Not exactly tales for boys: Gender and difference in the writings of Joseph Conrad

In Joseph Conrad\u27s tales, representations of women and of feminine generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad\u27s use of allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of masculine tales of adventure and intrigue and feminine dramas of love or domesticity have all inspired extensive commentary. Many critics have argued that Conrad\u27s fictions are aesthetically flawed by the inclusion of women and love plots; thus Thomas Moser has questioned why Conrad did not cut them out altogether (99). Yet a thematics of gender suffuses Conrad\u27s narrative strategies. Even in tales that contain no significant female characters or obvious love plots, Conrad portrays men whose gender identifications are not always clearly discrete; in subtle acts of displacement, Conrad introduces elusive feminine presences into male/male relationships. One instance of Conrad\u27s ambiguous deferrals at the generic level occurs in The Secret Agent; late in the novel, the Assistant Commissioner tells the Home Secretary, From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama (204). That point of view, which the detective tacitly refrains from claiming as his own, recasts a political threat as a sexual or domestic crisis and situates Winnie Verloc, with all her marital secrets, at the center of the action. In my dissertation, I investigate this identifiably feminine point of view, which is present in fugitive ways throughout Conrad\u27s canon. Focusing on current feminist, historicist, and psychoanalytic debates about subjectivity, female iconography, fetishism, genre theory, narrative satire, audience address, and the gaze, I explore how issues of gender and difference inform Conrad\u27s fictions at both structural and thematic levels. Conrad\u27s narrative strategies are articulated through a language of sexual difference that provides the vocabulary and the grammar for tales examining European class and racial---as well as gender---paradigms and their effects both in Europe and in the colonies. Yet this language is more than merely descriptive, for it permits dialogic tensions and interpretive indeterminacies incompatible with the uncritical reproduction of Victorian ideologic (and generic) norms and goals