Abstract
Conrad’s earlier Jamesian story “The Return” and his late novel The Rescue both consider the issue of women’s dissatisfaction in marriage and the problematic possibility of adultery. Featuring marriages based on illusion and presumption, Conrad initially poses extramarital relationships as a way for these heroines to escape to what may be a more equitable and affectionate union. Yet, both “The Return” and The Rescue ultimately demonstrate that the heroines’ frustration has less to do with their specific husbands than it does with the entrenched system of gender roles that proves to be at the root of their dissatisfaction.
Lady—wife—mother! Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake. Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the nature, the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees, and pray to be enabled to bear them—pray for patience—pray for strength to resist the demon that would tempt you to escape.
—Mrs. Henry Wood, East Lynne (1861, 116)
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Notes
- 1.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the portrayals considered here, the composition of The Rescue and “The Return” intersects. Conrad began writing The Rescue in 1896 (though it was not published until 1920), Conrad began composing “The Return” in 1897 and published it in Tales of Unrest in 1898. For more on this, see Knowles and Moore (2000).
- 2.
The plot of East Lynne puts its heroine through a series of tormenting roles (her last, improbably, as the disguised governess for her own children in the household of her abandoned husband and his new wife) to atone for her scandalous audacity in leaving her kind husband and her children to be with a less worthy man who is more sexually attractive to her.
- 3.
In “Why Are Women Redundant?” (originally published in 1862), William Greg (1999) defines redundant women as unmarried women , the abundance of whom indicates “an unwholesome social state” (158). This category does not include domestic servants, since “they are fully and usefully employed” (161).
- 4.
- 5.
This is clearly an earlier iteration of Kurtz’s painting in Heart of Darkness “representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch” (Conrad 1924b, 79). Lissa Schneider explores the critical history and resonances of the images in her chapter “Iconography and the Feminine Ideal” in Conrad’s Narratives of Difference (2003).
- 6.
- 7.
Keating (1985) reads “The Return” as a kind of rewriting of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House because of its similar themes and events.
- 8.
Gaetano D’Elia (1984) argues that, “Alvan Hervey is really the predecessor of the wordy zealots we will meet in The Secret Agent nine years later. Hervey’s private lucubrations, crammed with religious excitement, will be transformed into the political arguments of the pseudo-revolutionaries in The Secret Agent” (38).
- 9.
The reader might connect Hervey as a triumphant, cigar-smoking commercial man in this passage from “The Return” with Heyst early in Victory (Conrad 2016), as he contemplates the ruin of the Tropical Belt Coal Company:
His nearest neighbour—I am speaking now of things showing some sort of animation—was an indolent volcano which smoked faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon, and at night levelled at him, from amongst the clear stars, a dull red glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a smoker; and when he lounged out on his veranda with his cheroot, the last thing before going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of glow and of the same size as that other one so many miles away. (20)
- 10.
Conrad’s ironic invocation of the idealized comradeship “band of brothers” from the St. Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V underscores his criticism of these men’s unearned mastery in “The Return.” The aged anarchist Karl Yundt in The Secret Agent also dreams of a” band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means” (Conrad 1924e, 42).
- 11.
In A Wilderness of Words (1997), Ted Billy reads this image as a reference to Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” since Hervey, like the Duke of the poem, seeks mastery over a subordinate wife whom he sees as a kind of art object gracing his home (179). Also a man of “artistic tastes,” Hervey fantasizes about his wife’s death and resents that she seems to lack appreciation for the stature he has conferred upon her (TU 123). Browning’s poem may be read as a scathing critique of hypocritical Victorian values, as the dominant husband, having ordered her murder, reduces his child-bride to a veiled portrait that gratifies him and serves as a warning to the man negotiating his next marriage. In “The Return,” Conrad uses the image of the lifeless gallery of artistic treasures to convey the similar emptiness of this home, evoking the sterile dominance of another such husband.
- 12.
A separation also might have been economically risky for her, as William Bonney (1996) notes, “for the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 had done little to alleviate the financial vulnerability of women after marriage.”
- 13.
John G. Peters (2012) notes of Marlow in Heart of Darkness: “he finds it necessary to keep women in a separate sphere in order to maintain a place of refuge for men from the outside world” (97). While Hervey does not display Marlow’s capacity for introspection, Conrad seems to be conveying a similar, though less elaborated, sentiment here.
- 14.
This might recall for the reader Winnie’s thrust as she stabs Verloc before leaving him in The Secret Agent (Conrad 1924c).
- 15.
Peters (2012) notes that, “In the end, Marlow protects the Intended's world by lying to her,” but such an act means he cannot “relinquish” Kurtz with the truth. (107).
- 16.
As Harry Sewlall (2008) notes that Travers “has already demonstrated that not only is he the exact opposite of what a gentleman should be, but also an irredeemable snob and a virulent racist” (155).
- 17.
Of course, Britain’s Queen Victoria, who would have been the British monarch at the time the novel was set, did not rule “as much as the men,” nor did her position as queen materially help women to better themselves politically or in domestic life. Edith seems to envision a world where she might don the appropriate clothes and assume leadership, rather than the hereditary ties of the monarchy in Britain (TU 274).
- 18.
While Robert Hampson views Edith Travers’s dress as a “masquerade,” Sewlall argues that her willingness to don these garments can be read as respectful: “For a woman coming from a conservative environment as she does, her decision to accept the habiliments of another race and culture, not to mention a religion that represents the traditional Other of her own, Christianity, is not to be taken lightly” (Hampson 2000, 180; Sewlall 2008, 123).
- 19.
See Joyce Wexler’s (2018) excellent discussion of this passage and the novel in “Conrad’s Erotic Women.”
- 20.
Robert Caserio (1985) notes how Lingard “is shown to diminish in stature as he becomes increasingly the guardian of the white ego and Western conventions” (128–129).
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Harrington, E.B. (2017). The Adulteress and the Confines of Marriage: “The Return” and The Rescue . In: Conrad’s Sensational Heroines. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63297-1_6
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