SOURCE: "Conrad's Women," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, March, 1978, pp. 442-63.

[In the following essay, Thompson argues that Joseph Conrad's turn to stories focusing largely on his protagonists' relationships with women in his later career was a conscious decision, not an unconscious shift in the author's thoughts on women.]

We have learned to think of Joseph Conrad's writing career as falling into two distinct periods. The first, from 1895 until 1910, is the period of great achievement during which a skeptical Conrad portrayed isolated, deluded individuals stumbling into a moral abyss and either being destroyed or emerging with a stoical dedication to human solidarity. The second period begins in 1910 when Conrad, after completing Under Western Eyes, suffered some kind of breakdown. With the exception of The Shadow-Line (1917), his late fiction is weakened by the absence of the earlier skepticism and austerity; in these works, Conrad's writing is sentimental and romantic, full of unconvincing tales of timid heroes who are inspired by powerful women.

This change in Conrad's fiction is called a "decline" by Douglas Hewitt, Thomas Moser, and Albert J. Guerard,¹all of whose books appeared in the 1950's. The key to the decline is what Moser calls "the uncongenial subject"—women, especially women in love. Moser demonstrates that Conrad had difficulty finishing books about love (The Sisters and The Rescue, for example), that he was unable to dramatize emotions, that sexual subject matter was inhibiting for him. Moser suggests that Conrad could not write about love because he didn't really "believe in" it: "We must guard against being surprised, shocked or horrified at Conrad's negative attitude toward love. How could it be otherwise? Conrad sees man as lonely and morally isolated, harried by egoistic longings for power and peace, stumbling along a perilous path, his only hope benumbing labor or, in rare cases, a little self-knowledge. Conrad could not possibly reconcile so dark a view with a belief in the panacea of love, wife, home, and family."² By persistently writing about women and love, as he does in six out of seven of his last works, Conrad could not avoid failure, for he invariably fell into "creative bewilderment in the presence of a sexual situation."³

Critical consensus supports Hewitt, Moser, and Guerard,⁴ and I share the view that Conrad's later works lack the power and moral complexity of the earlier ones. It is troubling, however, that we have not reflected adequately on the artistic reasons for Conrad's returning to a love theme over and over again—and not only in his last works. (As Bernard C. Meyer, M.D., points out, the protagonist is emotionally involved with a woman in twentyfive out of Conrad's thirty-one stories.)⁵ Instead assuming that Conrad had legitimate artistic purposes in mind when he placed his uncertain heroes under the spells of strong women, commentators have sought extrinsic explanations for the recurrence of this stereotypic situation in his books. Some suggest that Conrad had grown weary of being a difficult and unpopular writer, so that the female love interest of Chance and Victory is a concession to the expectations of the reading public.⁶(The fact that Conrad's later works sold fairly well lends some credibility to this view.) Most scholars offer psychological explanations for Conrad's "obsession" with female-dominated men. Moser says, for example, that Conrad had a fear of women; in his mind they were somehow related to death and destruction, which explains his excessive concern with a hero's loss of masculinity to a powerful woman.

⁷ C. B. Cox finds Conrad a subconscious misogynist who lapses into vague, dreamlike, sentimental writing about women because he "could only find expression for his hidden fear of sex in these terms."⁸ The fullest explanation is offered by Bernard C. Meyer, whose psychoanalytic biography contains an analysis of Conrad's subconscious attitudes toward women. According to Meyer, Conrad was indeed a misogynist, whose female characters destroy men either by symbolically devouring them or by consuming them in flames. Meyer argues that Conrad's artistic decline was brought about by his nervous breakdown in 1910, which caused him to lose all control over his misogyny and write a series of books depicting "phallic woman" destroying "castrated man."⁹

These theories are interesting, but they do not deal with Conrad's conscious motives for writing about the impact of strong women on imaginative and potentially heroic men. If art is to some extent the product of careful thought and planning, as well as the expression of inner compulsions, then we must supplement the psychological explanations with literary analysis. Since Conrad insisted that "my work . . . has the solid basis of a definite intention" and that writing is "intelligent action guided by a deliberate view of the effect to be attained,"¹⁰ it is important that we provide an explanation of the Conradian love theme, not in terms of the author's psychological condition, but in terms of his apparent intended meaning as revealed by the text. Conrad wanted his readers to take seriously "the claims of the ideal"—the possibility of transcendent truth—and he usually embodied this possibility in stereotyped female characters; Conrad wanted his readers to take equally seriously the possibility that this world is without higher meaning and all claims of the ideal are illusions—and this, possibility is played out in the fates of his male characters; the novels of Conrad thus remain ambiguous, not revealing whether ideals are illusions or higher truths; and, finally, this is as true for Conrad's early works as it is for his late ones.

Let us begin with Victory (1915), a novel with more admirers than any other late work of Conrad. Because F. R. Leavis and others have maintained that Victory is one of Conrad's masterpieces, it is the book most severely attacked by those who find it representative of Conrad's female-related decline after 1910.¹¹ The descriptions of Lena as she gives her life for the unarmed hero, Axel Heyst, are considered typical of Conrad's loss of control. "We can only justify this language if we see it as heavily ironic, but words such as 'flush,' 'divine radiance,' and 'shades of death' suggest that Conrad has lost himself in sentimentality."¹² I submit that Conrad has not "lost himself," but is carefully trying to articulate his conception of man's fate in the world.

Lena embodies a vital alternative to Heyst's detachment. Heyst cannot effectively combat the worldly evil manifested in Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro because he has followed his father's instructions to endure life as a spectator rather than as a participant; he has never killed a man or loved a woman. Heyst is paralyzed because action requires commitment, hope, and belief, and he is too knowledgeable to succumb to such illusions. "He had been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness."¹³ Lena, however, is not a thinker. Instinctively, passionately, she offers fierce resistance to the evil invaders and demonstrates that "it is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog" (92). Heyst's detachment has been useless, no more than a "fine attitude before the universally irremediable" (Author's Note, p. x).

Lena's ability to act is generally explained in terms of her love for Heyst, her passionate nature, and her womanhood. She is seen as trying "to prove her love to Heyst,"¹⁴ and thereby help him recognize "the active role he should have played in the human scene."¹⁵ She is a representative of life whose passion and intuitive wisdom achieve a victory—perhaps an illusory victory—over Heyst's detachment. This is by no means a false reading. Lena is a creature of the world, and her simple earthiness and years of suffering enable her to recognize danger instinctively and move boldly to face it.

The text, however, also attaches a more sublime meaning to the character of Lena. Her function in the novel is highly symbolic, which helps to explain why so many readers have found her a stereotype, as if Conrad is more concerned with making her "mean" than with making her "be." Lena is the embodiment of a spiritual state which (if it exists) transcends the earthly realm of pettiness, suffering, and evil. She brings into Conrad's harsh world the mystical suggestiveness of beauty, divine love, and life eternal. This spiritual—one might almost say Platonic¹⁶—dimension seems to be lacking, or even ridiculed, in Conrad's earlier fiction and, with a few exceptions,¹⁷ critics have been inclined to pass over it in Victory; that is, while Lena is sometimes recognized as "transcendent," this quality is not regarded as particularly important, nor is the extent and purpose of such characterization carefully judged. It is, nevertheless, an important aspect of Lena's character, and it contributes mightily to the novel's meaning.

Conrad uses a number of conventional devices to emphasize the otherworldly side of Lena's character. She is, for example, repeatedly described as a ghost, a spirit, a "white, phantom-like apparition" (83); when Heyst meets her outside Schomberg's hotel, she is "white and spectral . . . putting out her arms to him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost" (86). She is dressed in white throughout the novel until Heyst makes her wear black for the final encounter with evil at the book's end. (Since she is entering the earthly battlefield, the change of color is perhaps appropriate.) In spite of Conrad's suggestions that she is a fallen woman (she is twice called Magdalen), the whiteness is also used to convey her innocence. She is often pictured as childlike (306, 309, 355, 405), or, as Conrad describes her in his Author's Note, "the very image of dreamy innocence" (p. xvii). Lena's spiritual nature is also implied by the magical quality of her voice. Hers is a voice "suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling" (209), which strikes Heyst with special force, for he is a man who has lived in silence. The voice, of course, is a nonphysical manifestation of Lena, and, like the whiteness, the childlike innocence, and the ghostliness, it is a conventional attribute which confirms our impression of her as a spiritual being.

Conrad suggests, at times, that Lena is as much a dream or an idea as she is a living woman. Lena says, "It seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of me I shouldn't be in the world at all" (187), and the narrator says that, for Heyst, her caresses "might have been the unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life; a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts" (319).

Lena makes it clear that her vision of life is one in which God has "got to do with everything—every little thing" (359). She is able to repel Ricardo's attack "because of the faith that had been born in her—the faith in the man of her destiny, and perhaps in the Heaven which had sent him so wonderfully to cross her path" (292). Heyst, whose view of life is precisely the opposite—God has nothing to do with anything—blames Lena's Sunday school lessons for such silly optimism. Lena understands the difference between their visions and condemns Heyst's earthbound realism when she says to him, "It seems to me that you can never love me for myself, only for myself, as people do love each other when it is to be for ever" (221). It is this sense of the infinite that enables Lena to love selflessly and act heroically. Heyst comes to see that she embodies a simple and timeless faith, for he wonders "whether you are just a little child, or whether you represent something as old as the world"; he sees himself, correctly, as the modern man, locked by his own skepticism into a particular moment in time: "I date later—much later. I can't call myself a child, but I am so recent that I may call myself a man of the last hour" (359). Lena, however, is never shaken by Heyst's lack of faith and, even as she dies, believes that her heroic sacrifice has made her love eternal: "Exulting, she saw herself extended on the bed, in a black dress, and profoundly at peace; while, stooping over her with a kindly, playful smile, he was ready to lift her up in his firm arms and take her into the sanctuary of his innermost heart—for ever! The flush of rapture flooding her whole being broke out in a smile of innocent, girlish happiness; and with that divine radiance on her lips she breathed her last, triumphant, seeking for his glance in the shades of death" (407).

While this final vision may be merely Lena's private delusion, the narrator insists it is Lena's spirituality that has enabled her to act: "She had been prompted, not by her will, but by a force that was outside of her and more worthy" (394). Lena is even granted a kind of divinity in two scenes in which men sit at her feet, looking up at her in adoration; Heyst assumes this posture on the hill in Samburan, and Ricardo kneels at Lena's feet in Heyst's bungalow and cries, "You marvel, you miracle, you man's luck and joy" (398). These heavy-handed scenes present the stereotypic paralyzed male, gazing worshipfully at the equally stereotypic female, whose exalted vision has guided her to resolute action. They are tableaux which formalize what Conrad's characterization, imagery, and narrative point of view have made clear throughout Victory: that Lena is a representative of the spiritual sphere who enters Heyst's godless, loveless, meaningless world, and offers the possibility of transcendent love and joy.

It may be that this dimension of her character detracts from Lena as a "real" woman with sexual and psychological needs, but Conrad has worked hard to keep us from such a one-sided view. Sometimes he suggests that Lena's spirituality is a sentimental delusion of Heyst's; at other times, it seems to be a self-conception of her own arising from her childish religiosity; at still other times, the narrator hints that Lena's spiritual nature exists outside the mind of either character. What is inescapable is Conrad's determination that Lena be seen as both a woman in the flesh and the embodiment of a transcendent ideal.

Once one recognizes Lena's symbolic significance in Victory, the most perplexing problem becomes determining whether or not Conrad is serious about this spiritual dimension of the novel. He is, after all, the writer of numerous tales in which dreams of noble deeds—such as Kurtz's notion of taking light into the heart of darkness or Lord Jim's desire to act heroically or Charles Gould's determination to save Costaguana through material interests—are either ridiculed or shown to be dangerously deficient. The world is too tough a place to sustain such illusions, and Conrad treats man's desire to transcend it with relentless irony. When it is a woman who possesses the lofty view of things, she can only retain her silly faith by being shielded from the awful truths of life.

Surely Victory can be read as another story in this anti-Platonic collection. Heyst suspects that he is jeopardizing his safety by rescuing Lena, and he is right, for it is Lena, indirectly, who brings destruction to his island. The world beguiles men into thinking action will matter in their lives, and Lena acts as the world's temptress, luring Heyst out of his safe isolation. There are Adam and Eve associations in Victory, which suggest that Lena can be seen as man's temptress, leading him on to the knowledge and action that will destroy him. Heyst knows that the great struggles of life are metaphysical—"the real dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be repelled by swords or bullets" (255)—and Lena's inspirational sacrifice is not much help in combating those dangers. From this perspective, Lena's higher vision seems a fatal delusion, and her "victory" is ironic indeed; she has not borne her love to another sphere, she has not defeated the forces of evil, she has not even sacrificed very effectively, for the man she means to save soon destroys himself in despair. This is the inevitable result of taking one's spiritual longings seriously.

Thus, Victory is a novel in which the author seems to take away the very thing he offers. In the "spiritual" scenes, Conrad suggests—through a "heavenly" female character—that the world can be transcended through love, sacrifice, and commitment to life; at the same time, the fate of the male character suggests that the world cannot be escaped, that "feminine" visions are illusions, and that stoic detachment might be the wisest response to life. Is Lena's nature truly spiritual? Yes and no. Has there been a real victory in the novel? Yes and no. Is "Victory" an ironic title? Yes and no. Conrad wants to leave the reader torn between belief and negation, between commitment and detachment, between vision and open-eyed realism. The world of Victory is thoroughly ambiguous and any response to it is likely to be insufficient and uncertain. In addition to wondering what unconscious motivation would drive a gifted ironist like Conrad to writing sentimental prose, we need to concede that Victory achieves an ambiguity, a precarious equipoise between irreconcilable extremes, that has been consciously sought by the novelist.

The stories that Conrad tells in his other late novels are, of course, various, but he always manages to include a female who seems to open the spiritual realm to an adoring male. Love inspires both men and women to dream of self-sacrifice; the protagonists become hesitant "knights," gingerly rescuing their inspirational "damsels." Love and the commitment to the ideal that it inspires, however, frequently lead to betrayal and destruction. As in Victory, Conrad's women are destroyers of their men; they bring not only the vision that makes life worth living but the fatal commitment as well—the commitment to a dream that renders man vulnerable and makes his worldly failure certain.

This is not to say that Conrad tells the same story over and over again, or that his characters are all the same. Lena and Flora de Barrai and Edith Travers, for example, are quite different women: Lena is inspired through suffering and love; Flora is inexperienced and torn by conflicting loyalties; Mrs. Travers is rather sullen and pampered. Their needs, their sufferings, and their minds are hardly the same, but symbolically, they are quite similar—they all bring the spiritual realm (or the illusion of the spiritual realm) into the lives of highly idealistic men.

In Chance (1913), the story of Captain Anthony's chivalrous rescue of Flora de Barrai is told by Marlow, a cynical antifeminist who tends to sneer at the sentimental strength of women and the "hackneyed, illusions, without which the average male creature cannot get on" (94). Flora de Barrai, a "phantom-like girl" (50), innocent, white, childlike, has sought a way "to escape from the world" (189) because she is "a woman for whom there is no clear place in the world" (281). She is of this world too, of course; her sense of family responsibility, her suffering at the hands of the governess, her sexuality (and confusion over her husband's honorable absence from the marriage bed) all contribute to the social and psychological dimensions of the work. She is rescued by Roderick Anthony, who idealizes her as "that wisp of mist, that white shadow homeless in an ugly dirty world" (332). Like Lena, Flora shows remarkable physical courage when she helps young Powell light a flare during a storm; and Anthony, like Heyst, makes himself vulnerable to the forces of evil (in this case, Flora's father) by deciding to follow an idealistic and sentimental course of action.

Marlow regards all these romantic doings with considerable scorn. He believes that most men's difficulties are brought about by "transcendental good intentions, which, though ethically valuable, I have no doubt cause often more unhappiness than the plots of the most evil tendency" (376). Even as he takes this realistic view, however, Marlow finds in women a spiritual quality that is beautiful and ennobling:

"Man, we know, cannot live by bread alone, but hang me if I don't believe that some women could live by love alone. If there be a flame in human beings fed by varied ingredients earthly and spiritual which tinge it in different hues, then I seem to see the colour of theirs. It is azure. . . .

You say I don't know women. Maybe. It's just as well not to come too close to the shrine. But I have a clear notion of woman. In all of them, termagant, flirt, crank, washer woman, bluestocking, outcast and even in the ordinary fool of the ordinary commerce there is something left, if only a spark. And when there is a spark there can always be a flame . . ." (353)

Thus, through Marlow's observations on Flora and Captain Anthony, Conrad has once again presented the conflict of world and spirit as ambiguous and irreconcilable. The dilemma of Victory is present in Chance: on the one hand, the transcendental realm that men perceive through women may be a sentimental illusion that leaves one defenseless in a cruel world; on the other hand, those spiritual visions may be the only force that inspires man to action that is not brutish—to deeds of heroic self-sacrifice.

The fact that Chance, unlike Victory, ends with a happy marriage and bright promise for the future may lessen the ambiguity somewhat. Powell is a solid, down-to-earth sort of man who will not spiritualize Flora in the way that Captain Anthony does, and perhaps we should conclude that her ideal significance is only one of Anthony's illusions. Chance offers us that possibility, of course, but it also teases us with the possibility that the ideal embodied by Flora has an existence outside the troubled mind of Captain Anthony.

The conflict of world and spirit reappears in The Rescue (1920). Tom Lingard is a strong and capable man who leaves himself as "defenceless as a child before the shadowy impulses of his own heart" (11) by chivalrously rescuing people in trouble. Like Heyst's, his chivalry fatally involves him in life, and again like Heyst, he faces the final struggle "unarmed" (70, 226, 287). He is, simply, "a man of infinite illusions" (466).

Lingard's first dangerous commitment is to Hassim and Immada, the exiled prince and princess of Wajo. His final romantic commitment is to Edith Travers, whose husband's yacht has run aground off Lingard's secret Shore of Refuge. This woman has the customary feminine effect on a man's worldly projects: she makes Lingard forget his commitment to Hassim and Immada, she fails to deliver the ring that signals their capture, and she keeps him from negotiating quickly with Belarab. In short, her participation in Lingard's affairs contributes to the destruction of his "kingdom" and the loss of several lives.

Edith Travers is not only a destructive force, however; she is a bored society woman who, at the same time, represents the spiritual potential in a man's life. Conrad uses the now-familiar technique of describing her as a victim of the world (122), as white, radiant, luminous (139), and as possessing a magical voice (141). Typically, she resists the banality of the world and longs to devote herself to the ideal: "As a young girl, often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal fulfillment and the only truth of life. Entering the world, she discovered that ideal to be unattainable because the world is too prudent to be sincere. Then she hoped that she could find the truth of life an ambition which she understood as a lifelong devotion to some unselfish ideal" (151).

Edith's encounter with Lingard fills her with a sense of purpose, a determination to assert life even at the risk of death. She sees her task as saving Lingard from himself, which is precisely what Lena must do for Heyst. To Lingard she is "Indestructible—and, perhaps, immortal!" (432); "he was in the state of a man who, having cast his eyes through the open gates of Paradise, is rendered insensible by that moment's vision to all the forms and matters of the earth" (415). Thus, it is Edith Travers who provides Lingard with his "glimpse of Paradise" (433, 436, 449), and it is also Edith who helps him bungle all his earthly projects. This dual function of the main female character makes The Rescue another book which, in a quite different context from that of Victory or Chance, insists on the impossibility of reconciling the claims of the transcendent and the terrestrial.

Rita de Lastaola, in The Arrow of Gold (1919), is one of Conrad's least subtle creations. She is a former shepherdess who has used her beauty to achieve power and influence among the artists, adventurers, and exiled Spanish nobility living in Marseilles in the 1870's. She is clever and worldly, and yet she is another female stereotype who embodies grace, perfection, and absolute harmony. We are told that she stands for "all the women in the world" (67, 101, 300). She too has a mysterious, magical voice, and she seems to be a heavenly emissary: she possesses a "form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather than blood" (88), and her beauty is "loveliness with a divine breath" (121). Although she has been the mistress of the artist Allègre, Conrad stresses the fact that she has been kept from the world like a nun and still has "childlike innocence" (93).

When the hero, Monsieur George, falls in love with Rita, he feels himself in touch with eternity: "I imagined her to be lost in thought, removed, by an incredible meditation while I clung to her, to an immense distance from the earth. The distance must have been immense because the silence was so perfect, the feeling as if of eternal stillness. I had a distinct impression of being in contact with infinity" (219). At another point he says, "I had never tasted such perfect quietness before. It was not of this earth. I had gone far beyond. It was as if I had reached the ultimate wisdom beyond all dreams and all passions. She was that which is to be contemplated to all Infinity" (288). As before, in the case of Captain Anthony, the reader will not be able to decide whether this is the sentimental illusion of a dreamer or the exalted inspiration of a visionary.

Like other Conrad heroines, Rita inspires her adorers to perform heroic deeds. But this heroism is wasted in a hopeless, unrealistic cause—the attempt to restore Don Carlos to the throne of Spain. This woman (who is all the women in the world) may bring to men a glimpse of Infinity, but she also directs them to worldly projects that are quixotic.

Conrad's last complete work, The Rover (1923), is less a love story than the other late novels. Nevertheless, in the character of Arlette, Conrad portrays a woman who instinctively turns to God when she falls in love with Lieutenant Réal and conceives of him as "free from all earthly connections" (175). She brings to him "the sense of triumphant life" (260) which is, for Conrad, the customary impact of the feminine vision upon men. And it is Arlette who inspires old Peyrol to destroy himself in heroic self-sacrifice.

These explications show that all of Conrad's last novels except The Shadow-Line contain sexually stereotyped protagonists who serve a thematic function. The novels are not felicitously done, it is true; the writing about women as carriers of the Ideal, the Eternal, and the True is clumsy and unoriginal. It is important to recognize, however, that this use of sexually stereotyped characters is a feature of Conrad's masterpieces as well as his lesser works; indeed, the exaggeration of the late novels helps us to understand the earlier, subtler writings. As we have seen, the idea that fascinates Conrad is this: the perception (or presumed perception) of transcendent truths is what gives life meaning and makes men long to sacrifice themselves to an exalted ideal. This spiritual perception is thoroughly feminine, so that women inevitably bear the vision to men, who are the primary actors in earthly dramas. The bitter ambiguity of life is such that the vision is at once sustaining and destructive, truthful and illusory, beautiful and ridiculous.

This ambiguity differs from the Romantic-Realism that readers have been discovering in Conrad since the 1920's. These readers maintain that Conrad achieves his unique effects by striving for a balance between Romance and Realism—that is, by treating the subject matter of Romance in the method of a Realist to produce Actuality itself.¹⁸ Ernst Bendz sees in Conrad's Romanticism a "subtle tinge of transcendentalism,"¹⁹ but he is almost alone in this view. Others associate Romance with adventure, melodrama, youth, mystery, sentimentality, Nature, exoticism, glamour, and suspense—but not "transcendentalism." As David Thorburn wisely observes, Romanticism leads, in fact, to a concentration on the ordinary world, "a place in which elemental necessities join men to one another, a place in which men are not entirely cut off from their kind, because they share similar feelings, fear death and want to keep living, ally themselves together when they must, and carry on long continuities of labor and struggle."²⁰ In other words, it would be a mistake to equate Conrad's insistence on the possibility of transcendent truth with the Romanticism that leads him to write adventure stories about sea voyages and faraway places. Conrad himself says, "the feeling of the romantic in life lies principally in the glamour memory throws over the past and arises from the contact with a different race and a different temperament."²¹ There is no "tinge of transcendentalism" in that statement.

Conrad's ambiguity is missed when one studies only the perspective evoked by the experience of the "masculine" stereotypes—nihilism, skepticism, pessimism, etc. This perspective is, of course, crucial to any understanding of Conrad. But it is an error to overlook the opposing perspective, the "feminine" fascination with the Ideal. As Conrad remarked to Sidney Colvin in 1917: "I have been called a writer of the sea, of the tropics, a descriptive writer, a romantic writer—and also a realist. But as a matter of fact all my concern has been with the 'ideal' value of things, events and people."²² Edward W. Said maintains that it was World War I that convinced Conrad that the world is more ideal and less mechanistic than he had suggested in his early works: "But, as Whitehead has put it, the only way to mitigate mechanism is by discovering that it is not mechanism. And this is what Conrad had just discovered. Because the war proposed itself to his heart with explosive, cataclysmic force, with a recognizable individuality of its own, with a beginning and a foreseeable end to it, Conrad now felt that universal existence was lively and dramatic."²³

Said's argument is attractive and certainly correct for the later Conrad, but I am not persuaded that Conrad's interest in higher truth developed only at the end of his life. Apparently, something happened after 1910 that led Conrad to represent the ideal as potentially, or momentarily, attainable in the love between a man and a woman. But even Conrad's masterpieces, those ironic and toughminded stories he wrote early in his career, continually focus on man's longing for a transcendent reality (either embodied in a woman or described in female imagery) and the apparent hostility of the world to this longing. The tension between idealism and skepticism is a feature of all Conrad's work.

Natalia Haldin, the unhappy Russian emigrée in Under Western Eyes (1911) is symbolically not unlike the women in Conrad's later fiction. She is naively ignorant of the affairs of men, and persists in a blind—and probably foolish—belief that the world is approaching a bright future of peace and loving concord. Yet, in spite of (or because of) her "ignorance of the baser instincts of mankind" (142), she is the inspiration for Razumov's sacrificial act of truthfulness—his confession that he betrayed Victor Haldin to the Russian authorities. He says that he has been moved by her "pure heart which had not been touched by evil things" (359); he tells her that "it was as if your pure brow bore a light which fell on me, searched my heart and saved me from ignominy, from ultimate undoing" (361). As we would expect, Razumov is destroyed for succumbing to a woman's inspiration, for heeding the call of the ideal.

In Nostromo (1904), Emilia Gould is represented as childlike, fairylike, and almost divine, as her association with the blue-robed Madonna overlooking the steps of Casa Gould implies. Her spiritual nature is expressed in the way she endows facts with ideal significance, whether the "facts" are silver ingots from the San Tomé mine or the important events of Costaguana's past. Though her husband abandons her in order to pursue his belief in justice through material interests, Emilia Gould is an object of reverence for Dr. Monygham, to whom she "suggested ideas of adoration, of kissing the hem of her robe" (513), and for Nostromo, who sees her as "Shining! Incorruptible!" (560). Nostromo even tries to make confession to her on his deathbed. Her effect on men, even on the cynical Dr. Monygham, is to inspire them to heroic action.

Antonia Avellanos, also in Nostromo, has a similar effect on Martin Decoud. Because of her, "his only aspiration was to a felicity so high that it seemed almost unrealizable on this earth" (192). Découd knows that this is "a sentimental basis for his action" (216), but it is the only power that can inspire him to put aside his clear-eyed skepticism and join the fight against the Monterists.

In Lord Jim (1900), the hero is influenced by an ideal of heroic action that is often described in feminine terms, such as his opportunity for redemption which comes to him "veiled . . . like an Eastern bride" (243-44). In addition, a real woman—Jewel—protects Jim and rescues him from the four assassins of Sherif Ali. With her heroism and love, she is able to keep Jim on Patusan, cut off from the harsh world of men, leaving "his earthly failings behind him" (218)—like going to a star. Jewel's relationship to Jim causes Marlow to reflect: "Our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. . . . One would think that, appointed to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution; for it is only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just palpable enough to give one a fright—an extra-terrestrial touch" (277). As in Victory, the cruel ironies of the world are opposed by the actions of a stereotyped female character who is loving, faithful, and spiritual.

The point of Lord Jim is not that Jewel's love and Jim's idealism are character deficiencies in a world that requires stern stoicism; the primary concern of the novel is the ambiguous nonresolution of the encounter between a transcendent ideal and a brutalizing environment. The underlying "Platonism" of Lord Jim, which goes well beyond the male-female relationship, has been identified by Tony Tanner in his brilliant analysis of the butterfly and beetle imagery. The butterfly is "a creature of beauty, a creature with wings which can carry it above the mere dead level of an earth which beetles crudely hug." The beetles, of course, are "ugly earth-bound creatures, devoid of dignity and aspiration, intent merely on self-preservation at all costs." Humanity contains both butterflies and beetles, the images suggest, and beetlelike humans survive far better than those special individuals who spurn the earth and pursue the transcendent beauty of the butterflies. What Tanner calls "Marlow's tentative Platonic musings" leave us with a choice between butterflies and beetles, a choice between survival without beauty and short-lived exaltation.²⁴ The impossible choice of Lord Jim is a feature of most of Conrad's other stories, in which the promise of the Ideal is offered to the male protagonists by female characters. (Or, one might say, the protagonists believe the Ideal is offered to them by women.) This is important for us to recognize, for it means that we must readjust our received notions of Conrad. Criticism has so concentrated upon Conrad as the poet of darkness, as the spokesman for Schopenhauerian despair, as the ironical observer of gullible men discovering their own capacities for betrayal, that we have slighted the other half of the picture in which Conrad tries to capture the overwhelming attraction of the Ideal.

It is possible in reading "Heart of Darkness" to mistake the insufficiency of Kurtz for the insufficiency of his ideal. The "moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment" (118), which we associate with Kurtz's Intended in the sepulchral city, is in fact noble and inspiring. It is currently fashionable to find the idea of taking "light" into the dark places of the world contemptible because it destroys the beauty and integrity of native societies, but that is not Conrad's objection to the "fantastic invasion." He was no lover of primitive cultures. The point is that Kurtz is too inherently savage to carry his conception of goodness beyond empty eloquence, that the avaricious agents of civilization are hypocritically invoking ideals as they grab the loot, and that the Intended is too far removed from the realities of existence to recognize that this is so. But the vision of "light"—the idea that redeems—may be the only alternative to the "triumphant darkness," unless we settle for Marlow's beetlelike survival technique of frantically working on the steamer in order to avoid the call of the wild. It is man, not the dream, that is insufficient.

If I have established that Conrad both affirms and denies the transcendent aspirations of men, there remains the task of explaining why he does so. This "having it both ways" is a feature not only of his novels but of his nonfictional writing as well. We find the pessimistic Conrad rejecting higher truths in a letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham in 1898: "Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow—only the string of my platitudes seems to have no end. As our peasants say: Tray, brother, forgive me for the love of God.' And we don't know what forgiveness is, nor what is love, nor where God is. Assez."²⁵ We find the affirming Conrad in his 1905 essay "Books": "It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require from him many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope, it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and renunciation."²⁶ Some of the most perceptive readers of Conrad have recognized that he expresses irreconcilable views and have criticized him for failing to resolve them. Surely that is what lies behind E. M. Forster's famous observation that Conrad's obscurity comes from his refusal to resolve "the discrepancies between his nearer and further vision"²⁷ and Ian Watt's judgment that "Conrad seems to accept an impasse to which his great contemporaries, more ambitious, and perhaps less deeply alienated from the possibilities of belief, tried to find solutions."²⁸ I would argue that this "impasse" is, in fact, a vision of life that requires considerable integrity and courage to sustain. In the life of a sensitive man, cursed (and blessed) with both imagination and intellect, these points of view will be in constant and dynamic conflict, so that any action must be taken in a state of thorough confusion; but a man who does not feel the burden of life's ambiguousness, who can maintain and act upon a single affirmative or nihilistic view of the world, is less a man for all his clarity.

It will not do to insist that the pessimistic Conrad was "early" and the affirmative Conrad was "late." Conrad's late books are not the work of a man who has become "simple and serene,"²⁹ nor do they represent a "retreat from a complex awareness of the mingling of evil and good in human nature and of the untrustworthiness of the ideals which we set up for ourselves."³⁰ If Conrad's late novels are inferior works of art, it is not because of a significant change in his view of men or women or the universe they inhabit. In spite of the falling off of his artistic powers, Conrad preserved an unchanging vision throughout his career; but Conrad criticism has not adequately defined that vision or shown how Conrad expressed it in his works of art. What is needed is a study of fiction which "admits to the validity of irreconcilable points of view."³¹ One can begin such a study by analyzing the way Conrad embodies irreconcilable points of view in sexually stereotyped characters.

For Conrad, existential problems are masculine problems. It is men who must find meaningful actions in a world that is unsympathetic—perhaps even hostile—to humanity. Some of Conrad's characters (Gentleman Brown in Lord Jim, and Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro in Victory) become agents of the world and participate in the harsh destructive process themselves. Others adopt a defensive attitude and simply struggle to survive—without principles, without aspirations, without plans. There are a few male characters in Conrad who survive impressively by remaining faithful to a code that has evolved as a way to behave in this tough world. Old Singleton, who bravely steers the Narcissus, and Captain Mac Whirr, who rides out a typhoon, are examples of such steadfast men. There are some men, like the grotesque revolutionaries in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes", who manage to exist only by ignoring the "darkness" of the world and pursuing fantastic Utopian visions. There are "civilized" men who live in societies designed to keep unpleasant realities at bay as long as possible; these are the people who so infuriate Marlow when he returns from the horror of Africa and sees them as "people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant dreams. . . . Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend" (152).

Women, on the other hand, are "out of it." They are the custodians of the dream—the dream of love, of beauty, of faith, of hope. One can only believe in these things by remaining innocent of the world, for the darkness is a destroyer of visions. Those men who think they have seen the world's darker side feel obligated to lie to women in order to keep their dreams alive. Gould lies to his wife, Razumov lies (for a time) to Natalia Haldin, Nostromo tells Giselle he comes to the Great Isabel to visit her when in fact he comes to tap his supply of stolen silver, Marlow and Kurtz both lie to Kurtz's Intended, and Decoud wants Antonia to be told that his mission has been "accomplished gloriously and successfully" (300). Because of her exalted vision, a woman can act heroically, as Lenadoes, or she can inspire a man to noble actions, as Antonia Avellanos does. Hence, Conrad's women are associated with the "sustaining illusion," the affirmative faith which, regardless of its truthfulness, makes action possible. This faith constitutes a rejection of the ironical skepticism of some of Conrad's male characters; as Sophia Antonovna says in Under Western Eyes, "women, children and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action" (279). Conrad is less interested in the truth or illusion of the feminine vision than he is in the impact of that vision on a man seeking meaningful action.

While Conrad's books contain many of the stereotypic male and female characters just described, these characters, however, are not his great interest. Again and again, he returns to a different character that fascinates him: the man who has enough integrity to recognize the terrible truths of the world and enough imagination to respond passionately to the transcendent vision. Lord Jim, Martin Decoud, Razumov, Axel Heyst, Captain Anthony, Monsieur George, and Tom Lingard are all versions of this character. Each one of these men is drawn to an idealized concept of the world that is, to some degree, feminine; each one of them also discovers that this is a perverse world in which hopes are crushed and dreams come to naught. It is not Conrad's "exhaustion," therefore, that leads him to portray his protagonists as men who are paralyzed, unarmed, and impotent. Action must be almost impossible for someone utterly torn between two conflicting views of the universe. No doubt Conrad admired the single-minded devotion to duty of a Captain Mac Whirr; but, for the most part, he did not find such men artistically very interesting. When one has no dreams of his own and is convinced that idealistic hopes are illusions, then the proper course of action is clear: one must faithfully steer the ship. But when one is not sure that dreams are illusions, when the earthly and celestial claims are both powerful and cancel each other out, then one does not steer well, and the likelihood of failure and even betrayal is great.

The presentation of men being pulled apart by conflicting visions requires narrative technique of extreme sophistication; Moser is quite right when he insists that "the essence of Conrad is his complexity."³² In order to write stories in which the desired effect is ambiguity, inconclusiveness, and uncertainty, Conrad must both affirm the Ideal and ironically undercut it at the same time. The multiple narrators and the abolition of chronological sequence are devices Conrad employs for simultaneously affirming and negating. Royal Roussel shows that it is through the complexity of Marlow's narrative that Jim becomes the kind of enigma Conrad wanted him to be: "Marlow's approach suggests that he is attempting to blend both sides of Jim, the light and the dark, by drawing the shadowy line between his success and failure so thin that the two are confused. If Jim's case could be made totally ambiguous, if Jim could be wrapped completely in the enigma, then perhaps a no man's land could in fact be established in which the darkness and the light could coexist."³³ As readers of Lord Jim, we must remain unsure of our estimation of him. A reader who is confident that Jim's dreams are either contemptible illusions or divine ideals has missed the point.

Throughout his life, Conrad admired those writers who shared his fascination with the ambiguity of the human situation. He wrote of Anatole France: "He knows that our best hopes are irrealisable; that it is the almost incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege, to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never failed to defeat their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity which can conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed before their irremediable littleness."³⁴ In his late works as well as his early ones, Conrad, like France, sought to show that a man's greatest misfortune—that he is a dreamer—is also his highest privilege. If, after 1910, he more explicitly equated man's aspirations with the vision of love brought to him by a woman, his insistence upon the ambiguity of the human situation did not diminish; we should be no more certain of Heyst's "victory" than we are of Jim's. There are many possible explanations for the artistic decline in Conrad's career, but a change in his perception of men and women and their predicament on earth is not one of them.

¹ Hewitt, Conrad: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1952; rpt. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft, 1969); Moser, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1966); and Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958).

² Moser, p. 127.

³ Guerard, p. 96.

⁴ Some critics have not accepted the theory of artistic decline. See, for example, Adam Gillon, The Eternal Solitary: A Study of Joseph Conrad (New York: Bookman, 1960), who insists that love is by no means an uncongenial subject to Conrad but the key to his vision of mankind (p. 87); Sharon Kaehele and Howard German, "Conrad's Victory: A Reassessment," Modern Fiction Studies, 10 (1964), 55-72, who maintain that the later Conrad is still concerned with the old preoccupations of illusions and loyalty; George Thomson, "Conrad's Later Fiction," English Literature in Transition, 12 (1969), 165-74, who sees in the last books a resolution—through women—of the tension that characterizes the early works; and John A. Palmer, Joseph Conrad's Fiction: A Study in Literary Growth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), who insists that Conrad's artistic development was continuous throughout his career.

⁵Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 273-74.

⁶ Paul L. Wiley, Conrad's Measure of Man (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), p. 3.

⁷ Moser, p. 126.

⁸Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination (London: Dent; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), p. 163.

⁹ Meyer, pp. 174, 232.

¹⁰ Conrad to Blackwood, 31 May 1902, cited in Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 284.

¹¹ In addition to Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), p. 209, Victory's defenders include: M. C. Bradbook, Joseph Conrad: Poland's English Genius (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1941); Morton Dauwen Zabel, Craft and Character: Texts, Method, and Vocation in Modern Fiction (New York: Viking Press, 1957); Robert F. Haugh, Joseph Conrad: Discovery in Design (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1957); Frederick R. Karl, A Reader's Guide to Joseph Conrad (New York: Noonday Press, 1960); J. I. M. Stewart, "Conrad," Eight Modern Writers, Oxford History of English Literature, 12 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 184-222; R. W. B. Lewis, "The Current of Conrad's Victory," Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 148-69; and Kaehele and German, Wiley, Baines, and Palmer, all cited above.

Among those who join Hewitt, Moser, and Guerard in attacking Victory are Marvin Mudrick, "Conrad and the Terms of Modern Criticism," Hudson Review, 1 (1954), 419-26, and "Introduction," Conrad: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marvin Mudrick (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966); G. S. Fraser, The Modern Writer and His World (1953; rpt., 3rd ed., Penguin, 1964); and René Kerf, "Ethics versus Aesthetics: A Clue to the Deterioration of Conrad's Art," Revue des Langues Vivantes (Brussels), 31 (1965), 240-49.

¹² Cox, p. 136.

¹³ Joseph Conrad, Victory, Vol. 15 of Joseph Conrad: Complete Works, Canterbury Edition, 26 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1924-26), p. 82. Further page references in my text are to this edition, and subsequent references to other Conrad novels are also to the Canterbury Edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

¹⁴ Baines, p. 396.

¹⁵ Karl, p. 248.

¹⁶ Conrad once wrote to Garnett (28 August 1908), "There is even one abandoned creature who says I am a neoplatonist? What on earth is that?" Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924, ed. Edward Garnett (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), p. 214. At least two critics regard this protest as disingenuous and have persevered in finding a kind of Platonism in Conrad's work. See Robert Penn Warren's introduction to Nostromo, Modern Library Edition (New York: Random House, 1951), p. xxxiii; and Tony Tanner, "Butterflies and Beetles—Conrad's Two Truths," Chicago Review, 16, No. 1 (1963), 123-40, rpt. in Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 447-62.

¹⁷ See Walter F. Wright, Romance and Tragedy in Joseph Conrad (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1949); and Seymour L. Gross, "The Devil in Samburan: Jones and Ricardo in Victory," NCF, 16 (1961), 81-85.

¹⁸ Ruth M. Stauffer, Joseph Conrad: His Romantic-Realism (Boston: Four Seas, 1922; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1969), p. 20.

¹⁹Joseph Conrad: An Appreciation (Gothenburg, Sweden: N. J. Gumpert, 1923), p. 30.

²⁰Conrad's Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 146-47.

²¹Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, ed. William Blackburn (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1958), p. 130.

²² Joseph Conrad, Joseph Conrad on Fiction, ed. Walter F. Wright (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 35.

²³Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), p. 72.

²⁴ Tanner, Chicago Review, 16, No. 1 (1963), 124, 127, 134; Lord Jim, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Thomas C. Moser, pp. 448, 450, 456.

²⁵Joseph Conrad's Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. C. T. Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 65.

²⁶ Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1923), p. 8.

²⁷Abinger Harvest (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 139.

²⁸ "Joseph Conrad: Alienation and Commitment," in The English Mind, ed. Hugh Sykes Davies and George Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), p. 275.

²⁹ Guerard, p. 292.

³⁰ Hewitt, p. 103.

³¹ Cox, p. 172.

³² Moser, p. 8.

³³The Metaphysics of Darkness: A Study in the Unity and Development of Conrad's Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 104.

³⁴Notes on Life and Letters, p. 33.