Abstract
An Outcast of the Islands is concerned, like The Secret Sharer, with ‘that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly’, but it begins when the ideal has already been once betrayed:
When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmire had produced the desired effect. It was going to be a short episode — a sentence in brackets so to speak — in the flowing tale of his life: a thing of no moment, to be done unwillingly, yet neatly, and to be quickly forgotten.1
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Notes
Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1971): ‘The subject of An Outcast of the Islands is the enslavement and eventual destruction of a white man, whose self-respect has already been undermined by a piece of dishonesty, by his passion for a Malay woman’ (p. 199). Baines’s terminology of ‘self-respect’ is inappropriate to Willems. As Conrad himself put it:
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951) p. 133.
See Hampson, ‘Chance, Pattern and Plan in Dostoievsky’s “The Gambler”’, Footnote, II. 1 (October 1973) pp. 8–16, and Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, On Sexuality (The Pelican Freud Library, vol. VII) pp. 243–60.
Compare George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, Inside the Whale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962). In each case, the personality-structure is exemplified in a colonial context, where the issue for the white man is precisely that of identifying with an alterated identity.
Almayeťs attitude to his environment is described as follows: ‘He hated all this…. And yet all this was very precious to him. It was the present sign of a splendid future’ (p. 292). For a detailed discussion of this aspect of the novel, see Hampson ‘The Mystic Worshipper and the Temple of Self: Egotism and Idealism in An Outcast of the Islands’, The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (U.K.), II.4 (September 1976) pp. 9–12.
W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London, 1952) pp. 42 and 145.
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© 1992 Robert Hampson
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Hampson, R. (1992). The Unshared Ideal of Self: An Outcast of the Islands. In: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22302-2_3
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