"They Always Leave Us": 'Lord Jim,' Colonialist Discourse, and Conrad's Magic Naturalism
1998; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Joseph Conrad and Literature
ResumoLord Jim is full of thumbnail biographies that give the reader a pleasant sense of overcrowding, as though the book might open out in some new direction at any moment follow the lives and tribulations of some new set of characters. Captain Elliot, the Master Attendant of the port where the Patna is towed and where the infamous crew of the Patna winds up, gives the Patna's captain a thorough dressing down, chewed up very small, so speak, Marlow says, and--ah! ejected him (p. 25).(1) He is near retirement and can say what he likes whomever he likes. But he has three homely daughters, and his only remaining care is see them married off. Little Bob Stanton gives up his life as a chief mate in the merchant marine marry the woman he loves and ends up selling insurance, which, as he tells his sea-faring comrades, shrivelled his soul to the size of a parched pea after two weeks. He drowns trying save a lady's maid in the Sephora disaster (p. 91). Poor Selvin, Marlow's own chief mate, is excellent man all round but given jealous rages when his wife's letters are late (p. 95). Perhaps the most shadowy of these brief biographies is that of the father of Jim's paramour, Jewel. All we know of is that he left Jewel's mother, and that she was therefore forced marry the unspeakable Cornelius. Marlow speculates that convention might have caused the separation between Jewel's mother and father (p. 168), and this probably means that Jewel's father was white. The strongest indirect evidence of his whiteness, however, can be found in Jewel's unshakable belief, proved true in the story, that Jim, the white man, will leave her--just as Jewel's father, a white man, left her mother, a non-white woman. When Marlow seeks convince her that Jim will stay with her forever, she replies always leave (p. 188). They must refer white men, us non-white women. Jewel's maternal grandfather was also white, and he was married--or not married--to Jewel's maternal grandmother, who was not white. This relationship, too, seems have ended unhappily--the grandfather, a brilliantly endowed man, ended his career under a cloud (pp. 168-69). Jewel's distrust of any liaison with a white man was therefore quite well founded since both her mother and maternal grandmother had suffered in mixed-race relationships. So when she begs Jim go away before he has gotten himself firmly established in Patusan, she seeks not only save his life, but also save herself from what must become a doomed, heart-breaking relationship with a white man. This is what Marlow must mean when he guesses that it was Jim's danger that was foremost in her thought--seven if she wanted save herself, too--perhaps unconsciously (p. 189). Today, this information about Jewel's origins and her great fear that Jim will desert her because he is white and she is not must be gleaned rather painstakingly from the novel. But Conrad's contemporary readers would have understood her situation and her fear immediately, for the instability of white/non-white romances is a very common trope of late-nineteenth century colonialist fiction. In colonialist stories, the white man always leaves, and the non-white woman often knows that he will. The most representative writer of colonialist fiction from the turn of the century, Rudyard Kipling, has the Indian woman Ameera tell the British civil servant Holden that he will leave her in, Without Benefit of Clergy. This is something that she, like Jewel, has learned from her mother. Holden never gets the chance desert her, however, since Ameera dies of cholera three or four years into their relationship. But Englishmen leave Indian women in other of Kipling's stories, such as Lisbeth, Kidnapped, and Georgie Porgie, and all but one of such inter-racial relationships in his fiction are doomed. (The otherwise undistinguished Yoked with an Unbeliever is the one exception. …
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