This collaborative session of the International Virginia Woolf Society and Joseph Conrad Society of America focuses on the family resemblances linking Woolf and Conrad as modernist writers caught between gender and empire. As incisive observers of imperium and the debilitating sociocultural effects of colonial culture on conscience and desire, Conrad and Woolf offered transformative resistance to cultural mores whilst, crucially for us, grounding their critiques through the intergenerational contestations of female characters. In the face of our era’s neo-colonial turn, the session develops relationally-minded approaches to family entanglement at the junctures of race, gender, and power, and does so through comparative work on two authors on whom such scholarship is lacking.

The panel aims to renegotiate the place of racialized gender in the still imperial world of nascent modernism. Whether considering Woolf’s depiction of feminine consciousness or the biracial female characters of Conrad’s Eastern narratives, both writers contemplate women at the cusp of independence. For instance, just as Heart of Darkness’s African consort and European “intended” exist at the supposedly oppositional poles of Conrad’s rumination on visibility and desire, Woolf’s young protagonist in The Voyage Out suffers slippages between her cultural identity and embodied encounters with exoticism. Indeed, each of our four presenters sees hybrid and threatening ‘new forms of beauty’ emerging through Conrad’s and Woolf’s poetic innovations, not least regarding young women caught between transgressive desires and generational constraint. To ensure a historically balanced appraisal for our panel’s more speculative literary considerations, we precede a long-established researcher with three emergent scholars: a visiting assistant professor, a sessional lecturer, and a PhD candidate.

With his addition of a later author, Ryan Tracy’s paper, “Conrad, Woolf, Morrison, and the Figure of the African Woman,” positions our panel’s exploration of Woolf and Conrad within the broader twentieth century. Unveiling the false moralities undergirding racial projections, Tracy provides an intersectional reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. Contemplating colonial race as an objectifiable component of alterity, Tracy renegotiates the projections that underlie narrative entwinements concerning gendered ethnicity and African or African American being. Indeed, his citation of the ‘very fine negress’ from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own prompts observance of the hypervisible divisions of colonial racism flowing from modernity’s inability ‘to comprehend the limits of its own spectacular desire.’

Pouneh Saeedi’s “Nina Almayer: Woolf, Femininity, & Conrad’s ‘Half-Caste Girl in the House’” applies Woolf’s interrogations of female voice and “nature” to Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly. Refuting the confusions of her divided racial heritage, Nina’s turn from the ‘sleek hypocricies’ of colonial society towards the ‘fierceness of natures... innocent of culture’ helps her to determine her own fate whilst revealing Conrad’s awareness of the extent to which imperium’s legislation of gender and race foments its own relational critique. Adopting a “resolute nature” in the face of dehumanization, Nina forges “a room of her own” by embracing the indeterminacies of her “half-savage” heritage against the overlapping patriarchal norms of both the “civilized” West and a long-colonized East.

In “New Wave Women: Gender and Vagueness in Conrad and Woolf,” Jennifer Cranfill examines the concept of vagueness in relation to gender and empire. Employing Bertrand Russell’s understanding of vagueness as ‘a sort of shadow’ cast over language, Cranfill recovers Conrad’s and Woolf’s female characters from within the shadows of imperial paternalism. Through Lord Jim’s mixed-race woman, Jewel, she interrogates the postcolonial and gender-based standards of imperial femininity. While Conrad’s depictions of femininity are cast in the same vague and occluded tropes by which he describes Africa, Cranfill notes the equally veiled terms of Woolf’s depictions of intergenerational family interaction, noting how Woolf’s female characters often fail to “see” one another. In sum, the paper shows Woolf and Conrad smudging the vectors of colonial gender whilst interrogating the expected semantic fields of femininity and empire.

Professor Richard Kaye’s paper, “Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, & the Refashioning of the Edwardian Heroine as Emergent New Woman,” provides social context to the relational discourses of the other presenters. Focusing on the rarely compared female characters of these authors’ South American novels, Nostromo and The Voyage Out, Kaye relocates the “lost girls” and “new women” of metropolitan literary production. By positing Nostromo as Woolf’s intertext, he accentuates The Voyage Out’s corrective to imperial masculinism – seeing Rachel Vinrace as a new woman contradicting societal expectations in the name of feminine consciousness. As a counterpoint to Conrad’s defeated heroine in the corrosive male-centric arena of Nostromo, Rachel emerges as a doomed heroine resistant to the temptations of colonial romance.