1. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 18.
2. I have discussed Almayer’s Folly in relation to Schopenhauer and Victorian erotophobia in Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. See also J.D. Patterson, ‘The Representation of Love in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: 1895–1915’, D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University (1984). In addition, I am grateful to Dr Zawiah Yahya for drawing my attention to the way in which the representation of Nina draws on and repeats conventional European representations of Malay women. As she argued in her paper, ‘Of White Man and Brown Woman in Colonialist Discourse’, given at the 34th International Congress of Asian and North African Studies, Hong Kong 1993: ‘Western discourse has constructed the oriental woman as a relentless and perversely sexual animal’.
3. For the femme fatale, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the ‘Fin de Siècle’ (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 144–68,
4. and Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late Victorian ‘Femme Fatale’ (London: Macmillan, 1992); for the figuring of the colonial space as female and the situating of women and non-Europeans as part of nature not culture,
5. see Helen Carr, ‘Woman/Indian: “The American” and His Others’, in Francis Barker et al., Europe and Its Others (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), 14–27; for an exploration of such figuring in Conrad’s work, see Padmini Mongia, ‘Empire, Narrative, and the Feminine in Lord Jim and “Heart of Darkness”’, in Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles, and Wieslaw Krajka (eds), Contexts for Conrad (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993), 135–50. See also Susan Jones, Conrad and Women (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 10, for Aissa as femme fatale.