ABSTRACT

This essay, one of the most recent collected here, shows the way in which the integrated use of a variety of theoretical perspectives can generate a radically new reading of a novel. Mongia begins with a classic feminist project, that of bringing to light marginalised women (in this case within a fictional text), attending to their story, and at the same time analysing why masculine discourse requires both the presence and the marginality of such women. To follow through these aims, she draws on the theory of literary genres (looking at elements of Gothic, adventure and romance), on psychoanalytical theory (specifically the processes of identity-formation in women) and on cultural geography as applied to the discourses of imperialism (the way in which colonial fantasies map ideas of gender onto constructions of space and place). These theories are synthesised so that, for example, a feminist psychoanalytical view of the Gothic, as concerned with mother-daughter relations, allows Mongia to read the village of Patusan, in Conrad's Lord Jim, as a region of feminised enclosure and insecure identity boundaries. Both Jim and Jewel, she suggests, inhabit this space for a time; one of Mongia's most original conclusions is that Jim plays the role of Gothic heroine at certain stages. However, Jewel remains stuck in this space of non-separation from the mother, which Jim escapes only by taking a leap out of the Gothic narrative of enclosure into an adventure narrative of masculine resolve. So Mongia sees the generic ambivalence of Lord Jim as indicative of the gender anxieties of the fin de siecle.