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Xingu

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Xingu first appeared in the Scribner’s Magazine for December 1911. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Xingu and Other Stories published in 1910. It is one of her most popular and most frequently anthologised stories – with good reason, because it’s very funny.

Xingu

Xingu – critical comments

This is a very amusing satire of cultural pretensions and snobbery amongst middle and upper class ladies as they attempt to keep abreast of intellectual life (whilst their husbands are at work making money).

The outsider Mrs Roby is considered unfashionable because she reads the works of Anthony Trollope; and it is a breach of club etiquette when she asks Mrs Plinth for her opinion of Osric Dane’s novel The Wings of Death:

To be questioned in detail regarding the contents of a volume seemed to her as great an outrage as being searched for smuggled laces at the Custom House.

The book of Appropriate Allusions which Mrs Leveret carries everywhere is another example of undigested ‘culture’:

though in the privacy of her own room she commanded an army of quotations, these invariably deserted her at the critical moment, and the only phrase she retained—Canst though draw out leviathan with an hook?— was one she had never yet found occasion to apply.

The most sustained and amusing thing about the story is Mrs Roby’s faux naive challenge to Osric Dane in claiming that the club have recently been absorbed in a study of ‘Xingu’. Neither the club members nor Osric Dane herself have the slightest idea what this means, yet they are obliged by their snobbish protocols to discuss it as if they were fully informed.

Even after Mrs Roby and Osric Dane have left the gathering, the club members continue to maintain the pretense between each other that they have all been absorbed in this fascinating subject – though they are unsure if Xingu is a language, a philosophy, a book, or some primitive rite. It is in fact a branch of the Amazon and the indigenous peoples who inhabit its shores – something which has been flagged up earlier in the story, because that’s where Mrs Roby has recently been travelling.

Xingu – study resources

Xingu The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

Xingu The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Xingu Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Xingu Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Xingu - eBook edition Xingu – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Xingu

Xingu – story synopsis

Part I.   A group of middle class ladies are members of a lunch club. They competitively and snobbishly concern themselves with issues of ‘culture’ without any really serious understanding of the works they read.

Part II.   Mrs Leveret carries round a book of Appropriate Allusions which she vainly hopes to apply to situations as they arise; and Mrs Ballinger shows off with ‘the book of the day’ when they assemble to be addressed by novelist Mrs Osric Dane. They are flustered because they do not know what subject will be discussed. They try to impress her, but she answers all their observations with chillingly lofty questions which they cannot answer. Finally, the apparently naive Mrs Roby suggests that they have recently been studying Xingu, and asks Osric Dane what she thinks of it.

Nobody knows what the term Xingu means, but they discuss the concept in entirely abstract terms as if they do – treating it as if it were a philosophic treatise. Mrs Roby’s assumption of prominence annoys Mrs Ballinger, who insists that they discuss Osric Dane’s latest novel. But Mrs Roby excuses herself, saying that she hasn’t read any of Osric Dane’s works, and leaves – but Osric Dane leaves with her, and wants to hear more about Xingu – something ‘long’, and ‘deep’, with ‘difficult passages’.

Part III.   After the two women leave, the lunch club is torn between criticising Osric Dane and Mrs Roby, and a confused desire to inform themselves about Xingu – though they fear it might turn out to be a subject unsuitable for ladies. They don’t know if it is a philosophy or a language. But when they consult an encyclopedia it turns out to be a river, a branch of the Amazon, where Mrs Roby has been living. They reconstruct the conversation and realise that they have been duped and feel that the incident is a scandal. Mrs Ballinger, as president of the club, is morally pressured by the other members into writing to Mrs Roby, asking her to resign from the lunch club.

Xingu – principal characters
Mrs Ballinger founder of the lunch club
Mrs Plinth lunch club member
Miss Van Vluyck lunch club member
Mrs Leveret lunch club member
Mrs Osric Dane celebrity novelist, author of Wings of Death and The Supreme Instant
Miss Fanny Roby ‘naive’ Trollope enthusiast

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Youth

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Youth was written in early 1898 and first published in Blackwood’s Magazine for September 1898. It was later collected in book form as Youth, A Narrative and Two Other Stories published by William Blackwood in 1902. The two other stories were Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether. The first American edition was published by McClure, Phillips in 1903.

Youth

Youth – critical commentary

Steam and sail

This is one of a number of stories which features as background the transition from sailing ships to coal fired steam ships. The age of sail is often depicted in Conrad’s work as elegant, stylish, and requiring a ship’s crew with practical skills and a disciplined sense of co-operation. Steam-powered ships on the other hand are often depicted as dangerous and mechanically crude vessels, with no particular glamour attached to them.

It is clear in this story and others that Conrad regards the old sailing ships as a more romantically pure form of sea travel – but that experienced mariners must be able to translate their skills to the newer world of steam-powered vessels. In Youth Marlow survives storms and then the collapse and finally the destruction of the Judea. But he survives these maritime experiences and sees them as a right of passage into adult life.

The narrative

The first point to note is that Conrad created his narrative using a construction which he used several times – as did his friend Henry James. A group of men are gathered round a table in conversation. An outer-narrator sets the scene and introduces the characters – including in this case the inner-narrator Charles Marlow, who takes over the story.

This is sometimes called a ‘framed narrative’ – but it is worth noting that the narrative baton is never handed back to the original outer-narrator. Marlow keeps the story to himself until the end of the tale – merely referring to the others around the table in his final paragraph.

As readers we tend to forget that the entire story is essentially a first-person narrative, and that Marlow may be prejudiced or even wrong about some of his suppositions within the text. This was a literary device with rich potential that Conrad developed in some of his later fiction – and it has to be said that he did not always keep the narrative logic under firm control. Some of his novels feature scenes which the narrator (Marlow and others) could not know about.

Evaluation

The main weakness with the story is that it is not much more than a rather repetitive catalogue of disasters befalling the unfortunate ship, and not much psychological drama between any of the characters and the events which harass them.

The repetition of the storms and re-fits to the Judea spoil any structural unity the story might have had, and they smack very much of being inspired by keeping a documentary record of personal experience, rather than the construction of a work of art. Indeed, in his preface to the collection of tales in which Youth appeared Conrad says of the piece himself “Youth is certainly a piece of autobiography (`emotions remembered [sic] in tranquillity’)”.

Marlow’s concluding encomium on youthful aspirations is measured and ambiguous enough to include a certain amount of self-criticism. He is looking back from the age of forty-two when recounting the story amongst his conversational colleagues, and the implication of the concluding line surely includes a note of scepticism:

“…tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time when we were young at sea, young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks – and sometimes a chance to feel your strength – that only – what you all regret?”
And we all nodded at him: the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined wrinkled, our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone – has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash – together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.

Youth – study resources

Youth Youth – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Youth Youth – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Youth The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Youth Youth – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Youth Youth – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Youth Youth – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Youth Youth – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Youth Youth – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Youth Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Youth Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Youth Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Youth

Youth – plot summary

The inner-narrator Marlow recounts his first voyage in the East as second mate at the age of twenty on the Judea. He has transferred from an Australian clipper to a rusty old ship taking coal from the Tyne to Bangkok. The ship encounters gales in the North Sea and delays in Newcastle when there is a collision with a steamer. They sail into the North Sea where the ship begins to break up in further storms. But Marlow feels invigorated by surviving the ordeal and thinks of it as an ‘adventure’.

The galley and seamen’s quarters are swept away in the storm, and the steward is found completely mad with fear, from which he never recovers. When the storm abates they turn back to Falmouth, where the ship is repaired. When they set off again the crew refuse to continue. Even with a new crew, the same thing happens again. They become ‘residents of Falmouth’. The ship is then completely re-fitted, at which point all the rats on board leave the ship. A new crew is recruited from Liverpool, and the ship sails for Bangkok.

All goes well until they reach the Indian Ocean, when the cargo of coal catches fire. The crew try to put out the fire by pumping water into the hold. Their efforts last for two weeks, at which point they finally celebrate their success. Shortly afterwards the coal gas causes an explosion which rips the ship apart. The captain ignores the damage and keeps going for Bangkok.

They seek assistance from a passing ship which tows them towards a nearby port. But en route the fire breaks out again. The captain opts to stay with the ship until its extinction, saving as much as possible for the underwriters. With the ship on fire and the lifeboats ready to depart, Marlow goes back on board to find the captain asleep and other members of the crew having a meal and drinking beer. When his lifeboat finally cuts loose from the ship, Marlow thinks of this as his first real command.

Marlow eventually reaches a small port on a nearby island, and is shortly afterwards joined by the captain. An English steamer agrees to take them as passengers to safety. Marlow awakes the next day face to face with the East of his dreams and ends the soliloquy with a rhapsodic tribute to youthful optimism.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Youth – principal characters
I an un-named outer narrator
Charles Marlow the inner-narrator and protagonist (20)
Mahou first mate
The Judea a rusty old steam ship (Motto – ‘Do or Die’)
Jermyn the pilot with dripping nose
John Beard a ship’s captain
Jenny Beard his wife
Abraham the steward, a mulatto

Youth

Blackwood and Sons, 1902

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph ConradThe Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book at Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Red button Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Red button Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Red button Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Red button Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Red button Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Red button John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Red button Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Red button Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Red button Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Red button Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Red button Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Red button Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Red button Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Red button Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Red button George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Red button John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Red button James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Red button Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Red button Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Red button J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Red button John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Red button Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Red button Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Red button Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

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