Power and Passivity: A Feminist Look at Nostromo and The Mayor of Casterbridge
This paper was written as an assignment for MODERN BRITISH NOVEL ENGL 431, Dr. Craig Barrow, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 7 Oct. 1987.
For Patricia Spacks, marriage often serves as a paradigm for the ambiguities of the female condition, a social arena for the struggle to satisfy the opposing needs for control and submission. The extremes range from marriage as a way to maturity (Spacks 125-126, 129) to society's means for punishing a woman for failing to accept her proper role (Spacks 101). This emphasis on marriage reveals, Spacks realizes, a need for fulfillment through relationship. The roles of power and passivity can serve both as a means to relationship and as a substitute for it (Spacks 316-317, 320). The female characters in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge reveal that this road to fulfillment can be very complex.
"As the "never-tired senora" (Conrad 84), Emilia Gould exemplifies the feminine virtues termed by Patricia Spacks "taking care" and "fingerposts." By "taking care," Spacks refers to a woman's role of repressing (Spacks 93) and concealing (Spacks 81) her own emotions and her socially perceived responsibility for the moral and social care of her family and friends (Spacks 83). "Fingerposts" suggests the parallel figure of feminine self-denial, stepping aside and pointing the way or providing moral direction for society (Spacks 190-191).
The silver mine becomes both the locus of Emilia's self-denial as it consumes her husband and the means of accomplishing "her unselfish ambitions" (Conrad 81). As the novel progresses, her fear of failure (Conrad 81) and her meager attempts at faith in her husband are finally frustrated (Conrad 172-173). The discontented cry "the wealth for the people," and Monygham's warning that the time will come "when all that the Gould Concession stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back" (Conrad 406) lead her to realize that all her self-denial and self-sacrifice has come to nothing, and in a "moment of bitterness. . . . worthy of Doctor Monygham himself," she tells Giselle, "Console yourself child. Very soon he would have forgotten you for his treasure" (Conrad 444).
The failure of Emilia Gould to achieve power passively through virtue cost her her relationship to her husband. Antonio Avellanos, on the other hand, achieves an appearance of power, but at the cost of mythologizing (Spacks 321-322) both herself and her relationship to Martin Decoud.
Antonio Avellanos, a young woman who scorns the "rigid conventions regulating the life of Spanish-American girlhood" (Conrad 129), is held in awe by the blanco young ladies of Costaguano (Conrad 121). Learned and proud (Conrad 121), she is familiar with her father's library, writes state papers, and is a solid conversationalist (Conrad 129). Her view of men is that they "must be used as they are" (Conrad 149).
Decoud, whom she castigated for his "aimlessness" and "the levity of his opinions" when she was only sixteen, is completely in her power. Despite his disdain for his journalistic efforts for the revolution (Conrad 151), he argues with himself that he is "not a patriot, but a lover" (Conrad 148). Standing with her in the window at Casa Gould, in violation of custom, he tries to talk her into forgetting the revolution and eloping. Instead she draws him in deeper, and they stand, elbows touching, intimate, discussing the efforts of the revolutionaries (Conrad 149+).
She rejects his plan for seccession (ironically, Decoud doesn't see it) (Conrad 19-197), but is quick to adopt it later when the revolution appears to be falling apart (Conrad 291-292). When labor troubles arise in the new republic, she returns to her original plan of a united Costaguano with the added twist, her conviction that "this was from the first poor Martin's intention" (Conrad 405).
Her relationship with Decoud, bearing all the marks of an illegitimate intimacy, never went beyond their elbows touching. Yet, ironically, she has a marble medallian "representing a veiled woman seated with her hands clasped loosely over her knees" and inscribed with the legend "To the memory of Martin Decoud, his betrothed Antonia Avellanos." In the end, living with her uncle Father Corbelan, she appears as a kind of secular nun, remembering a mythic sacrifice to celibacy, dedicated to the cause of revolution (Conrad 381).
One of the curious characteristics of Nostromo is that it has neither hero nor heroine. Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, on the other hand, focuses on one who has been called his "greatest and most tragic hero" (Hardy blurb), Michael Henchard. The lives of three women are enmeshed in Henchard's tragic fall: his wife, Susan; her daughter, Elizabeth-Jane; and his betrothed, Lucetta. Of these three, Elizabeth-Jane comes closest to being the heroine of the novel.
Elizabeth-Jane's desire to "better" herself by becoming a "woman of wider knowledge, higher repute" (Hardy 33-34), "her willingness to sacrifice her personal comfort and dignity to the common weal" (Hardy 51), her "great natural insight" (Hardy 91), her "reasonableness" (Hardy 92) are qualities Hardy seems to hold in high esteem. On the other hand, her passiveness in the face of Henchard's cruelty (Hardy 131+) and her willingness to be replaced by Lucetta in Farfrae's affections (Hardy 176-177) are characteristic emblems of what Patricia Spacks sees as the conversion of the feminine capacity for suffering into a feminine role for suffering (Spacks 39).
If Elizabeth-Jane is disatisfying as a heroine, it may lie less in Hardy's suppression of her because she is a woman than in the overall bleakness of his outlook. As he says of himself in 1882,
Since I discovered several years ago, that I was living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently. . . . I am content with tentativeness from day to day (Walcutt 436).
If Elizabeth-Jane is as "familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as the diurnal setting of the sun" (Hardy 177), if her life was a long lesson teaching her that "happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain" (Hardy 327), yet her "humorousness" in the face of pain (Hardy 177), her sense that life is less "a series of pure disapointments than . . . a series of substitutions" (Hardy 177), and her practice of
making limited opportunities endurable, which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain; which thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider interests cursorily embraced (Hardy 326-327)
reveal the best qualities in the face of life that Hardy believes anyone can possess, man or woman.
Where Elizabeth-Jane's passivity tends to slip outside the limited categories of masculine-feminine roles into the broader Hardiesque realities of humanity in the face of Nature, Lucetta Templeman reveals the penalty a woman incurs for refusing to passively accept the role society forces on her (Spacks 316-317).
From the moment she first appears in the story, Lucetta is portrayed as a victim. The scandal that arises over their being "careless of appearances" does Henchard little harm, but ruins her (Hardy 84). She is in constant fear of being exposed, and her only escape is marriage to Henchard (Hardy 119-120). Falling in love with Farfrae, she wrestles with the conflicts between her own desires and the strictures of society. Forced by Henchard to agree to marry him (Hardy 194-196), she secretly marries Farfrae, further compromising her position and leaving her prisoner to Henchard's discretion with regard to their letters (Hardy 207-209).
Lucetta's behavior is condemned by Henchard (Hardy 208), Elizabeth-Jane (Hardy 211-213), and she fears will be by Farfrae as well (Hardy 245). The skimmity-ride becomes the means for making Lucetta's condemnation public. Contriving to get Farfrae out of the way, the locals parade the effigies of Henchard and Lucetta past her house. Overwhelmed, she falls in a swoon, and eventually dies (Hardy 272-275, 284). Lucetta, having refused to accept her proper place, is destroyed.
Lucetta fails in her attempts to resist the passive role society places on her. Hardy's Susan Henchard reveals a passivity in relationship carried to the extremes of masochism (Spacks 72-77), yet within that passivity exercises a power that helps lead to the fall of her husband.
Patricia Spacks writes of women who seek "misery not as an end in itself, . . . but as a necessary means to self-assertion" (Spacks 316). Hardy suggests that Susan is deceived into believing that her auction is valid because of her "idiotic simplicity" (Hardy 25), but her behavior and conversation in connection with the auction suggest strong resentment (Hardy 16-20). As Henchard says, prophetically, the morning after the auction, "Meek--that meekness, has done me more harm than the bitterest temper!" (Hardy 25).
When Henchard is finally reunited with his wife, she will not forgive him (Hardy 80). Her forgiveness eventually comes, posthumously, but only with the revelation that Elizabeth-Jane is not his daughter (Hardy 127). Her "honesty in dishonesty" (Hardy 128) obliterates the forgiveness for Henchard.
"[W]hy should death rob life o' fourpence?" Christopher Coney asks as he digs up and spends at the Three Mariners the four ounce pennies that had weighed down the eyes of Susan Henchard (Hardy 122). "[H]er wishes and ways will all be as nothing!" Mother Cuxsom tells us (Hardy 123). But at the end of the novel, Elizabeth-Jane is dancing with Newson on her wedding day to Farfrae, and Henchard is dead, unforgiven by Elizabeth-Jane in life as he was by her mother (Hardy 318-326). Was Susan Henchard the blindly simple woman Hardy pictures her as (Hardy 78-79) or was she a "willful sufferer" (Spacks 316), deliberately blind, whose meekness was her own form of power.
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. New York: Signet, 1904.
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. New York: Signet, 1980.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Female Imagination. New York: Knopf, 1975.
Walcutt, Charles Child. "A Biographical Sketch." Jude the Obscure. By Thomas Hardy. New York: Bantam, 1981. 432-439.