Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Hawthorn Jeremy;

Author:Hawthorn, Jeremy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Planter of Malata

Sexual obsession also plays a crucial role in ‘The Planter of Malata’. The tale’s central male character, Geoffrey Renouard is, like the young narrator-captain in ‘A Smile of Fortune’, an isolated individual. Away from Malata (another island!) where he has started a scheme involving the experimental cultivation of silk plants, he encounters the ‘pagan’ Felicia Moorsom24 with her ‘magnificently red’ hair (9) and becomes romantically obsessed by her. As in ‘A Smile of Fortune’, Conrad’s male hero becomes involved in a complex game of deceptions and hidden agendas that involve not just himself and the woman by whom he has been smitten, but her father, too. The father, his sister and his daughter have travelled from Europe to the great colonial city (named as Sydney in Conrad’s manuscript) in search of ‘Master Arthur’, who had been engaged to Felicia but who left England in disgrace after being unjustly accused of financial wrongdoing. As Renouard knows, and as most readers guess before the fact is confirmed, ‘Master Arthur’ is actually Renouard’s assistant, Walter. And Renouard also knows that the man is dead (he buried him himself, after Walter’s death following an accident), but he chooses to conceal this fact so as to stay in Felicia’s company as long as possible. Thus, as in ‘A Smile of Fortune’, the story presents a knot of characters each of whom is driven by publicly acknowledged as well as by secretly unacknowledged motives.

Renouard’s obsession with Felicia is, like that of the narrator of’A Smile of Fortune’ with Alice Jacobus, presented as a sort of addiction or sickness:

On board the schooner, lying on the settee on his back with the knuckles of his hands pressed over his eyes, he made up his mind that he would not return to that house for dinner – that he would never go back there any more. He made up his mind some twenty times. The knowledge that he had only to go up on the quarter deck, utter quietly the words: ‘Man the windlass,’ and that the schooner springing into life would run a hundred miles out to sea before sunrise, deceived his struggling will. Nothing easier! Yet, in the end, this young man, almost ill-famed for his ruthless daring, the inflexible leader of two tragically successful expeditions, shrank from that act of savage energy, and began, instead, to hunt for excuses. (43)

Renouard also shares with his literary predecessor the captain-narrator a consciousness of the disparity between the force of his desire and the worth of its object. However, whereas Alice Jacobus is a social outcast, Felicia belongs to ‘the cream of our society’ (13). Her father chooses a somewhat different formulation, using the word ‘froth’ to describe her social milieu.

[Y]ou don’t know what it is to have moved, breathed, existed, and even triumphed in the mere smother and froth of life – the brilliant froth. There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space – to amuse life – a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere.

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