ession with The Wife that Marlow secures his position, which he trivializes for this very reason: "My dear aunt's influential acquaintances were producing an unexpected effect on [the brickmaker]. I nearly burst into a laugh" (Conrad 28). Earlier Marlow confides to his shipmates the ludicrousness, the oddity, of his having had to enlist a woman's help to get a job: "Then--would you believe it--I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work--to get a job! Heavens" (Conrad 12)! This sets the stage for a consistent vision of women who must be constituted by the type of their relationship to their male lovers or relatives.
From the beginning of the narrative women are reductively associated with th
...