Conrad and the Erotic: “A Smile of Fortune” and “The Planter of Malata”

SINCE THOMAS C. MOSER'S Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline appeared in 1957, discussion of the sharply varying quality of Conrad's fiction and analysis of his depiction of relationships between men and women seem destined to overlap. Moser's diagnosis of what he con siders the debilitating sickness in Conrad's fiction is neither simple nor simplistic but involves a clear thesis: "love" is "the lowest common denominator of the apprentice work ... of the inferior short novels ... of the weak portions of "Heart of Darkness," Lord Jim, and Nostromo" It also "dominates the later period, where it is central to six of the seven novels" (3-4). Moser concludes that the "sympathetic treatment of love between a white man and a woman is not congenial to the early Conrad's creativity" (65). In such summarizing statements Moser blames Conrad's attempt to write about love, not about sexuality, for inadequacies in the better work and for his "decline." But his account of the relationship between love and sexuality in Conrad, between, say, the romantic and the erotic, is not always as clear as one might wish. Discussing "The Return," for example, which he characterizes as "a bad piece of writing," he writes that it provides a "locus classicus for the near paralysis of Conrad's crea tivity when dealing with a sexual subject," and that "it is significant that Conrad's one extended study of a sexual subject should center in an inadequate male who sees female sexuality as an inescapable menace" (1957: 77). In contrast, he enthusiastically describes "A Smile of Fortune" as "a first-rate story of female sexuality and male impotence" (98). That critics still engage with Moser's thesis says something about its importance, but it has had unfortunate after-effects. Susan Jones's