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

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

There was never a time in all my travels that a woman of the right sort did not turn up to help me out of a fix. I don't know why. It's perhaps because they know without telling that I love them all. [PlayfuL ] I've almost fallen in love with you, Miss Bessie. (27, emphasis added)

But that "almost" is a huge caveat, and by the play's end, he has lumped her with all other women "of the right sort" he has ever known. Just before his assaultive final kiss and departure, he proclaims, "I haven't forgotten a single one of you in the world. Some've given me more than money. No matter. You can't buy me in-and you can't buy yourself out..." (33, ellipses Conrad's). While the rhetoric and context here are financial, his point seems to be that women are powerless to take the narrative reins that men control.21

Bessie, however, is not that powerless: she has her own story and has learned to script others as well. She tries to mold Harry into being the ideal son to his father: "How could it hurt you not to contradict him for a while-and perhaps in time you would get used . . ." she cajoles him (29). She also urges his father into a reconciliation plot with his son. Although Bessie's response to Harry's volley of kisses as he leaves is only an unanswered call into the darkness for Harry to return, she at least expresses her desires ("Take me with you") and manages to chastise Captain Hagberd for precipitating his son's departure. Nevertheless, at her father's bellows, Bessie now "at the first call.. .springs up and begins to stumble blindly towards the doa' (35). Momentarily defeated, she re-enters her father's narrative in madness and despair. If the words "One Day More" initially signaled Hagberd's hope of his son's return, they end the play as a dirge for the continuation of life as Bessie has come to know it. While rejecting her father's script for her, Bessie has adopted her neighbor's and society's belief that marriage is the only "way out" for a young woman. When Bessie, seven pages into the play, agreed "wearily" to Captain Hagberd's truism that "Girls are different, my dear. They don't run away" (7), we might have anticipated her inability to truly reform her role. She has made some strides, but not enough: perhaps she fails in part because she adopts the scripting methods of the men in her life. Nonetheless, Bessie's autonomy and efforts are perhaps why Conrad defended-to his agent Pinker in 1919the play and this character as "absolutely the first conscious womancreation in the whole body of my work" (qtd. in Aubry 225).

LaughingAnne is also a play about choices. Written earlier in the same year as The Secret Agent, 1920, but never performed,22 this play is the most explicit about the lack of choices contemporary society allows women, especially poor ones. Besides the difference in social register, the setting is also removed from tradition-bound England and is now the exoticized Far East. Anne's clothing in the first act emphasizes that she is a has-been: she wears a "faded" and "ragged" pink gown, the " last remnant of her old outfit," say the stage directions (LA 2). In the second act her dress is also loose and flowery, her hair hangs down her back, and her neck is uncovered, providing visual clues about her independence from standard female dress, and suggesting metaphorically her sexual "looseness."