The publication of Chance, first serialized in The New York Herald in 1912, followed by revised book editions in England (Methuen) and the United States (Doubleday) in 1914, ended Conrad’s terrible money troubles. It was a huge success.[1] This is treated as a significant irony by most Conrad critics, who, echoing the “achievement and decline” thesis, identify Chance as the first of Conrad’s depleted fictions, those written after Under Western Eyes. In his Psychoanalytic Biography, Bernard Meyer argues, persuasively, that Conrad’s enormous psychological investment in Under Western Eyes led to a breakdown, so he never risked that level of investment in his writing again (220–223).
This is a reasonable argument. Though critics have written a number of books and essays attempting to refute the achievement and decline theory,[2] no one has argued plausibly that Conrad’s later fiction exhibits the intensity and scope of Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, or Under Western Eyes. But Chance is nonetheless a strange, interesting novel: Conrad’s only attempt to create a romance with a young woman as protagonist, and his only novel to make a swindling millionaire its central antagonist. It is also a fitting work to conclude this study, for it reveals, once again, the profound and radical inconsistency of the politics in Conrad’s fiction.
In a tortuously arch and oblique review in the Times Literary Supplement (later expanded in Notes on Novelists), Henry James argues that Chance is, above all, an experimental novel, one which privileges method over substance. In the review, James first criticizes most contemporary novels for being full of incident but relatively artless, lacking in attention to method and craftsmanship. He then singles out Chance as being, essentially, no more than a study in method, in how novels are told. “The miracle,” he writes of Chance, “is of the rarest”:
confounding all calculation and suggesting more reflections than we can begin to make a place for here; but the sources of surprise for it might be, were this possible, even greater and yet leave the fact itself in all independence, the fact that the whole undertaking was committed by its very first step either to be “art” exclusively or to be nothing. (Notes on Novelists, 274)
Chance, he claims, concerns itself almost entirely with its narrative method; the narrators (or what James calls the “producers”) are “almost more numerous and quite emphatically more material than the creatures and the production itself in whom and which we by the general law of fiction expect such agents to lose themselves” (275).
As Cedric Watts suggests, for James to accuse Conrad of excessive self-consciousness and attention to method over plot is amusingly ironic (116). But James was right to identify the novel as pure écriture. Susan Jones goes further than James to demonstrate the self-consciousness and the great authorial distance that Conrad achieved in Chance, unearthing the many subgenres Conrad both incorporates and mocks. Conrad, she writes, draws “on the methods of a number of sub-genres: the romance . . . the detective novel . . . the sensation novel and melodrama, complete with family jealousies, a wicked governess, intrigues, domestic enclosure, and the sense of female entrapment onboard ship. Flora’s story emerges obliquely from an interweaving series of set pieces consisting of a ‘rites of passage’ narrative of a young sailor, a Victorian family saga, the biography of a fraudulent financier, and anecdotes of seamen delivering a cargo of explosives to the colonies on Anthony’s ship, The Ferndale” (Conrad and Women, 104). Chance echoes and quietly mocks the popular genres of its day: the romance, the melodrama, the bildungsroman, the crime novel, and the sea novel.[3]
Marlow creates distance from events by reminding us repeatedly that the action is carried out by characters, characters whose origins are fictional. Charles Powell is the protagonist of Chance when it functions as a bildungsroman. One of the down-and-out porters who helps young Powell to his first berth as a ship’s officer aboard the Ferndale is “like a hungry ogre” (29). With this otherwise superfluous observation, Powell’s voyage from innocence to experience, piloted by an ogre “and his horrible little pal in [a] soldier’s coat” (29–30), becomes proverbial; he is a generic young man beginning his generic adventures in a generic fairy tale. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan notes how emphatically Conrad draws attention to the generic qualities of the novel when she writes,
it is not only Marlow, the narrator, who insists on the fictionality of his tale. Conrad himself seems to take part in the game of textuality by neatly dividing the story into the section of “The Damsel” and the section of “The Knight.” Whereas the reader of a bona fide romance is invited to immerse himself in the world of the work, the reader of Chance is constantly reminded of the textual, fictional quality of this world as loudly proclaimed by the generic signals. (Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, 158–159)
The large number of references to books, usually novels, contributes further to our sense that this is less a novel than a meditation on the novel. Marlow refers to his own reading at least four separate times, and Roderick Anthony courts Flora de Barral in part because he was bored during his visit with his sister and her family; he had “read every book there is” in the Fynes’ cottage. Powell describes Captain Anthony as a “great reader” and confesses that he, himself, had “a great liking for books. To this day I can’t come near a book but I must know what it is about” (413). The novel is full of both storytellers (including an unnamed, primary narrator, though Marlow and Powell provide most of the narrative) and writers—Carleon Anthony, the poet; his daughter Zoe, author of the feminist tract mocked by Marlow; and even the “pedestrian” John Fyne, who “wrote once a little book called the “Tramp’s Itinerary,” on English walking paths (37). In two separate scenes, Marlow appears, unnecessarily, to greet the primary narrator from the shadow of a bookcase (350, 359); Marlow himself, it seems, emerges from books. The grotesquely villainous De Barral can’t understand Powell’s Biblical reference to Jonah (399–400); the good characters are all readers, while the villain of the piece says of himself that he is “‘no reader’ with something like pride in his low tones” (381).
Chance is flooded with references to books, and Conrad seems not only to be gently mocking readers, both the characters in his book and his actual audience, but authors, both the authors of the subgenres he deliberately echoes, and Conrad himself. Anyone, it seems, can write a book. And anyone can live, delusionally, within their pages. In “a world which prides itself on being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible theories,” Marlow reminds us, echoing a similar sentiment from The Tempest,[4] we “are the creatures of our light literature much more than is generally suspected” (288). The novel’s protagonists—Roderick Anthony, Flora de Barral, and young Charles Powell—are all readers who are influenced, sometimes in malign ways, by their reading. And the novel’s writers—Carleon Anthony, Zoe Fyne, and John Fyne—are all manipulative to various degrees.
James’s contention that the novel is essentially pure technique, a novel more about writing a novel than about characters and incidents, is therefore well justified. Based on Conrad’s biography, we can deduce two good reasons for him to have produced it: first, we might recall Bernard Meyer’s persuasive suggestion that he could no longer risk deep and perilous psychological investment in his fiction, so he wrote Chance and his later works from a far greater critical and emotional distance. Second, Conrad desperately needed to reach a wider audience, and, as Susan Jones demonstrates in “Modernism and the Marketplace: The Case of Conrad’s Chance,” he deliberately and, as it turned out, successfully manipulated the novel’s ingredients to appeal to the mostly female readers of the New York Herald’’s “Sunday Magazine,” where it was first serialized (105–108).
Chance’s byzantine narrative structure[5] and multiple narrative voices make it difficult to assign any particular political perspective to the novel. The characters’ viewpoints might be dismissed as mere ingredients in this generic stew because the characters themselves seem generic: the ingénue Charles Powell; the grasping, social climbing, desperate governess; the first mate who both venerates and monopolizes his captain. Even its name draws our attention to the generic nature of its plot, driven by its many accidents of “chance.” The novel, we might say, is pure artifice. Despite this, Chance invites us to explore its politics as I have defined them for this study because its chief villain is a fraudulent financier, its secondary villain a published feminist, and its secondary narrator an acerbic misogynist.
In a much-quoted October 7, 1907 letter to his socialist friend, Cunningham Graham, Conrad defends himself from the charge that The Secret Agent unfairly makes villains of anarchists. He has not attacked true revolutionaries in the novel, Conrad claims in his response; the “revolutionaries” in the novel, with the exception of the Professor, are mere “shams.” Instead, he identifies the true anarchists of the early twentieth century, the millionaires: “By Jove! If I had the necessary talent I would like to go for the true anarchist—which is the millionaire. Then you would see the venom flow. But it’s too big a job” (Collected Letters, 3, 491). But in Nostromo Conrad had already “gone after” Holroyd, his representation of an evangelical American capitalist who operates independently of any rules. Holroyd’s great wealth frees him to pursue his own ends and to seek his own version of immortality through the spread of his religious beliefs and the establishment of the Occidental Republic, the newest nation in South America. As I suggested in chapter 4, the political implications of this portrait are clear and direct. Has Conrad created a second millionaire anarchist in de Barral? Should we read him the same way? As I will seek to demonstrate below, probably not.
In Conrad’s Secrets, Robert Hampson adds one more subgenre to the list noted above, echoed in Chance: the “criminal capitalism” novel. The second half of the nineteenth century suffered a large number of bank failures and spectacular financial swindles. As Hampson points out, while the criminal justice system focused on petty crime, what later became known as white collar crime affected far more people, throwing numbers of the middle and lower middle class into poverty. Drawing on the work of Ranald Michie’s The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914, Hampson notes the large number of novels devoted to financial swindles of all kinds: “From Thackeray’s The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841), Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1851) and G. W. M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1844–1856) through to Arnold Bennett’s Teresa of Watling Street (1913) and Le Queux’s Sins of the City (1914), Michie lists over fifty novels dealing with banking crises, financial speculations and fraud” (114). One of these novels, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), was a likely source for Chance (112).
De Barral and his crimes are additional, sensational ingredients of the generic jumble of Chance. I argue above that Nostromo stages and demonstrates the criminality of post-colonial, late-stage capitalism, at least in so far as it affects former colonies. Holroyd, in this reading, becomes something of an unconscious anarchist who creates his own laws. But as the villain of Chance, de Barral is quite different from Holroyd; the latter operates well within the economic laws of imperial capitalism and evinces something of the grandeur of America’s robber barons. De Barral is a lower-class outsider from the start, a small man with small ideas who achieves a great short-term success but is caught and punished for his transgressions, in part because he lacks the intelligence to keep from being swindled himself. While Holroyd leads the large, all-conquering forces of imperial capitalism, and his power drives the action of the novel into a future pitting a rising proletariat against its capitalist masters, de Barral is never any more than an ignorant bank clerk who finds the formula to strike it rich at the expense of his depositors.[6] He is thoroughly discredited from the start. We learn of his success in retrospect; through the present of the novel, he is either in jail or, as he believes, virtually imprisoned while sailing with Anthony and Flora as the anonymous Mr. Smith.
In part because of de Barral’s singular meanness, and in part because of the generic priorities of the novel—its insistent, self-conscious display of its generic ingredients—it’s difficult to read Chance as a clear indictment of the system that produces men like de Barral. Indeed, it seems more appropriate to read Chance as upholding and perpetuating the conservative cultural values most often expressed by the other novels within its many subgenres; its classism, for example, is far more pervasive than its criticism of England’s financial system. From the pinched, hypocritical morality of de Barral to the representation of Flora’s cousins as a rogues’ gallery of lower-class philistines, the tone of Conrad’s disdain for lower middle-class taste and values perfectly matches the magazine fiction of its time. Harper’s Monthly Magazine, where Conrad first published “An Anarchist” (Aug 1906) “The Informer” (Dec 1906) “The Partner (Nov 1911) and “The Secret Sharer” (Aug-Sept 1910) is full of stories told from this perspective, where the values of the characters match the values expressed in the magazine’s ads. The young men in the stories drive the cars and the young women wear the clothes and use the creams advertised in its pages. The values of the lower classes, especially the lower middle class, are mocked.[7]
The representation of Flora’s cousins in Chance reproduces the class snobbishness of much of the other fiction published in The New York Herald and other popular magazines of its time. After the Fynes rescue Flora from the general collapse of the de Barral household, where the servants are described, dismissively enough, as “having assembled for a fatuous consultation in the basement” (127), the Fynes send a telegram to de Barral, letting him know Flora is with them. De Barral never responds. Instead, he sends a grotesquely vulgar cousin to the Fynes to take Flora in. The following quotation conveys the extent and vehemence of Marlow’s and, I believe, the narrative’s classism:
To a telegram in guarded terms dispatched to de Barral no answer was received for more than twenty-four hours. This certainly caused the Fynes some anxiety. When the answer arrived late on the evening of next day it was in the shape of an elderly man. An unexpected sort of man. Fyne explained to me with precision that he evidently belonged to what is most respectable in the lower middle classes. He was calm and slow in his speech. He was wearing a frock-coat, had grey whiskers meeting under his chin, and declared on entering that Mr. de Barral was his cousin. He hastened to add that he had not seen his cousin for many years, while he looked upon Fyne (who received him alone) with so much distrust that Fyne felt hurt (the person actually refusing at first the chair offered to him) and retorted tartly that he, for his part, had never seen Mr. de Barral, in his life, and that, since the visitor did not want to sit down, he, Fyne, begged him to state his business as shortly as possible. The man in black sat down then with a faint superior smile.
He had come for the girl. His cousin had asked him in a note delivered by a messenger to go to Brighton at once and take “his girl” over from a gentleman named Fyne and give her house-room for a time in his family. And there he was. His business had not allowed him to come sooner. His business was the manufacture on a large scale of cardboard boxes. He had two grown-up girls of his own. He had consulted his wife and so that was all right. The girl would get a welcome in his home. His home most likely was not what she had been used to but, etc. etc.
All the time Fyne felt subtly in that man’s manner a derisive disapproval of everything that was not lower middle class, a profound respect for money, a mean sort of contempt for speculators that fail, and a conceited satisfaction with his own respectable vulgarity. (128–29)
The Fynes must send Flora off with this caricature of middle-class respectability, but very shortly after she joins her cousins, she is so verbally abused by the other members of the family, especially the mother and sisters, that she runs away. Here is how Marlow describes her reception and flight from the “odious” cousins’ household:
I could imagine easily how the poor girl must have been bewildered and hurt at her reception in that household—envied for her past while delivered defenceless to the tender mercies of people without any fineness either of feeling or mind, unable to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner for disdain, her silent shrinking for pride. The wife of the “odious person” was witless and fatuously conceited. Of the two girls of the house one was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded—if they may be credited with any mind at all. The rather numerous men of the family were dense and grumpy, or dense and jocose. None in that grubbing lot had enough humanity to leave her alone. At first she was made much of, in an offensively patronising manner. The connection with the great de Barral gratified their vanity even in the moment of the smash. They dragged her to their place of worship, whatever it might have been, where the congregation stared at her, and they gave parties to other beings like themselves at which they exhibited her with ignoble self-satisfaction. She did not know how to defend herself from their importunities, insolence and exigencies. She lived amongst them, a passive victim, quivering in every nerve, as if she were flayed. After the trial her position became still worse. On the least occasion and even on no occasions at all she was scolded, or else taunted with her dependence. The pious girl lectured her on her defects, the romping girl teased her with contemptuous references to her accomplishments, and was always trying to pick insensate quarrels with her about some “fellow” or other. The mother backed up her girls invariably, adding her own silly, wounding remarks. I must say they were probably not aware of the ugliness of their conduct. They were nasty amongst themselves as a matter of course; their disputes were nauseating in origin, in manner, in the spirit of mean selfishness. These women, too, seemed to enjoy greatly any sort of row and were always ready to combine together to make awful scenes to the luckless girl on incredibly flimsy pretences. Thus Flora on one occasion had been reduced to rage and despair, had her most secret feelings lacerated, had obtained a view of the utmost baseness to which common human nature can descend—I won’t say à propos de bottes as the French would excellently put it, but literally à propos of some mislaid cheap lace trimmings for a nightgown the romping one was making for herself. Yes, that was the origin of one of the grossest scenes which, in their repetition, must have had a deplorable effect on the unformed character of the most pitiful of de Barral’s victims. (163–165)
What can we expect, Marlow asks, of people whose business might be the “manufacture on a large scale of cardboard boxes”? Nothing in the lives of these people escapes Marlow’s disdain: their dress, their unrefined manners, their intelligence, or their religion. Even Marlow’s French phrases help demonstrate the superiority of the cosmopolitan Marlow over Flora’s impossibly vulgar cousins.
Here and elsewhere Marlow proves himself a tremendous snob, a Wildean figure[8] with an interest in room furnishings; he ingratiates himself with a money-lender by remarking, when he enters the “financier’s” office, that he “had never seen so many fine things assembled together out of a collection.” Later during the interview, the money lender notices and encourages Marlow’s admiration for his objects while deprecating the taste of his usual clients: “I see that you know what you are looking at. Not many people who come here on business do. Stable fittings are more in their way.” “Just go and have a look,” he adds, “at that garniture de cheminée yonder.” The garniture, Marlow agrees, “was very fine” (77). In the first half of the novel, Marlow repeatedly insists on his superiority to those who don’t share his tastes, attitudes, and background. He happens to be near the courthouse at the close of de Barral’s trial and is caught up in the overflow crowd outside, waiting for the news of de Barral’s sentence:
The sentence making its way outside met with a good reception. A small mob composed mainly of people who themselves did not look particularly clever and scrupulous, leavened by a slight sprinkling of genuine pickpockets, amused itself by cheering in the most penetrating, abominable cold drizzle that I remember. . . . (85)
I got mixed up in that crowd seething with an animosity as senseless as things of the street always are . . . . (86)
Marlow resents being jostled in the crowd. He was “greatly incommoded by the pressure of a hulking fellow who was remarking to some of his equally oppressive friends that the ‘beggar ought to have been poleaxed.’ I don’t know whether he had ever confided his savings to de Barral but if so, judging from his appearance, they must have been the proceeds of some successful burglary” (86). We might contrast this Marlow’s disdain for common people, whom he labels “things of the street,” with the attitude of Lord Jim’s Marlow—his far more generous response to the crowd outside Jim’s trial in Lord Jim (57) and his characterization of the pilgrims, bound for Mecca: “Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire” (17). The attitude of Chance’s Marlow presents a telling contrast; it is both misanthropic and classist.[9]
Marlow isn’t always reliable. He is at first annoyed by Flora, confessing that he doesn’t like “rude girls” (45), mocking her despair and even her gestures toward suicide; but then he changes his feelings radically, taking up her cause and becoming her champion: with Anthony and Powell, becoming one of her “knights.” His speculations are often extravagant, sometimes ineffectually rebutted by the primary narrator and sometimes proven wrong by the narrative.[10] But nothing in the novel contradicts his snobbish, often vehement dismissal of lower middle-class tastes, attitudes, and occupations. In this case, the novel upholds the class values of much of the popular romantic and sentimental fiction of its time.
Marlow’s extravagant misogyny represents the most important political feature of Chance. For Thomas Moser in Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline, the “decline” phase of Conrad’s career begins with Chance. “Conrad’s moral sense,” he writes,
demanding that his characters act upon their own volition, conflicts with his misogyny. Woman in action, woman as the competitor of man, is insufferable. Thus, Conrad’s sympathy for the homeless waif [Flora] vanishes as soon as she makes a gesture of self-assertion. Marlow’s comments on women and Conrad’s characterization of Mrs. Fyne in Chance both seem to evolve from unconfessed misogynistic feelings. (160)
Moser wasn’t the first to deplore the misogyny in Chance—Conrad’s close friend and supporter, Edward Garnett, mildly but directly criticized the novel in the Nation for its treatment of the Fynes—both, he found, are caricatured in ways that reveal Conrad’s own prejudices, his disdain for feminists and middle-class values:
Mr. Conrad’s philosophic derision of all theorists is disclosed in his scathing treatment of the respectable Fynes. Perhaps he over-emphasizes by a shade his ironical derision which plays like sheet lightning round the heads of these self-complacent people, “common-place, earnest, without smiles and without guile.” Perhaps, in Marlow’s dislike of feminism the author’s shadow is projected too obtrusively on the curtain, but, anyway, in the portraits of the Fynes, the middle-class mediocre target is riddled with shafts barbed with malicious wit. (The Critical Heritage, 278)
Conrad himself insisted on the political nature of that misogyny by making Zoe Fyne a champion of women’s rights, a suffragette. According to Cedric Watts, Conrad based Mrs. Fyne on Sylvia Pankhurst, author of The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, published in 1910, two years before Chance first appeared. If Watts is correct, as I believe he is, Conrad created an inaccurate, even slanderous parody. Here is how Marlow characterizes the philosophy of her “little book”:
It was not political, it was not social. It was a knock-me-down doctrine—a practical individualistic doctrine. You would not thank me for expounding it to you at large. Indeed I think that she herself did not enlighten me fully. There must have been things not fit for a man to hear. But shortly, and as far as my bewilderment allowed me to grasp its naïve atrociousness, it was something like this: that no consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in the way of a woman (who by the mere fact of her sex was the predestined victim of conditions created by men’s selfish passions, their vices and their abominable tyranny) from taking the shortest cut towards securing for herself the easiest possible existence. She had even the right to go out of existence without considering anyone’s feelings or convenience since some women’s existences were made impossible by the shortsighted baseness of men. (59)
And later:
He told me that his wife had been very much engaged in a certain work. I had always wondered how she occupied her time. It was in writing. Like her husband she too published a little book. Much later on I came upon it. It had nothing to do with pedestrianism. It was a sort of hand-book for women with grievances (and all women had them), a sort of compendious theory and practice of feminine free morality. It made you laugh at its transparent simplicity. But that authorship was revealed to me much later. I didn’t of course ask Fyne what work his wife was engaged on; but I marveled to myself at her complete ignorance of the world, of her own sex and of the other kind of sinners. (65–66)
Nowhere in The Suffragette does Pankhurst anticipate Zoe Fyne’s advice that women act unscrupulously, practice “feminine free morality,” in their relationships with men.
Quite the reverse is the case, in fact. The Marlow of Chance is infamous for claiming that women have no sense of honor or decency, that they seek only thrills, and that they purse “sensation at any cost”:
As to honour—you know—it’s a very fine medieval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn’t theirs. Since it may be laid as a general principle that women always get what they want we must suppose they didn’t want it. In addition they are devoid of decency. I mean masculine decency. Cautiousness too is foreign to them—the heavy reasonable cautiousness which is our glory. And if they had it they would make of it a thing of passion, so that its own mother—I mean the mother of cautiousness—wouldn’t recognize it. Prudence with them is a matter of thrill like the rest of sublunary contrivances. “Sensation at any cost,” is their secret device. All the virtues are not enough for them; they want also all the crimes for their own. And why? Because in such completeness there is power—the kind of thrill they love most. (63)
In The Suffragette, Pankhurst reveals male political officials acting dishonorably in their dealings with suffragettes. They would promise to give women the vote in their election addresses, but then back down when they were elected to seats in Parliament. A brief story provides some contemporary perspective on Marlow’s mischaracterization of women’s sense of honor. As a protest against an anti-suffragette bill informally called “The Brawling Bill” in 1909, which “was intended to penalize anyone found guilty of disorderly conduct within the confines of the Palace of Westminster while parliament was in session,” Pankhurst, the likely model for Mrs. Fyne, joined four other women who protested by chaining themselves to a statue in the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament (Crawford, 237). Those convicted under the Brawling Bill might be imprisoned for as much as six months, and fined as much as £100. During the debate over the measure, one Member of Parliament, a Mr. Keir Hardie,[11] accused his male counterparts of treating the suffragettes dishonorably, so it was understandable they would resort to extreme measures to ensure they were heard:
[Hardie] stated that in his opinion the Bill was only necessary because of the failure of members of the Government, and Members of the House to redeem their election pledges in regard to Women’s Suffrage, and that it was because women felt that they could no longer appeal to the honour of the House of Commons, that they had taken to extreme measures. (The Suffragette, 371)
Pankhurst never suggested that women should act dishonorably in The Suffragette, the source Conrad would have had access to as he was writing Chance, and here we see her quoting from a member of parliament who accuses other politicians of acting dishonorably in their dealings with women. Whether or not Conrad based Zoe Fyne on Sylvia Pankhurst, we can see that Chance takes a very clear, reactionary position resisting the growing women’s movement in England.[12]
Several critics have attempted to make the case that Chance invites the reader to reject Marlow’s misogyny. In Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, Hawthorn argues that Chance both attacks feminism and at the same time challenges early twentieth-century patriarchy. Hawthorn suggests that Carleon Anthony is a deliberate parody of the author of “The Angel of the House,” and that since Anthony is a domestic tyrant in the novel, the reader is led to question and reject the sentiments in Coventry Patmore’s most famous poem: “The character of Roderick Anthony’s father, the poet Carleon Anthony, is at least partially modeled after the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore, author of that archetypal celebration of the mythic Victorian wife and mother ‘The Angel in the House’” (133). “These echoes and references [to Patmore]” Hawthorn adds:
help to establish that Chance cannot just be dismissed as an anti-feminist tract; internal textual evidence can be adduced to support the thesis that in this novel Conrad was concerned to attack the patriarchal views of women, views which through talk of ‘The Angel in the House’ seemed to lay claim to a positive disposition towards the female sex, but which in practice were associated with a domestic tyrannizing of wife and children. (135)
But this seems strained because it depends on importing a particular, critical reading of “The Angel in the House” into the plot of Chance, and then using that reading to answer Marlow’s misogynistic statements. Hawthorn must create an alternative, supportive framework for his argument, forcing the text to conform to what are likely his own feelings about patriarchy. Depending on faint resemblances between Patmore and Carelon Anthony’s poetry and biography, Hawthorn’s argument is too slight to support the claim that the novel should not be “dismissed as an anti-feminist tract.”
In a book published a decade after Hawthorn’s, Susan Jones agrees that the novel paradoxically supports women’s rights, focusing on Flora’s circumstances to argue that, as in his representation of Winnie in The Secret Agent, Conrad wants to remind the reader of women’s grossly limited options under patriarchy: “While many critics emphasize its success in the marketplace, implying that Conrad denied his aesthetic principles in writing a ‘woman’s novel,’ they fail to see, in the emergence of Flora de Barral, the continuity in the ongoing preoccupations of his work, or the development of a sensitive attitude to the characterization of women. In Chance, the repetition of well-worn gestures and poses reinforces the reader’s perception of a gap between being and representation, drawing attention to the disparity between what a woman is, or might choose to be, and the roles that have been prescribed for her” (Conrad and Women, 102). “The epistemological issue,” she adds, “—how to know the woman—lies at the heart of the narrative’s structure. But the method of constructing the story exposes the unreliability of the narrators’ observations. Conrad creates a network of voyeurs, who, tantalized by the object of their view, nevertheless fail to represent her accurately” (118).
Jones’s argument is more substantial and better supported than Hawthorn’s, but, unlike Winnie, Flora is made too passive to carry the burden of this reading. This is another example of how Conrad’s political positions cannot be said to “develop” from one novel to another; there is no continuity between Winnie Verloc and Flora de Barral. Flora suffers passively under the abuse of her grotesquely cruel governess, then under the abuse of her vulgar cousins, and then under the selfish cruelty of her father, who perversely but easily prevents her from developing an intimate and loving relationship with her husband. After de Barral’s suicide, when the spell of her father’s presence is broken, she is literally carried, half-fainting, into her cabin by her husband. And after Captain Anthony’s death, she waits passively for Marlow to arrange her happy-ending relationship with Powell. Not only does Flora’s passivity prevent us from making her the hero of a story concerned with the oppression of women in a patriarchy, Flora’s problems and insecurities are also primarily caused by women. She is traumatized by her governess, brutalized by the women in her cousin’s family, and ultimately betrayed by Mrs. Fyne. All these women’s acts are committed within stereotypical female roles: those of the governess, those of catty and envious female rivals within a family, and those of a faux-feminist author. As Cedric Watts puts it, “Flora’s neurotic insecurity and her inhibitions about marriage have been caused largely by the malevolence of her governess and by the teachings of the ‘emancipated’ Mrs Fyne; it is to the chivalrous Captain Anthony and the gallant young Powell that she owes her salvation” (Joseph Conrad: A Literary Life, 119).
Flora de Barral is no Winnie Verloc, though both are presented as victims of patriarchy, and Zoe Fyne has almost nothing in common with Sophia Antonovna, though both take an interest in the fortunes of a younger woman and try (at least at first, in Zoe Fyne’s case) to help her. Chance demonstrates once again the radical incongruity of the politics in Conrad’s fiction, in this case, on the “woman question.” The novel’s treatment of class is also radically inconsistent with earlier novels. We might remember, once again, the Marlow in Lord Jim who speaks wistfully of his inability to see the difference between rich people and poor people, the fortunate and the unfortunate: “in each case all I could see was merely the human being” (75). Lord Jim’s Marlow contrasts pointedly with the Marlow of Chance, who has nothing in common with the earlier Marlow’s melancholy egalitarianism; Chance’s Marlow is, quite confidently, both a classist snob and a misogynistic bully.
This leaves us to ask whether we can infer any narrative point of view in Chance, whether we can assign any political position to the novel at all. If we accept James’s claim that Chance is an extended study in style, we might conclude that we cannot. Given that John Fyne’s earnestness is treated with such humorous disdain (every reference to him mocks his solemnity and seriousness in some way), should we adopt this as our own stance on the characters and incidents? Should we take anything in the novel seriously? We might recall the way Marlow and Fyne search for the suicidal Flora; even the possibility of a young woman’s suicide makes Marlow want to laugh. Chance appears to be the least sincere, the most deliberate of Conrad’s creations. How, he seems to have asked himself, can I appeal to a middle-class audience that has always eluded me? What are the ingredients? I need a damsel in distress, a knight, or several knights, a conniving villain, a happy concluding romance. The reading public, especially women, are interested in the “new woman” these days, so I will include a woman who (mis)represents that position. I will sprinkle in some discrete sex—Flora is bred to be mated to a cad, who successfully seduces her, though she escapes just before she reaches the sexually mature age of sixteen. Just at this point, she is comically abducted by Fyne, who literally carries her into his hotel. The obvious impropriety of this, as Marlow coyly suggests (“What might have been [the spectators’] thoughts at the spectacle of a shameless middle-aged man abducting headlong into the upper regions of a respectable hotel a terrified young girl obviously under age, I don’t know” (125) is diffused when the hyper-masculine but cowed Fyne leaves her in the arms of his (veiled lesbian) wife. Then Flora herself becomes the seducer of Captain Anthony, who is then separated from his inconsolable first mate, whose interest in Anthony may or may not be homoerotic.[13] So the novel is full of muted gestures in the direction of sexuality, much like the generic fiction Conrad imitates to reach the audience of The New York Herald’s Sunday Magazine.
The novel’s classism is also a prominent feature of the other stories in the Herald and other popular magazines—perhaps another generic feature. And, despite the novel’s narrative complexity, it is also quite conventional in the way it presents at least two grand narratives. The heterosexual romance that drives the (meandering) plot ends with Charlie Powell getting the girl and their living happily ever after in middle-class comfort. The other grand narrative celebrated by the novel, the one imposed most persistently both on novels and history, traces the relentless progress of cause and effect. The novel’s very title is Chance, and the workings of “chance” lead inexorably to the saving of the heroine (multiple times), Powell’s employment as second mate, Anthony’s elopement with Flora, the defeat of the villain, and the happy ending. While so much of Conrad’s fiction illustrates the arbitrary nature of ontology and epistemology, Chance’s plot works systematically through a series of “chance” occurrences to predictable conclusions.
But if we dismiss the politics in Chance as entirely generic and insincere, we must return to the practice of distinguishing Conrad’s genuine, engaged, artistic fiction from his “merely” generic work. One reason we should avoid condemning any one novel or story in this way is that all of Conrad’s fiction might be called generic, as Jameson famously claims in The Political Unconscious:
[E]ven after eighty years, his place is still unstable, undecidable, and his work unclassifiable, spilling out of high literature into light reading and romance, reclaiming great areas of diversion and distraction by the most demanding practice of style and écriture alike, floating uncertainly somewhere between Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson. (206)
Early readers of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands appreciated Conrad’s exoticism: his extravagant Malays, black haired beauties, and flashing krises. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is a sea tale; Heart of Darkness a cautionary story in the imperial gothic genre; Lord Jim, a boy’s adventure novel. Nostromo includes an irresistibly handsome young hero who bends iron bars with his bare hands, and The Secret Agent is a dynamite novel. In Conrad’s novels and stories, the politics are embedded in the genre. Attempts to impose a stable or developing political position on his work will always fail. Despite readers’ best efforts to bring him into one political fold or another, he remains, politically, the most elusive of authors.
See Joseph Conrad: A Literary Life, 114–122, where Cedric Watts lays out the marketing, reception, and sources of Chance.
For a useful discussion of the achievement and decline debate, including its participants and their central arguments, see Simmons in A Joseph Conrad Companion.
For a very recent analysis of the various genres echoed in Chance, focusing especially on the influence of Dickens, see Kujawska-Lis.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on” Act 4, scene 1, The Tempest.
Susan Jones characterizes the narrative accurately in Conrad and Women: “the method of constructing the story,” she writes, “exposes the unreliability of the narrators’ observations. Conrad creates a network of voyeurs, who, tantalized by the object of their view, nevertheless fail to represent her [Flora] accurately. Marlow, however, believes firmly in his own authority as interpreter of all he sees and hears. . . . Yet his perceptions are rarely as accurate as he makes out” (118).
The parallels between Bernard Madoff and de Barral are uncanny. For a fine discussion of de Barral’s reliance on empty advertisements to promote his Ponzi scheme, see Donovan (Popular Culture), 154–56.
See my “‘Pathos and Fun’: Conrad and Harper’s Magazine.” But not all the stories in popular magazines were classist, or classist in the same way as the Marlow of Chance. In Nanon Toby’s “Miss Allaire: Manikin for the Paris Dress Emporium,” for example, published in the New York Herald Magazine February 20, 1910 (Chance was published in the same magazine two years later), Miss Allaire learns to love a man of the lower middle class and to reject the snobbism of her mother. The fiction in these magazines very often adjudicates the contemporary debates involving style, class, race, and gender, especially the “woman question.” Marlow’s attitudes situate him on the more reactionary pole of those debates.
For a discussion of Marlow’s bisexuality and the homoerotic undertones of Chance, see Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love between the Lines (74–76).
And we might as well add “racist” to Marlow’s more general misanthropy and classism in Chance. In Conrad’s second equation between Africans or African Americans and dogs—after the far more infamous one noted above in Heart of Darkness—Marlow compares the barking of the Fyne dog with the music of some “nigger minstrel”: “His sharp comical yapping was unbearable, like stabs through one’s brain, and Fyne’s deeply modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger minstrel on a popular beach” (141). This last version of Marlow in Chance has almost nothing in common with earlier Marlows, whose tolerance, generosity, humanity, and humility concerning their own limitations contrast so sharply with this Marlow’s conceited pride in his superior point of view.
Dealing with the text’s misogyny, Armstrong makes the case for Marlow’s unreliability, but he notes at the same time that the narrative doesn’t adequately provide space for rebuttal (“Misogyny and the Ethics of Reading: The Problem of Chance.”) The same is true of Marlow’s classism, which is left even more unchallenged than the misogyny in the novel. Though the primary narrator’s indignant objections to some of Marlow’s more outrageously sexist comments are, as Armstrong suggests, ineffectual, at least some objections are raised. None is raised to his classism.
Hardie was a member of the Scottish Labour Party. He was first secretary of the party at the time that Conrad’s friend, Robert Cunningham Graham, was its president.
Others have listed Marlow’s many and varied misogynistic characterizations of women. Armstrong’s “Misogyny and the Ethics of Reading: The Problem of Conrad’s Chance” is especially comprehensive. But see Greaney as well, where he begins a chapter on Chance noting that “It is the most ‘feminine,’ or female-oriented, of Conrad’s novels, but its engagement with issues of gender is tainted by the arch misogyny of Marlow, whose clumsy and unsympathetic line in anti-feminist repartee is never convincingly challenged or dialogized in the text” (98).
See Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad, 76–77.