Richard Herndon - The Genesis of Conrad's "Amy Foster"

The Genesis of Conrad's "Amy Foster"
Author(s): Richard Herndon
Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Jul., 1960), pp. 549-566
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173319
Accessed: 31-03-2019 02:55 UTC

[정리]

필자는 이 글에 묘사된 주인공 Yanko의 고립감이나 이질감 등을 콘래드가 영국 내에서 느꼈던 감정보다는  콩고 강 여정 때의 감정과 더욱 면밀하게 연결된다고 보고, 에이미 포스터의 모습은 그의 부인이었던 제시와의 사이에서 느꼈던 사랑이나 결혼에 대한 감정과의  관련성을 찾고 있다.  

549) " Amy Foster," as a work of spiritual autobiography embodying his ever present feelings of loneliness, foreignness, and isolation, and his sense of exile from Poland.

- Some have said or implied that it may, in addition, reveal his early experiences in England and his feelings of alienation from the English.

- Albert J. Guerard has recently suggested (Conrad the Novelist, pp. 49-50) that the story might seem one of the most intimately biographical of Conrad's works, for Conrad, like its hero, left Poland on an improbable adventure, was lonely upon his arrival in England, was perhaps rejected by the English, retained a foreign accent all his life, and perhaps had an obscurely unsuccessful marriage.

550) the sources of " Amy Foster"

- First, as its beginning Conrad used not his own experiences but a true anecdote about the shipwreck, persecution, and tragic isolation in England of a German sailor, with whom he sympathetically identified himself. Second, he probably had not felt as a youth upon arriving in England that the English were hostile to him or were abusing him; years later, however, he endured acute physical and moral isolation in the Belgian Congo, and he apparently derived from memories of this sojourn some of his inspiration for the story and perhaps also an episode for it. Third, he seems to have conceived some of its incidents and characterization upon recalling or rereading Flaubert's story "Un Coeur Simple," but the plot as a whole he patterned on that of his own earlier story " The Idiots." Last, the conclusion of " Amy Foster " reflects not only his poor health and fear of an early death, and perhaps dissatisfaction with his wife, but also a literary propensity for ending tragic action with the protagonist's death.

-  In 1923 when Richard Curle was preparing to review Conrad's collected edition, Conrad asked him not to emphasize the connections between his books and his life, and not to mention stories on which he himself did not wish to comment.

552) Conrad, who according to his wife found in Ford at this time a stimulating intellectual influence, probably developed some interest in local history.

[포드의 영향과 교류]

553) Six months later when Conrad had finished writing " Falk " and was seeking stories to make up the Typhoon volume, he may have reread the passage about the castaway and perhaps recalled details told him by Ford. He adopted the subject with Ford's knowledge and- doubtless with his encouragement, and wrote the story in June, 1901.

- The Cinque Ports

 One of the most tragic stories that I remember to have heard was connected with a man who escaped the tender mercies of the ocean to undergo an almost more merciless buffeting ashore. He was one of the crew of a German merchant that was wrecked almost at the foot of the lighthouse. A moderate swimmer, he was carried by the current to some distance from the scene of the catastrophe.

554) Dr. Kennedy - Ford

555) Conrad drew much of the geography and rural atmosphere, and perhaps some minor characters in "Amy Foster" from the area and people he saw near his home in Kent, just as he had earlier obtained many details and the germinal idea for "The Idiots," his only other story of rural life, from observing the coastal regions and farmers of Brittany.

- both he[Garnett] and Ford asserted that the South Coast cottagers were indeed hostile to the outlandish looks and manners of foreigners and accepted newcomers only with extreme slowness.'

- Yanko's general qualities of mind and temperament-his dreamy, sensitive nature, impressionable and imaginative, yet with the fortitude to endure persecution and hardship-and his quick, fervid utterance seem to reflect some of Conrad's traits; but his simple piety, desperate homesickness, and good-natured and vivacious yet awkward attempts to enter local society were not, so far as one knows, Conrad's.

II.

556) When Conrad compared the German sailor's isolation and privations in England with his own earlier experiences, he probably recalled not his arrival in France or England but his relatively short stay in the Congo. To be sure, Yanko's dream-like trip from Poland to the Elbe and the emigrant ship Conrad doubtless described from memories of his own mental state when in 1874 he broaded [boarded의 오기인 듯] the train that was to take him to Marseilles and the sea (Aubry, II, 155, 157) ; ( Razumov leaves Russia by rail road in a similar dream-like trance.)

-  but the surviving information about his first contacts with the French and later with the English does not prove or even suggest that he felt strongly alienated from them. There were no serious language obstacles; the people were not hostile or uncharitable; and their moral outlook was in essential accord with his own.

-  However lonely he may at times have felt on shore between voyages, he nonetheless had, even during his early years in England, a few devoted friends, such as Adolf Krieger and G. F. 'W. Hope.

557) Certainly his feeling of foreignness must have been more pronounced among the English than among the French, for he was sometimes mistaken for a Marseilles Frenchman.

- " il me faut rendre cette justice aux Anglais qu'ils ne m'ont jamais fait sentir mon origine etrange

["I must render this justice to the English, who have never made me feel my origin stranger]

-  I went out into the world before I was seventeen, to France and England, and in neither country did I feel myself a stranger for a moment: neither as regards ideas, sentiments, nor institutions " (Aubry, I1. 289. 1922. 1214)

- he considered his stay in the Congo to have been his most strenuous test and transforming experience, telling Edward Garnett that before the Congo he had been a mere unreflective animal. His personal isolation there was the most severe that he suffered in his adult life, and to a considerable extent it was self-imposed. Even on the boat traveling to the Congo, he doubtless felt isolated and, like Yanko, sought companionship in external nature.

[콩고에서의 여정, 체류 동안 느꼈던 고립감이 극심했음을 생각할 필요가 있음.]

-  At the main base his association with the other company employees was extremely limited and strained; some of them he came to despise for their inefficiency, greed, and ruthlessness, and they in turn regarded him as repellent.

558) . 'She saved my life,' Conrad said, 'the white men never came near me."' 24 Through the negress' act of pity and charity, Conrad was doubtless, like Yanko when treated kindly by the servant girl Amy, temporarily released from his isolation and "brought back again within the pale of human relations with his new surroundings." This crucial experience may appear in " Amy Foster" as Amy's generous donation of bread to the tormented, hungry, and sick Yanko, who is imprisoned in the hut-like wood lodge.

 (25 The scene in Conrad's Part IV of Romance, p. 433, in which a negress feeds broth to the exhausted and straved [starved] John Kemp, that in " Gaspar Ruiz," A Set of Six, pp. 27-28, in which a destitute girl hides and nurses the wounded, feverish Ruiz in a hut, and that in Under Western Eyes, pp. 152-153, in which Tekla devotedly cares for an outcast dying of fever, may be drawn from the same experience)

559) that Conrad in depicting the final illness of Yanko modelled the scene on one of his own malarial attacks, which had their origin in the Congo, further suggests that the story is a kind of delirious, nightmarish reflection of the crisis of his African adventure, but developed as a domestic tragedy in an English setting.

III.

559) 플로베르 - Un Coeur Simple의 영향 [충실한 하인 펠리시테]

560) For the character of the country girl, Amy, he appears to have drawn upon three sources-the character Felicite, Mrs. Conrad, and the Conrads' young servant-girl, Nellie.

- His indebtedness is subtle rather than obvious because he had been reprimanded by Edward Garnett for his excessive reliance upon French models in his earlier story of rural life, "The Idiots.

- 펠리시테와 에이미

Perhaps because of their dullness of mind and lack of education, they perform their chores faithfully and do not object to the uneventfulness of their daily lives. Yet contrary to appearances, they have an imaginative faculty which has enabled each to have her single, unsuccessful love affair, the remembrance of which probably remains buried somewhere in her consciousness.

- ." Unlike Felicite, Amy has beneath her surface kindliness a fear and dislike of foreign persons and things.

562) Except for Yanko's brief period of courtship and married happiness, both he and Felicite are more or less emotionally separated from others until they are freed by death, which they face encouraged by a simple kind of Christian belief.

IV

563) Conrad's domestic situation and the idiosyncrasies of Jessie Conrad may have suggested to him the particular causes of Yanko's and Amy's gradual estrangement-namely, the replacement of her love for him by her maternal solicitude for her child, whom she fears he will injure, and her growing revulsion from his foreignness.

- Before marriage Conrad told Jessie that he did not want any children, and he was displeased several years later at the prospect of the first one, perhaps because of financial worries and the danger to his wife's health, or because she had been expending upon him her strong maternal feelings and he was reluctant to share them.

564) the conclusion contains many details drawn from a malaria attack which ocurred during his honeymoon or from a later attack of similar severity, and it expresses his abiding fear of an early death, which was traceable to his Congo experience.

[필자는 콩고 경험이 콘래드에게 안겨준 좌절감이나 고립감, 죽음과의 대면 그런 것이 이 작품에 큰 영향을 미쳤을 것이라고 가정한다.]

- Yet insofar as Amy's character reflects Conrad's view of his wife, the story is an uncomplimentary depiction of her excessive solicitude about her child, her strong anxiety at hearing foreign speech, and perhaps her prosaic and unimagi native mind.

565)  Je me suis collete avec la mort ou peu s'en faut [  I got stuck with death or almost]

566) Unlike many novelists, he did not, except for the " Congo Diary," keep notebooks or sketches by which his creative use of his materials could later be traced; and his unwillingness to explain the backgrounds of his work and so violate the privacy of his emotional life has left his readers uncertain of the relationship of much of his fiction to his life.

-  The problem of interpreting the story as spiritual autobiography is not, therefore, to discover whether upon arriving in England Conrad suffered isolation and mistreatment, but rather what significance for his out look on love and marriage the tragic domestic plot-also found in " The Idiots " and The Secret Agent-may have had.