Reviewed by:

• Centennial Essays on Joseph Conrad’s Chance ed. by Allan H. Simmons and Susan Jones
• Robert L. Caserio (bio)

Critical response to Chance: A Tale in Two Parts has been another tale in two parts: those who are for the novel, and those who are against.¹ Can we move beyond the contradictory claims that have divided assessments of Conrad’s best seller? The most recent division began with Paul B. Armstrong’s “Misogyny and The Ethics of Reading: The Problem of Conrad’s Chance” (1993) and Susan Jones’s Conrad and Women (1999). Armstrong formidably prosecuted Conrad’s patriarchy-biased construction of his heroine Flora; Jones formidably defended Conrad’s sympathetic construction of his heroine in the context of feminism’s first wave. Those antithetical views impact the arguments of six of the eleven stimulating centennial essays that comprise Allan H. Simmons and Susan Jones’s 2016 volume. Their collection’s immediate virtue is that it presents the latest opportunity for sifting the controversy, maybe even for settling it. If we can move beyond claims and counterclaims of Chance’s misogyny, less worried readings of Chance might come into view. Insofar as one might characterize the other essays of the volume as new expansions of critical interest, alternative topics already are on the horizon.

As it is, a critical consensus seems to be establishing itself in favor of Conrad’s feminist leanings, disentangled from the anti-feminist snark of Marlow’s second-level narration. The editors haven’t grouped together the essays most relevant to the debate, but if I might be allowed to regroup them for the sake of focus, I’d say that those defending the novelist and his novel outnumber the opposing views: four to two. Jay Parker’s defense, “Rortyian Contingency and [End Page 87] Ethnocentrism in Chance,” makes one of its strongest points by elucidating the meaning of Flora’s governess for Conrad’s narrative structure. The governess’s rapacious actions, Parker proposes, “are directly related to her position in a patriarchal society” (33), the debased values of which are illustrated by the governess’s victimization of Flora and of the governess’s co-conspirator Charley (the first of Flora’s two loves named Charles).

That the governess victimizes others might seem to argue that patriarchy is all-pervading, constraining women to act like their oppressors, and leaving women no freedom to resist; but Parker reads Conrad’s Flora as “a woman similarly constrained who does not victimize others, and thus the governess’s behavior cannot be excused on the grounds that she is oppressed” (33). In other words, there is in the social world more freedom—and more liberating contingency—than inflexible visions of patriarchy would claim. Flora’s seizure of that freedom, Parker argues, shows Conrad’s imagination flexibly accommodating feminism as well as chance.

The case for Conrad’s accommodation depends in these essays on foregrounding Flora’s “agency.” Anne Enderwitz’s “Speech, Affect, and Intervention in Chance” celebrates Flora’s surmounting of the trauma inflicted by her governess—and by the public’s assault on her father. Flora does so by finding her voice: “speaking out to her husband [Captain Anthony],” for example, she casts aside a “disjunction of affect and speech” (48) and she becomes an “active agent” (49) who grasps her capacity for decisive articulations, free of ambiguity. For Enderwitz, Flora’s definiteness of linguistic usage and effect marks Chance’s difference from earlier Conrad, and earlier Marlow. No ultimate indeterminate darkness here—despite chance—no purblind suffering female.

Pei-Wen Clio Kao reiterates the contrast between Conrad’s treatments of the Intended and of Flora in “From Incapable ‘Angel in the House’ to Invincible New Woman in Marlovian Narratives.” The Intended in Heart of Darkness is to be protected from the truth and made thereby into an incapable agent, but Flora, “an individual subject rather than a victimized object” (124), displays “the active energy of an independent ‘New Woman’ of her day” (124). Kao concedes that Chance “goes beyond...

审核人：

• 关于约瑟夫·康拉德《机会》的百年论文集。艾伦·西蒙斯（Allan H.Simmons）和苏珊·琼斯（Susan Jones）
• 罗伯特·凯西里（Robert L.Caserio）（生物）

对机会的批判性反应：分为两个部分的故事又分为两个部分：一个是支持小说的人，另一个是反对小说的人。¹我们能否超越对康拉德最畅销书的评估产生分歧的矛盾说法？最近的分裂始于保罗·B·阿姆斯特朗（Paul B. Armstrong）的“《味gy》和《阅读伦理：康拉德的机会问题》”（1993年）和苏珊·琼斯（Susan Jones）的《康拉德与妇女》。（1999）。阿姆斯特朗（Armstrong）强烈起诉康拉德（Conrad）偏重父权制的女主人公植物群（Flora）；琼斯在女权主义的第一波浪潮中坚决捍卫康拉德对女主人公的同情心。这些对立的观点影响了11篇令人振奋的百年论文中的6篇，其中包括Allan H.Simmons和Susan Jones的2016卷。他们收藏的直接优点是，它为筛选争议，甚至为解决争议提供了最新机会。如果我们能够超越Chance的厌女症的主张和反诉，则可能会出现对Chance不太担心的阅读。就某篇论文的另一篇文章可能将其描述为新的重要兴趣而论，替代性话题已经迫在眉睫。

实际上，一种重要的共识似乎正在建立起来，以支持康拉德的女权主义倾向，与马洛第二层叙述的反女权主义倾向脱钩。编辑人员尚未将与辩论最相关的文章归类在一起，但如果为了重点而允许我重新分类，我会说捍卫小说家和他的小说的人的反对意见要多于反对意见：四比二。杰伊·帕克（Jay Parker）的辩护，“罗蒂亚式的偶然性和[结束第87页]民族中心主义的机会”，通过阐明弗洛拉（Flora）的女主人对康拉德（Conrad）的叙事结构的意义，成为其最强的要点之一。帕克建议，女教师的s亵行为“与她在父权制社会中的地位直接相关”（33），其贬低的价值观体现为女教师对弗洛拉的伤害以及女同谋的同谋夏利（弗洛拉的第一个同谋）。两次相爱的名字叫查尔斯（Charles）。

女教师是别人的受害者，这似乎表明父权制度无处不在，限制了妇女像压迫者那样行事，使妇女没有抵抗的自由。但是帕克将康拉德的《植物志》读为“一个同样受约束的女人，不伤害他人，因此不能以被压迫为由来谴责女教师的行为”（33）。换句话说，在社会世界中，有比父权制不屈不挠的愿景所拥有的更多自由和更多的偶然性。帕克认为，弗洛拉（Flora）夺取了这种自由，这表明康拉德（Conrad）的想象力灵活地兼顾了女权主义和机会。

康拉德的住宿条件取决于这些论文中对弗洛拉的“代理机构”的关注。安妮·恩德维兹（Anne Enderwitz）的“演讲，情感和介入机会”，庆祝弗洛拉（Fora）克服了她的女教师和公众对她父亲的攻击所造成的创伤。弗洛拉通过找到自己的声音来做到这一点：例如，“与丈夫[安东尼上尉说话]”，她抛弃了“情感和言语的分离”（48），她成为了一个“主动的代理人”（49），掌握了她具有明确表达的能力，毫不含糊。对于Enderwitz来说，弗洛拉对语言用法和效果的确定性标志着Chance与早期的康拉德和早期的马洛不同。尽管有机会，但这里没有终极不确定的黑暗，也没有盲目的受苦女性。

Pei-Wen Clio Kao在“从无能的'屋中的天使'到Marlovian叙事中的无敌新女人'中重申了康拉德对意图和植物的对待之间的对比。应保护黑暗中的意图免受真理的侵害，从而使之成为无能为力的行为者，但弗洛拉（Flora）“一个个体主体而不是受害客体”（124）表现出“一个独立的“新女人”的活跃能量”（124）。花王承认机会“超越了……”