ABSTRACT
The time has come to counter the myth of Conrad’s misogyny. The chronological and critical distance that has enabled us recently to reassess Conrad’s attitudes toward race and colonialism can now help us to reconsider as well the long-held view of Conrad as a “masculine” author who wrote almost exclusively about a male world for a male readership. Toward this end, I will argue that a reexamination of such complex, multifaceted, and nuanced female characters as Winnie Verloc, Natalia Haldin, and Sophia Antonovna encourages us to revise the notion that Conrad knew women little and liked them less.1 Further, by reviewing several key works by Conrad from the beginning to the middle of his career, I propose to establish that from his earliest fiction, Conrad was centrally concerned with issues of gender and sexuality and that his treatment of these issues grew more unconventional and more iconoclastic over time. Finally, I will argue that Conrad’s revisionist thinking on these matters reaches its fullest and most “revolutionary” expression in his 1911 novel Under Western Eyes, which paved the way for his later novels centered on and addressed to women. So ahead of its time was Conrad’s treatment of gender divisions and female sexuality in this novel that only now, a century later, are we able, I believe, to appreciate its originality.
