ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how Joseph Conrad represents the stormy sea as a living entity with which the mariner must cohabitate. In his depictions of dirty weather, Conrad offers a non-humanist examination of the interrelation between the human and nature that arises elsewhere in his works, for instance in his comments regarding how seamanship has changed in the industrial period. Conrad once wrote that “a wrestle with wind and weather has a moral value like the primitive acts of faith on which may be built a doctrine of salvation and a rule of life”. Conrad’s depictions of dirty weather challenge normative readings of Conrad and of literary weather, in several ways. In a well-known analysis of Romantic-era weather, Jonathan Bate states: “The weather is the primary sign of the inextricability of culture and nature”. Weather is the primary sign of its mutability”.
