ABSTRACT

Nineteenth-century domesticity provided a dominant narrative for the Victorian era, in terms both of society and literature. While it held ascendancy, domestic ideology was crucial in shaping English constructions of gender, as well as aesthetic values and literary pre-eminence. Writers like Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard offer texts of coded-masculine adventure, where women, if they feature at all, often appear as dangerous others, and where men's true ambitions can be derailed by romantic distractions. In addition to offering alternative modes of fiction, these adventure stories also countered domestic views of masculinity with competing masculine models, male characters unconfined by the strictures of domestic ideology. Writing in the same decade as Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson called his text-in-progress, "The Beach of Falesa", "sterling domestic fiction". Conrad and Stevenson both crafted lead characters that imagine themselves at the top of the prevailing social structures.