Abstract
The figure of the nineteenth-century female suicide, a young woman who drowns herself to escape disgrace, serves as a poignant moral reminder for Victorian women to value their sexual purity. Conrad repeatedly invokes the figure of the female suicide from his early story “The Idiots” to the novels The Secret Agent, and Chance. Departing from the more familiar sentimentalized notion of this figure, Conrad frames the suicides in the former two texts ironically as the remedy to the impossible liberation provided by murder. This contrasts with Flora in Chance, who considers suicide repeatedly as a remedy to her sensationalized tragic role yet chooses to live. Conrad’s treatment of the figure of the woman suicide legitimates the women’s frustration with their conventional roles.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
As L.J. Nicoletti (2007) explains: “Victorian Londoners were inundated with images of drowned women” that resembled each other in popular representations: “Early in the era, the iconography became well established and ahistoric: a composition framed by an arch; a moonlit setting; a beautiful, unscathed corpse; and a fall from Blackfriars or Waterloo bridge, allowing St. Paul’s Cathedral to be moralistically included in the background.” Until the 1840s, the iconography of suicide was more associated with men, who remained more likely to commit suicide than women throughout the period (Nicoletti 2004, 8).
- 2.
“The Idiots” was published in 1896. The Secret Agent was written after Conrad apparently began writing Chance in 1905; once he completed The Secret Agent in 1906, he went back to Chance several times starting in 1907, finally completing it in 1911 (Hampson 1992, 196). Susan Jones (1999) traces Chance to the early, unfinished short story “Dynamite,” to which Conrad refers in correspondence in 1898 and 1899 (135). According to Jones, the manuscript of Chance in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library has an attached note that states this version was begun in 1906 (136, n7).
- 3.
The story is based in part on Conrad’s experience of a similar community with disabled children in Brittany on his honeymoon (see Stape and Simmons 2011).
References
Armstrong, Paul. 1993. “Misogyny and the Ethics of Reading: The Problem of Conrad’s Chance.” In Contexts for Conrad, ed. Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles, and Wiesław Krajka, 151–174. Boulder: Eastern European Monographs.
Conrad, Joseph. 1924a. Chance: A Tale in Two Parts. Garden City: Doubleday, Page, and Company.
_______. 1924b. “The Idiots.” In Tales of Unrest, 93–142. Garden City: Doubleday, Page, and Company.
_______. 1924c. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. Garden City: Doubleday, Page, and Company.
Davies, Laurence. 1993. “Conrad, Chance, and Women Readers.” In Conrad and Gender, ed. Andrew Michael Roberts, 75–88. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Fothergill, Anthony. 2003. “‘For to End Yet Again’: Suicide in the Stories of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford.” In Inter-Relations: Conrad, James, Ford and Others, ed. Keith Carabine and Max Saunders, 179–208. Boulder: Social Science Monographs.
Hampson, Robert. 1992. Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Hawthorn, Jeremy. 1990. Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment. London: Edward Arnold.
Jones, Susan. 1999. Conrad and Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore. 2000. “Chance.” In Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, ed. Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore, 58–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luyat, Anne. 1980. Conrad’s Feminine Grotesques. The Conradian 6 (2): 5–15.
Monk, Leland. 1993. Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Moore, Gene M. 1997. “Conrad’s ‘The Idiots’ and Maupassant’s ‘La Mère au monstres.’” In Conrad Intertexts and Appropriations: Essays in Memory of Yves Hervouet, ed. Gene M. Moore., Owen Knowles., and J.H. Stape, 49–58. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.
Nicoletti, L.J. 2004. “Downward Mobility: Victorian Women, Suicide, and London’s “Bridge of Sighs.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2 (1): n. p. Accessed Apr 17, 2017. http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2004/nicoletti.html.
Nicoletti. 2007. “Morbid Topographies: Placing Suicide in Victorian London.” In A Mighty Mass of Brick and Stone: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London, ed. Lawrence Phillips, 7–34. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Simmons, Allan. 1999. “The Later Novels: Chance (1913), The Arrow of Gold (1919), The Rescue (1920), The Rover (1923), and Suspense (1925).” In A Joseph Conrad Companion, ed. Leonard Orr and Ted Billy, 252–280. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
Stape, J.H. and Allan H. Simmons. 2011. “The Conrads in Brittany: Some Biographical Notes.” The Conradian 36 (1): 70–79.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harrington, E.B. (2017). The Victorian Woman Suicide: “The Idiots,” The Secret Agent, and Chance . In: Conrad’s Sensational Heroines. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63297-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63297-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63296-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63297-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)