Arrow Of Gold Research Articles

Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity

Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity

Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The portrayal of the “New Woman” in Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold and Halide Edip Adıvar’s Handan

There are striking resemblances regarding the
 role of women and the constitution of the female subject in European and late
 Ottoman societies at the turn of the century as represented in Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold and Halide Edip Adıvar’s
 Handan. Both Handan and Rita struggle
 to establish themselves as independent subjects in societies where they are
 basically perceived and treated as objects. Seeking to assert their individual
 identities as “New Women”, Rita and Handan stray from the well-trodden path and
 openly challenge patriarchal structures that marginalise women. Yet, they are
 also torn by inner turmoil that results from the conflict between traditional
 female roles their society expects them to play and their desire for an
 authentic, fluid identity. Whereas Rita is able to exercise relatively more
 agency and ends up following her own path in the end of the novel, Handan can
 only find release in death. Thus, Handan fails to make the vital
 transformational shift from seeing herself as the helpless victim and as not
 good enough to deeply honoring and respecting herself as a whole. In what
 follows, I comparatively examine Rita and Handan as discursive constructions of
 the New Woman in fiction and examine ways in which the New Woman protagonists
 in these novels internalise or challenge dominant gender norms and discourses
 of their milieu. 

“All his life seemed to rush into that hand”: The Poetics and Erotics of Touch in Conrad’s Fiction

Over the course of his career, Conrad’s descriptions of touch form a remarkable trajectory. The early Malay novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, present a woman’s sensual touch as a dangerous, debilitating experience for a man. For the next several years, Conrad’s descriptions of touch are rare and muted, even in situations that would seem to call for more detailed and explicit accounts. Later, some crucial male/male relations produce deeper images of the power of tactility, and this new freedom starts to extend to Conrad’s representations of male/female relations in works like “A Smile of Fortune” and “The Planter of Malata.” In each of these works, he negotiates issues of power, culture, gender, and panic. Finally, in his last completed novels, The Arrow of Gold and The Rover, Conrad directly sets forth embodied emotion and intimacy through the touching of hands, shoulders, and lips, as the dangerous tactility narrated in the early novels set in an exotic Orient is at last able to be domesticated and experienced in an ultimately unexceptional though still highly charged manner. Conrad’s authorial development may be connected to issues occurring in his personal life at this time, and it parallels the changing cultural perceptions of the sense of touch from the late Victorian to the early modern period, in particular the literary transformations of the status of the tactile during this period.

Conradian Claustrophobia: Gender, Confinement, Emancipation

This article discusses the ways in which space is gendered in a number of Conrad's fictions, with a particular focus on those spaces experienced as metaphorically or literally claustrophobic and stifling. First two shorter works in which men face entrapment are discussed: "The Inn of the Two Witches" and "Amy Foster." The article then builds on the treatment of Alice's imprisonment in "A Smile of Fortune" to consider two works that focus on a woman who feels stifled and entrapped in physical and cultural spaces: "To-morrow" and The Arrow of Gold. The movement through these works does not follow the chronology of their composition, but rather focuses on the varying ways in which Conrad uses constrictive physical spaces to explore gender stereotypes.

Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity Adam Barrows Peter Lancelot Mallios , Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010, 468 pp. Joseph Conrad languished in poverty, ill health, and relative obscurity during the period when he was writing his greatest novels, finding a mass audience only when his arguably weaker later novels were embraced by publishers and readers in a country where Conrad himself had never set foot, a place that scarcely figured at all in the otherwise vast geographical scope of his fiction. Why did Americans of the late nineteen-teens and twenties embrace Conrad wholeheartedly as one of their own when on the surface his style, settings, and subject matter seem so distant from what we typically identify with American writing? Why lionize a man who seemed, based on his fiction at least, to have a disdainful European contempt for American materialism and greed? Why on earth would American readers make the plodding and now largely unread late Conrad novel The Arrow of Gold the second bestselling book in America when novels like Lord Jim or The Secret Agent had previously failed to find anywhere near that kind of enthusiastic reception? In his brilliant and compellingly readable book, Our Conrad, Peter Lancelot Mallios provides an answer to these questions and in the process makes an impassioned and thoroughly informed case for a transnational comparatist approach to Conrad, American studies, and modernism alike, opening up productive possibilities for dialogue between Americanists and Conradians that has been, as Mallios writes, "more foreclosed than one might think" (ix). America's construction of Conrad as a "master" literary figure, Mallios argues, was crucially determined by the Great War, when under the Woodrow Wilson presidency America emerged as "both an international power and a modern nation entwined in a global crisis" (33). At a time when America's relationship to the British Allied war cause and to Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony more generally were issues of paramount public concern, the Polish-born Conrad, who was at once both productively assimilated to and insuperably alienated from his adoptive country of England seemed to be rehearsing America's own crises and opportunities, or as Mallios more lucidly phrases it: "Conrad's writings directly evoke and uncannily summon wide fields of U.S. concern and territory, consequently [End Page 324] disrupting, dialogizing, and placing into controversy vast domains of U.S. knowledge hitherto administered by a grounding tabula of isolationist and exceptionalist logic" (33). Conrad's exceptional malleability within and adaptability to this uniquely American cultural and political nexus of problems is in large part due to his notoriously ambiguous and ironic narrative positioning, which enabled him to be co-opted by some American readers as aggressively anti-War and by others as the greatest militant jingoist since Kipling. Doubleday, Page, and Company, clearly seeing the commercial opportunities for selling their latest star client according to the latter interpretation, carefully and quite deliberately in Mallios's view packaged their uniform editions of Conrad's works in direct replication of the aggressive marketing campaign that had worked so well for Kipling. If The New Republic could use Conrad as a model for Anglophilism and the allied war effort "precisely because his sense of British appreciation and sympathy originally came from somewhere else" (116), other readers, like H.L. Mencken, could read in Conrad's work a staggering condemnation of the entire Anglo-Saxon enterprise and by extension the war effort that was being mustered to prop it up. While Conrad himself carefully and calculatedly seems to have refused to clarify his position on the war, thus enabling his reception by a broader section of Americans, Mallios attributes Conrad's ambivalence and ambiguity far more worshipfully to the great writer's ability to produce literary "heterotopias" such as his Malay trilogy wherein "hierarchies of imperialism, and the conceptual segregations endemic to them, are folded into a single social space in which cultures and races are multiple, power is plurally distributed, and all methods, boundaries, alliances, and attachments are provisional, subject to no naturalizing or exceptionalizing claims" (31). While a theoretical reliance on the overused and insufficiently challenged Foucauldian concept of "heterotopias" perhaps unfairly absolves...

Conrad’s “Woman as Truth” Topos: “Supposing Truth Is a Woman — What Then?”

Conrad’s “Woman as Truth” Topos: “Supposing Truth Is a Woman — What Then?” William Freedman The topos of the dangerous woman in many of Conrad’s narratives is more than an emblem of authorial gynophobia — it stands for the danger of truth or knowledge, typically for the protectively hidden truths of the instinctual, uncontrollable, or savage self whose trampling of self possession is tantamount to death. Is Conrad’s presentation of woman as the alluring and intimidating object of knowledge to be construed literally or metaphorically? I believe that the two options are compatible and belong to the tradition in which woman, like truth itself, holds special claim as the fascinating object of male desire, forbidden, and inscrutable — this last largely as a defense against the danger of what so irresistibly draws men. The ambivalent attitude toward hidden truth in Conrad’s fiction typically derives from its association with woman as both carnal reality and the symbolic incarnation of forbidden knowledge. I In Conrad’s “The Planter of Malata,” on four occasions the ironically named Felicia announces her identity as truth itself, e. g. “Here I stand for truth itself” (WT 78; cf. also 43, 47, 75). In numerous other cases the association is latent—for instance, in the feminization of the natural landscapes which, as in Heart of Darkness, speak the savage truth to those brave or foolhardy enough to pay attention. Woman merges with nature as the unfathomable other; Conrad’s male narrators and protagonists often identify her with the enigmatic, mysterious, and unfathomable—the sea, the wilderness, “truth” itself. In The Arrow of Gold, for example, Rita embodies “that something secret and obscure which is in all women” (146).1 [End Page 67] In “The Return” woman is explicitly identified as a form of the world’s impenetrable and unutterable secret. Groping at the feet of the wife who has betrayed him (as the sea, the wilderness, and other objects of hungering curiosity tend to do), Alvan Hervey is “penetrated by an irresistible belief in an enigma, by the conviction that within his reach and passing away from him was the very secret of existence — its certitude, immaterial and precious” (TU 176). In Under Western Eyes Razumov regards Natalie Haldin “not as an individual, but as the symbol of transcendent value”; his desire for her “is transposed metonymically into desire for the truth, the removal of the last obstacle to full utterance” (Cave 1998: 5). In Chance “the ‘inwardness’ of events becomes symbolically female, so that knowledge and ignorance of women function as paradigms of all knowledge and ignorance” (Roberts 1993: 98). And in “Falk,” as in “The Planter of Malata,” the link is literal and explicit. The narrator of “Falk,” gazing at Hermann’s niece, gifted with a bewitching “profusion of sensuous charms,” identifies her as “the eternal truth of an unerring principle” (TLS 236). It is tempting to dismiss this claim as ironic, the heated untruth man is heir to when dazed by desire.2 But the narrator’s perception is familiar. With magnificent hair — abundant, long, thick, and of the lion’s tawny color (TLS 151),3 Hermann’s niece, unnamed, is woman dangerously incarnate, the eternal and predatory principle of feminine sensuality. She is “an allegoric statue of the Earth” (152), a “siren” singing irresistibly the female sensuality that threatens to unravel man’s self-possession and overpower his hold on reason and self-control; she represents “the eternal truth of an unerring principle,” sufficiently threatening to demand the obfuscating reduction of her character to enigma. At the end, feebly and gratuitously, both Hermann and the narrator declare that it is “impossible to make women out” (236—37; cf. also 152, 160, 200, 201, 206, 208, 213, 216, 217, 236, and 239).4 The dark specter of the female endangers the vulnerable feminine element in man. The chilling suspicion that what she wants is man’s weakness, his capitulation, his enslavement, breeds the ostensibly irresolvable Freudian perplexity about the nature of female desire. [End Page 68] Some recent criticism of Conrad has turned away from the earlier prevailing charge of misogynistic fear or loathing toward a more complex view of his representation of...

Joseph Conrad: betrayal and identity

Acknowledgments - Two Prototypes of Betrayal: Almayer's Folly - The Unshared Ideal of Self: An Outcast of the Islands - The Real Existence of Passions: The Sisters, 'The Rescuer' - The Brotherhood of the Sea: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', 'Heart of Darkness', Lord Jim - The Betrayal of Land-Entanglements: Nostromo, The Secret Agent - Independence and Community: Under Western Eyes, 'The Secret Sharer' - The Wisdom of the Heart: Chance, Victory - Initiation and Invention: The Rover, The Arrow of Gold - Notes - Index

The Grotesque in Conrad's Fiction

C ONRAD has yet to be named a master of the grotesque. In recent books on the in literature by Wolfgang Kayser, Arthur Clayborough, and Philip Thomson, Conrad is not even mentioned.' Critics have analyzed the in the works of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Golding, and Sherwood Anderson, among others, but no one has made an extended study of the in Conrad's fiction.2 This is surprising in view of the importance in Conrad's fiction of characters and situations to which the novelist himself applied the term grotesque and which exemplify qualities by which twentieth-century scholars have identified the in literature. The distortion of persons and objects, the yoking of incompatibles, the fusion of the fearsome and the ludicrous, inducing in the reader a sense of dislocation and insecurity-those elements stressed by Kayser and Clayborough and others in their definitions of the grotesque-are pervasive in Conrad's fiction from Almayer's Folly to Victory and The Arrow of Gold. The is of essential importance in Conrad's treatment