ABSTRACT
The first time Conrad came to an impasse with The Rescue , He Wrote the ultimate anti-romance: “The Idiots” (1896), a shocking and poorly received work about a Frenchwoman who mortally stabs her husband rather than bear any more of his “idiot” children, then drowns herself. 1 Set in Brittany, it avoids the generic complications and charged sociopolitical issues inherent in Conrad’s Malay fictions, which examine the role of Europeans in the Eastern colonies while using love plots to foster action and narrative development. Still, the drama in “The Idiots” is not quite as “simple” as the frame narrator claims (59); 2 in the final scene, the mayor, a Royalist, cynically plots to turn the Bacadou family’s tragedy to his advantage against local Republican and anti-clerical influence. “The Idiots,” with its obvious parallels to The Secret Agent, is a classic early example of Conrad’s “tricks with girls”; a “formidable and simple” domestic drama allows for traditional plot development while opening a space for ironic commentary on a political plane (TU 59). Unsurprisingly, Edward Garnett disliked “The Idiots,” which, among other things, explores marital rape from a woman’s point of view. According to Zdzisław Najder, after reading “The Idiots” Garnett advised Conrad “to stick to maritime and exotic subjects” (197). Conrad returned to work on The Rescue, only to break off once more when he feared it had become a “strange and repulsive hybrid.” He then wrote his first African tale, “An Outpost of Progress,” and quickly followed this with The Nigger of the “Narcissus”; both were published in 1897.
