ABSTRACT
In Joseph Conrad’s tales, representations of women and of “feminine” generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad often uses elusive allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of “masculine” tales of adventure and intrigue and “feminine” dramas of love or domesticity. Many critics have argued that Conrad’s fictions are aesthetically flawed by the inclusion of women and love plots; thus Thomas Moser, in an oft-cited remark, has questioned why Conrad “did not cut them out altogether” (99). Yet a thematics of gender suffuses Conrad’s narrative strategies and calls out for analysis. Thus, even in those tales that contain no significant female characters or obvious love plots, Conrad portrays men whose gender identifications are not clearly discrete. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow compares Kurtz to “an enchanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle” (72); later, Kurtz and the manager of the Central Station jockey for position as masculine knight-in-armor: “Save me?,” Kurtz says, “Why I’ve had to save you” (100, emphasis in original). Marlow’s courtly desire to find and rescue a princess ultimately leads him to the Intended’s door, but in the end he chooses to leave the actual woman under the spell of her enchantment. Conrad’s “Youth,” the first of his Marlow tales, imitates in structure and theme the classical quest narrative, except that this time the young Marlow seeks to be worthy, not of a princess “sleeping in a fabulous castle,” but of his fantastic notion of the East itself as the ultimate feminine icon. With this subtle act of displacement, Conrad’s “Youth” introduces an elusive feminine presence that allows Marlow to reinforce his masculine identity as he narrates an episode from his early days in a seaman’s world devoid of women. At the generic level, one of the more striking instances of Conrad’s ambiguous deferrals occurs in The Secret Agent, late in the novel, the Assistant Commissioner tells the Home Secretary, “From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama” (204). That point of view, which the Assistant Commissioner refrains from claiming as his own, recasts a political threat as a sexual or domestic crisis and situates Winnie Verloc, with all her marital secrets, at the center of the action.
