Women in Conrad

CONRAD'S SENSATIONAL HEROINES considers a variety of topics related to gender and the role of women in a number of Conrad's works and in society in general at the time. Each chapter examines either two or three of Conrad's works that Harrington puts in dialogue with one another. While she considers The Secret Agent, one of Conrad's more frequently studied works, the bulk of her emphasis is on a group of less-studied works, such as "A Smile of Fortune," "Because of the Dollars," and "The Return."

The title of Harrington's book is a bit of a misnomer since she actually covers a fairly broad historical area of Conrad's fiction, from his first published story "The Idiots" through to his final completed novel, The Rover, along with emphasis on The Secret Agent, which was published during Conrad's productive middle phase. Still, it is true that her emphasis lies more toward Conrad's later work, which has historically been rather neglected or even dismissed and has only in recent decades received more attention. But the broader coverage of Conrad's career makes I think for a more convincing argument in any case.

In this book, Harrington does a very good job of identifying various important aspects of the "Woman Question" in Conrad's works. Conrad has been justly criticized for his (or at least some of his characters') less-than-progressive views on women. Other commentary has sought to defend Conrad against such criticism, but I agree with Harrington that the truth is somewhere between. She nicely identifies some of the limitations of Conrad's views (he was of course a product of his time) while at the same time recognizing the ways in which Conrad identified problems with the plight of women at the time and cast light on those problems. This measured evaluation I think is quite right. I was also impressed with the way Harrington brings together in some of her chapters works quite widely separated in Conrad's canon, such as "The Return" (1897) and The Rover (1923), to demonstrate that these works reveal similar concerns about women in society. Another strength of the book is Harrington's focus on such varied aspects of issues regarding women: pornography, the adulteress and marriage, the fallen woman, female suicide, and women as commodity. In short, this book is a good addition to Conrad studies and particularly to Feminist studies of Conrad—and obliquely to Feminist studies of the British modernist world.

Having said this, I had a few minor reservations. The book leaves one with the impression that these issues are prominent in Conrad's works. In a sense, Harrington has clearly shown that they are in fact more prominent than many readers perhaps have seen them to be. At the same time, I would argue that Conrad is not a novelist of social conscience and that the social issues that do appear in his novels are part of the larger fabric of the work rather than their primary focus, in contrast, for example, to Gissing's The Odd Women. Harrington does not specifically state that issues surrounding the plight of women are primary in Conrad's works, but the impression I am left with after reading her book is that they are more prominent than I believe them to be. Also, I would have liked to have seen Harrington's ideas more clearly situated within the conversion surrounding women in Conrad; in particular I would have liked to have seen more concerning how her ideas augment and supplement those by Susan Jones and Ruth Nadelhaft, since they are the most prominent voices on the topic up until this point. In addition, I do not remember Lissa Schneider's Conrad's Narratives of Difference, which also considers issues of gender in Conrad's works, being mentioned. These titles are very relevant to the Harrington's topic.

Overall, these are...