From Incapable "Angel in the House" to Invincible "New Woman" in Marlovian Narratives: Representing Womanhood in "Heart of Darkness" and Chance

WHEN ADDRESSING ISSUES of the Modernist arts and literature in the face of the "machismo aesthetics" of the male modernists, feminist critics choose to turn their attention to things "associated with the feminine" that have long been excluded or ignored by male critics (Felski 1995: 24). According to Rita Felski, modernity as a concept denotes the public sphere dominated by malecentered institutions, and enacts a rigid hierarchical distinction between the public sphere (masculinity) and private sphere (femininity), which distinguishes the male mastery of a "experimental, self-conscious, and ironic aesthetic" from the female indulgence in the "seductive lures of emotion, desire, and the body" (24). To dismande the phallogocentric fixity of gender hierarchy, Felski encourages a "revisionist readings of the male modernist canon" on the part of feminist critics to cast new light on the importance of female experiences as well as women's modernity (24). Inspired by my predecessors' efforts to illuminate images of the feminine and to release the voices of female characters repressed by traditional scholarship concerning modernist literary text, this paper will re-read Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1899) and Chance (1914), focussing on the different representations of womanhood filtered through the eyes of the serial male narrator Charlie Marlow. Motivated by the feminist objective to restore the importance of the trivial, the everyday, and the mundane in the experiences of women (Felski 1995: 28), I shall present a critical perspective in which the representation of women and the feminine are fully explored and addressed, through the lens of female sensibility and sensitivity as well. As Nadelhaft has put it, "a feminist reading of Joseph Conrad is designed in large part to reclaim Conrad for women readers for whom he has been almost a clandestine pleasure, in the face of the male critical hierarchy and feminist disapproval" (1991: 1) so that the pleasures for women readers of Conrad's works can be best enjoyed and savored from the new critical perspective of feminism.Many critics of Chance have commented on the complex discussions of gender at work in the novel.1 By comparing the representation of the female protagonist in this novel with Conrad's earlier evocation of the "Intended" in "Heart of Darkness," this essay explores the development of Conrad's response to contemporary literary tropes from that of the "Angel in the House" to the "New Woman." I shall argue that while the "Intended" belongs to the category implied by Coventry Patmore's famous poem, Flora de Barrai in part sheds the patriarchal assumptions of the Victorian "Angel" and emerges with an identity more closely conforming to the ideals of the "New Woman." Nevertheless, a comparison of the two female images proves that their construction goes beyond the simplistic polar division of patriarchal passivity/feminist independence, which in turn demonstrates Conrad's insight into the complexity as well as profundity of womanhood.The Construction of the Intended as "Angel in the House" in "Heart of Darkness"2In her classic essay on the mechanism of gender and imperialist ideologies operated in "Heart of Darkness," Johanna Smith points out that Marlow's misogynistic vision of womanhood as an innocent and naive being - dubbed as "angel in the house" - was shared by his Victorian contemporaries. The ideal Victorian woman is a figure needing to be protected and enshrined within the domestic sphere; the outside world of imperialist adventures is too harsh for her to survive and to understand. Smith spells out the psychological mechanism for the Victorian construction of the separate spheres which underlies Marlow's discourse of womanhood. The ideology of the separate spheres is constructed to strengthen the workings of "masculine imperialism" that is safely distanced from the private sphere "too beautiful altogether"; in other words, the "the feminine sphere of 'idea' will prevent the masculine sphere of Tact' from deteriorating" (1996: 180). …