; the ship “like some rare women” is the strongest feminine presence in the novel (SL 49). Susan Jones’s rich and engaging treatment of the incomplete manuscript Suspense in relation to the genre of the sensation novel stands as an insightful consideration of Conrad’s use of Victorian popular fiction, one that has influenced this study. See Jones (1999), 194–220.
- 10.
In his essay “The Late Novels,” Hampson (1996) notes, “Flora [in Chance] is the first of the damaged women of the late novels: she anticipates Lena in Victory, Rita in The Arrow of Gold, Arlette in The Rover, and perhaps even Adele in Suspense (146).
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Harrington, E.B. (2017). Introduction: Conrad’s Sensational Women. In: Conrad’s Sensational Heroines. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63297-1_1
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