Conrad and the Immigrant: The Drama of Hospitality

Abstract

Originally entitled ‘The Castaway’, Joseph Conrad’s tale ‘Amy Foster’ (1901) tells the story of a Polish man who, after leaving his home to sail the seas, comes to reside, work, and raise a family in the county of Kent in south-east England. In this respect it corresponds unusually closely to its author’s own post-maritime history, though the story’s main protagonist, an illiterate peasant from the Carpathian mountains, is very unlike Conrad. Influentially, Edward Said read ‘Amy Foster’ as a great statement on the theme of exile, personally and historically important to Conrad, as to Said himself. This article approaches the tale as a study of immigration and the reception of the immigrant (a critical issue in many parts of the world today), and discusses its staging of the drama of hospitality, and of what Derrida called ‘hostipitality’, attending to different forms of hospitality, and inhospitability, in the tale. Moving from the content of the story to its narrative rhetoric in the context of practices of Victorian and modernist fiction, the essay goes on to explore what this tale may show of the kind of qualified hospitality that modern fiction such as Conrad’s offers to the characters who come to reside in it.