“Lost in the Haze”: Joseph Conrad, the Ruined Maid, and the Male Gaze

Some Conrad criticism, perhaps confusing narrative voices like Marlow’s for Conrad’s own, and falling under the spell of that catalogue of ‘knowing’ male Victorian assertions about femininity, makes the erroneous assumption that Conrad is misogynistic, or, equally damning, that his writing is merely masculine. He is routinely discussed as part of a “masculinist tradition,” even in his contemporary reception. The American feminist, Mary Austin, for example, tells her readership in “Joseph Conrad Tells What Women Don’t Know About Men,” that in order to know their political opposition, women who are interested in promoting and pursuing their own rights should study Conrad’s works in order to fully understand men.¹ That summary evaluation in 1923 is not out of sorts with much critical reaction today, though Nina Pelikan Strauss takes a variant position in her essay, “The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” where she ponders the sheer difficulty of feminist response to Conrad’s work.² Each response, however, is predicated on the masculinity of Conrad’s perspective and prose, as though his is a world entirely for and about men.

But even more extreme claims are not uncommon. Peter Hayes, for example, goes further, affirming that Conrad “is a writer of a deeply conservative, if not chauvinistic frame of mind” and goes on to argue that there is little to distinguish between author and his narrator since Conrad “identifies, unequivocally, with Marlow’s most ‘misogynistic’ statements.” ³ He also dismisses criticism that sets out to reframe a perception of Conrad’s treatment of women with that subtle jibe, “revisionist.”⁴ The response is almost understandable: for while the woman question pervades much of the popular and sentimental fiction of the Victorian period, and Modern fiction wrestles with the resulting emerging place of women, Conrad’s fiction does seem to privilege a specifically delimited world of men. Examples in Conrad’s fiction representing this narrow compass are more common than not: an “old sea dog” setting the tone early in “A Smile of Fortune,” for example, is deftly characterized as the type who “knew women and children only by sight” (a charge sometimes wrongly leveled at Conrad himself by virtue of his chosen career), but this kind of narrowness is not exclusive to such minor characters and is often, in fact, a key, and conscious, feature of Conrad’s limited narrators.⁵

Casual barbs against women are not difficult to locate across the range of Conrad’s writing and one does not find, in much of the fiction, the kind of modern narrative complicity that is typified, for example in Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1894), an intriguing novel dramatizing the travails of the New Woman in an otherwise unresponsive patriarchy. Nonetheless, while Conrad’s fiction is rarely so overt, it is a mistake to assume, because of such comments, that Conrad’s narrative point of view is generally misogynistic or exclusively masculine. Instead it is complex: his ostensible treatments of feminine sensibility range from the sometimes savagely parodic, in Peter Ivanovich’s cult of the female, for example, in Under Western Eyes, to the idealized, as we see in the author’s treatment of Nathalia from the same novel. At the same time, and paradoxically, there are telling contemporary evaluations of Conrad’s sensibility (from Edward Garnett, for example, one of Conrad’s earliest and most earnest readers), which note the compellingly feminine quality of Conrad’s outlook—describing it as, “a blend of caressing, almost feminine intimacy with masculine incisiveness.”⁶ That quality, (though what it is, is never really quantified), is for Garnett a key feature of Conrad’s story-telling. Presumably it encompasses Conrad’s empathetic enquiry, his eye for detail, his awareness of psychological interiors, and, surely, his sensitivity to issues of gender. Perhaps that is most evident in the range of female figures across the body of his work treated with remarkable sympathy and insight. The tragic and conflicted Emilia Gould in Nostromo is one such character, and Winnie Verloc, in The...