"A World of Their Own": Subversion of gender expectations in Conrad's plays

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2001 by Wheatley, Alison E

Despite their isolation from other women, the women in Conrad's plays have learned well the roles they are expected to play and the ways they fit into male fantasies. They have been carefully instructed all their lives by the words and actions of men. Yet in each play, the female protagonist forcefully tries to shape her own life, quietly resisting and subverting the gender expectations of the men in her world. Captain Hagberd, for instance, outlines to Bessie the duties of a good wife: "when a husband gets back from his work he needs a lot of water for a wash . not that [a beloved husband should] ever need to do a hand's turn after he comes home" (ODMS). He seals the lock on this joyless fate by limiting women's options: "Girls ... don't run away," he proclaims (ODM 7). As Bessie's father bellows his demands and cruelly coerces her constant attention, Bessie surreptitiously tends to her garden and at least some of her own needs in conversations with her neighbor. Laughing Anne, too, might seem to be adopting a familiar female role, caring for a child at the expense of her own desires, but she also is crafting herself as the kind of woman she admires. While Anne refers several times to her lack of choices-basically being with one man or another until he tires of her-she does actually negotiate for the best, most moral position that will protect and provide for her and her son. Winnie has had a negative model in her passive mother who allowed Winnie's father to beat and berate her weakened brother Stevie. In a move similar to Kristine Linde's in Ibsen's A Doll House, Winnie made the independent decision seven years earlier to marry Verloc instead of the young man she loved, because Verloc was able and willing to take on responsibility for supporting her brother and widowed mother. Although Verloc believes Winnie is following his script, responding to his wooer's advances, she instead has her own agenda. Like a prisoner of war who maintains sanity by thinking her own thoughts, Winnie has endured her marriage not out of duty or desire, but for her own rewards. Although these rewards do not satisfy all her emotional needs, they help her solve the sense of responsibility she has accepted for herself.

Conrad's first play, OneDay More, was written in 1904 from his 1903 story "To-Morrow. "18 This period was volatile politically for women in Britain as the "Woman Question" became publicly debated. Education and work had both been opened more fully to women in the previous two decades. Oxford and Cambridge admitted women after 1880, and those decades saw a noticeable increase in employment for both working-class and middle-class women (Gardner 6). Groups such as the Fabian Society (1884) and the Independent Labour Party (1893) not only allowed women's participation but fought for their social rights and suffrage. The battle for suffrage was being waged in both the United States and Britain during the entire second half of the nineteenth century, until women over thirty finally won the vote in Britain in 1918 and the Nineteenth Amendment passed in the United States in 1920 after frustrating years of sometimes violent protest. Despite these strides, the first two decades of the new century still found conservatives in politics and the workplace, the theater and home, literary and dramatic criticism. Conrad himself maintained a traditionally courtly attitude toward women, evident in his letters, though he also supported women's voting rights (Davies 78). In a letter to the New York Herald `Sunday Magazine' 14january 1912 about the first installment of Chance, about to be published, Conrad publicized his reasonably feminist attitude, in part, no doubt, to court women readers: ". . . any woman with a heart and mind knows very well that she is an active partner in the great adventure of humanity on this earth and feels an interest in all its episodes accordingly (qtd. in Davies 78). Nonetheless, despite the conservative strongholds, the social improvements for women inevitably impacted the literature and drama of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.19