CONRAD AND WOMEN.docx

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Publication Information: Book Title: Conrad and Women. Contributors: Susan Jones - author. Publisher: Clarendon Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: iii.

Preamble

In a letter of 14 July 1923, written near the end of his life, Joseph Conrad reflected on the shape of his career and public reputation as a writer. Corresponding with Richard Curle, he worried that the prevailing image of him as an author of sea stories risked obscuring the full range of his work. He hoped to be 'freed from that infernal tail of ships', since, in reality, 'in the body of my work barely one tenth is what may be called sea stuff. 1 Not only did the popular perception overstate his devotion to nautical tales, but he added the complaint that the mere presence of seamen in many of his books did not necessarily make them sea stories. Yet Conrad's objection to his public profile did little to prevent the survival of a reputation established during his lifetime. Even today Conrad is still most widely recognised as a writer of 'sea stuff', a man in a man's world, occupying an exclusively masculine tradition.

Nowhere is this bias more striking than in the received view of Conrad's relation to women. Ostensibly, as a man of the sea we assume that Conrad must have neglected women's themes and felt ill-prepared to engage in their concerns. But, as I argue in this book, the evidence of his biography, correspondence, and fiction suggests a very different conclusion, indicating a complex and intriguing relationship between Conrad, the women in his life, his female characters and readers of his work. This is not to deny that Conrad produced important representations of the male consciousness and male society, but rather to redress the imbalance in our perception of his widespread preoccupations. Although he explored the epistemological dilemmas of the male protagonists in the earlier part of his career and never relinquished these themes altogether, he began in the Malay fiction by producing prominent female figures whose position offered an important critique of imperialism, a role that women continued to fulfil in the political works of the middle years,

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such as Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. Later his work appeared in the highly visual contexts of popular magazines and journals, and he embarked on a new form of investigation, questioning the presentation of spectacle, outward appearances, and the framing of the aesthetic object. 2 Above all he increasingly turned to the issue of gender, female identity, and, in relation to romance, how women are invited to conform to its conventionalised gestures and plots.

Many critics have identified a decline in his shift towards the romance genre in the later work, but I argue that they miss the continuity in his career and neglect important aspects of his experimentation and social commentary. He was not altogether the lonely seaman uncomfortable in female company, but rather a sympathetic interpreter of women's contemporary situation. His relationship to women, to his women characters, and his women readers was at times difficult, challenging, but nevertheless one that initiated an astute, though largely unrecognised, exploration of female identity in the fiction.

In order to rehabilitate Conrad in relation to women, I investigate a host of issues, drawing on criticism of his novels, questions of biography, issues of marketing, textual scholarship, and visual theory. I take a historical perspective initially, and begin in Chapter I with a survey of critics' responses to the theme of Conrad and women, showing the way in which he has been traditionally associated with a predominantly male discourse. The reception of his work in modernist circles privileged a narrow band of texts that focused on male experience through the fragmentation of the text, the dislocation of consciousness, the undermining of realist ventures in fiction, the questioning of the nature and meaning of textuality. This trend of taste and critical evaluation neglected large portions of his work and overlooked important evidence, but it particularly inhibited any serious attention to his later work when he experimented with popular forms such as the romance, historical novel, and sensation fiction.

Biographical criticism has also co-operated with the maleoriented reading of his fiction, and Conrad emerges as someone

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who preferred the company of men and who looked to women only for domestic and moral support. In Chapters 2 and 31 consider major female influences on his life and writing. First, I explore the female presence during his formative years in Poland, and illuminate the role played by female protagonists in Conrad's fiction by considering them in the context of the status and image of women in Polish romantic literature and culture. Second, I explore the role of his distant cousin by marriage, Marguerite Poradowska, as a creative influence on Conrad's career. Poradowska, herself a writer of French fiction, corresponded with Conrad during his transition from seaman to author, and the two frequently discussed each other's work. In the letters, Poradowska provided an audience for some of Conrad's earliest rehearsals of later fictional themes, and in the texts of her novels she offered valuable source material for his experimentation with romance forms.

In Chapter 4, challenging traditional notions of the Conrad canon, I introduce his novel Chance as the central focus of this book. Serialised in The New York Herald Sunday Magazine in 1912, and aimed at the women readers of the paper, the novel represented a turning-point in Conrad's career, his first economically successful venture in reaching a wider audience and addressing the themes of gender and romance that would occupy the later fiction. Conrad's creation of a central female protagonist has often been heralded as the moment when his artistic powers began to diminish. The novel has also received negative responses from those critics who see it as an unsuccessful attempt to emulate Henry James. Instead, I read Chance as a new direction in Conrad's fiction, one where he engages in a theoretical debate with 'The Master' on the relationship of vision and epistemology in the presentation of women in romance.

In Chapter 5 I look at the genesis of the novel in greater detail. By studying three texts of Chance(manuscript, serial, published novel) we gain a sense, not merely of the length of Conrad's commitment to the project but also the nature of the experiment he engaged in. This novel's history offers a paradigm for Conrad's artistic development from the early years of 'rites of passage' narratives of an exclusively male discourse, through to the responses to gender and genre in the late work, revealing a greater continuity in Conrad's career and establishing a serious alternative

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to the bifurcation of his fiction into 'achievement and decline' (established by Thomas Moser and followed by numerous other critics).

Chapters 6 and 7 place Conrad's work in a wider textual field. I explore Conrad's shift in methodology in the later fiction, showing how it arises partly from a response to the visual emphasis found in his new marketing contexts. In spite of the modernist emphasis on the fragmentation of vision, the new media of glossy magazines, photographs, and films ensured the endurance of hegemonic codes--of perspective, framing devices, and portraiture. Conrad examined the survival of these codes in a literal sense, looking at the ways in which traditional structures of vision contribute to the limitation of female identity, particularly within the popular genres. Conrad's unexpected contribution to an ongoing debate about female identity, in novels like Chance, Victory, The Arrow of Gold, The Rover, and The Rescue, puts him in a much closer relationship with his contemporaries, with the work of authors ranging from Wharton, James, Bennett, Galsworthy, Ford, to the inexpensive editions of neglected popular writers.

The final chapter explores the late works in relation to an earlier popular form of women's writing: the sensation novel of the 1860s and 1870s. By comparing Conrad's final, unfinished novel Suspense(published posthumously, 1925), and the sensation fiction of Mary Braddon and others (particularly Braddon Lady Audley's Secret ( 1862)) I show the extent to which Conrad was indebted to the methods of sensationalism right up to the end of his life. The closing chapter demonstrates the importance of women's writing, women readers, female portraiture, and the relationship of text and illustration in the serialised novels in shaping Conrad's later fiction. It draws attention to the re-emergence of Poradowska's influence, and how, in the late work in particular, Conrad exploited the techniques of traditional forms in order to question the structures of romance which continued to confine and classify women.

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I
Conrad, Women, and the Critics

Nothing is more familiar to readers of Joseph Conrad than the image of the author as a lonely seafarer, drawing on the memories of life on board ship to construct the tales that sustained his career as a writer. We can easily picture the sensitive, displaced individual fashioning modernist narratives of dislocation and despair upon the moral framework of a male community to which he gave priority, and from which, above all, women were excluded. The conventionalised view is highly selective, but it has nevertheless proved remarkably enduring, and has reduced the value of much of the work that fails to fit its frame of reference. My purpose is to challenge the prevailing image of Conrad and to offer an alternative to its tenacious hold on the critical tradition. But before such a powerful paradigm can be overturned, it needs to be understood in the light of its long history. This chapter focuses on the construction of Conrad's public image, beginning with an account of Conrad criticism (including the earliest notices of his published work), at the same time considering the marketing strategies used by various editors and friends to promote his fiction. Subsequently, I explore the ways in which his biography has been understood and disseminated in the light of the received critical tradition.

Conrad's association with the sea established his reputation as an author of exotic adventure told from within a predominantly male discourse. The marketing of his early novels capitalised on the portrait of the sailor turned writer, a gentleman of the Polish 'szlachta' 1 who transformed the voyages of his youth into tales expressing nostalgia for the male seafaring community (as in 'Youth' and 'Typhoon'). For example, in 1904, T.P.'s Weekly published an unsigned biographical article to promote

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the serialisation of Nostromo, drawing attention to the masculine tone of the writer's former life and its compatibility with his current authorial intention. His unnamed biographer observed that he 'wanted things always to be shipshape, in his writings as at sea'. While Conrad had previously endeavoured 'to turn his Conway boys into fine seamen', he now applied the moral incentives of the 'ancient and honourable craft' of seamanship to his new career as a writer. 2 Advertisements in the journal complemented the masculine image, with instalments of Nostromo sandwiched between notices for 'Three Nun's Tobacco' and '"Citizen", the World's Best Boot for Men'. Prior to the serialisation of Nostromo, the tone of male exclusivity associated with the initial representation of Conrad had also been supported by the contexts in which his early works appeared. Heart of Darkness ( 1898-9), Lord Jim ( 1899- 1900), 'Youth' ( 1898) and other short stories were published in Blackwood's Magazine, a literary journal suffused with the character of the gentleman's club, often imperialist in perspective and at times jingoistic in tone. 3

The popular impression of Conrad as a male-oriented author of nautical tales coincided with his reputation for awkwardness with women. When Lady Ottoline Morrell expressed a desire to meet Conrad, the writer Henry James deterred her: 'But, dear Lady . . . he has lived his life at sea . . . he has never met "civilised" women.' 4 Lady Ottoline's later comments on Jessie Conrad corroborated this line of thinking. She saw Conrad's relationship with his wife not as one of compatibility, but one where Jessie merely represented a good and reposeful mattress for this hypersensitive, nerve-wrecked man, who did not ask from his wife high intelligence, only an assuagement of life's vibrations'. 5 The undignified description of Jessie, emphasising her passive role

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and lack of sophistication, confirmed a popular image of the author's indifference to female companionship.

This reductive view of Conrad shows considerable persistence. With varying degrees of subtlety, the popular image still reflects the isolated sailor of exotic Polish origins transformed into a man of letters, who married beneath him to provide himself with a housekeeper, but who still preferred male camaraderie to the society of women. In 1960, Graham Hough extended the argument to include Conrad's literary audience. He insisted on Conrad's inaccessibility to women readers, locating the author's work in a 'male world':

In my experience very few women really enjoy Conrad, and this is not only because the feminine sensibility so often ceases to function at the mere mention of a topsail halyard, but because the characteristic concerns and occupations of the woman's world play such a very small part in Conrad's work. 6

The presence of women characters in Conrad's novels has caused the greatest difficulties for such critics. Even by the 1980s some commentators could only account for Conrad's inclusion of female roles in his novels by referring to the author's commodification of them. Edward Said identified a list of 'substances' occupying Conrad's imagination, which the author drew upon as organising materials for his narratives: 'Lingard's gold, Kurtz's ivory, the ships of sailors, Gould's silver, the women that drew men to chance and romance'. 7 Meanwhile, some feminist critics continue to interpret Conrad's narratives as unremittingly patriarchal, reading into his presentation of women a blatant and uncomplicated misogyny. Joyce Carol Oates, for example, is convinced that Conrad's 'quite serious idea of a "heroine"' is always someone 'who effaces herself completely, who is eager to sacrifice herself in an ecstasy of love for her man'. 8 Drawn in by his lasting reputation, critics have dismissed the possibility that women have had any positive impact on Conrad's creative

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