"Charlotte
Corday in a Schoolgirl's Dress"
by Susanna
In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad often compares the multitude of South American revolutions to the Italian revolution of Garibaldi through the character of Giorgio Viola. However Conrad also makes connections to the French Revolution of 1789 through a comment of Martin Decoud.
While they are talking privately on the balcony of the sala of the "Casa Gould," Decoud reminds Antonia Avellanos of a time she "snubbed" him in Paris: "You know you were a very terrible person, a sort of Charlotte Corday in a schoolgirl's dress; a ferocious patriot. I suppose you would have stuck a knife into Guzman Bento?" (Conrad 153). In these lines, Decoud not only compares Antonia to the young woman who in 1793 murdered Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin leader of the French Revolution (Conrad 446, note 13); he also draws a parallel between the constantly changing government of the fictional Costaguana and that of revolutionary France.
Decoud declares that winning Antonia is his "only one aim in the world," and that her "snubbing" of him in Paris was the beginning of his affection for her (Conrad 153). Ironically enough, he chooses to strive for this aim by somewhat playfully mocking the object of his affections. Decoud does not compare Antonia directly to Corday; instead he says she was a sort of Corday, infantilized by her "schoolgirl's dress." When he calls her a "terrible person" and a "ferocious patriot," his words sound less like admiring praise and more like a scolding that she had been a bad little girl.
It is possible that Antonia misses these implications of her childishness; however, as a woman of well-established intelligence she more likely chooses to overlook them. As Decoud's statement is in the past tense-- "you were," "you would have"-- Antonia could read it as a jibe at her as she used to be, not as she is at present. She replies to Decoud's accusation, "You do me too much honor" (Conrad 153). She may be referring to Decoud's "supposition" that she could have murdered Bento as Corday murdered Jean-Paul Marat, or Antonia might believe that that she does not deserve to be compared to Corday at all. In either case, Antonia ignores Decoud's subtle digs at her own maturity and embraces the comparison to Charlotte Corday instead. Whatever Decoud's implications about Antonia's maturity, the comment is made in an illicit situation according to the customs of Costaguana. The two are not alone, for the Goulds and their other guests are conversing in the room behind them; however the couple’s behavior is "in defiance of every convention" that unmarried men and women should not converse unattended. Decoud and Antonia are, as Don Juste Lopez notes, "Costaguaneros with European manners." (Conrad 152)
Interestingly, while the "first families in Sulaco" often gossip about the couple, no one interferes with their behavior at the window of the Casa Gould. No one in the room intrudes upon their conversation or attempts to separate them, and the passers-by-- Lopez and his daughters, the widow Gavilaso de Valdes and her sons-- pretend not to see them. (Conrad 152) Their improper behavior is apparently tolerated because of Antonia's family situation; Conrad writes that the conversation is "something of which in the whole extent of the Republic only the extraordinary Antonia could be capable-- the poor, motherless girl, never accompanied, with a careless father, who had thought only of making her learned" (Conrad 158). The implication is that Antonia is allowed to transgress moral boundaries because she doesn't know any better thanks to her father's lax parenting and encouragement of her education.
Taken in a larger context, Decoud's comment about Antonia's past attitude may be considered a censure of the "schoolgirl" revolutions of Costaguana and the Americas as a whole. During his discussion with Antonia, Decoud thinks that "[a]fter one Montero there would be another, the lawlessness of a populace of all colours and races, barbarism, irremediable tyranny." He longs to take Antonia to Europe, a land lacking "the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly seemed even harder to bear than its ignominy." (Conrad 158) Decoud seems to differentiate between the revolutions of Costaguana and those of Europe, such as the French Revolution he references when he compares Antonia to a schoolgirl version of Charlotte Corday. However, a continuation of the comparison of the Costaguanero and French revolutions begun by Decoud reveals that his European elitism is misplaced. The direct parallels between the two show that the Costaguaneros are not simply playing at revolution; like Antonia and Decoud themselves, the revolutions of Nostromo are Costaguaneros with European manners.
The most obvious comparison is, of course, between Antonia Avellanos and Charlotte Corday. Corday lost her mother at a young age as Antonia did and was left with a father whom Henri Béraud describes as "a poor gentleman who thought only of his library" (Béraud 222)-- quite similar to Antonia's "careless father, who had thought only of making her learned" (Conrad 158). Although Corday spent her youth not with her father, but in a convent called Abbaye-aux-Dames and with an aunt in Caen, like Antonia she devoted herself to knowledge. Béraud notes that Corday was "often caught declaiming verse from Horace or Cinna. Deprived of tenderness at an age when it is necessary to childhood, the little Charlotte retired within herself; she thought, she read much without any plan: Tacitus, Plutarch, Raynal and Jean Jacques Rousseau." (Béraud 222)
While Corday's act elevated Marat to the status of martyr, she was not without her own followers. Béraud claims that she founded "the religion of the dagger" and that she earned the nicknames "angel of murder" and "red virgin." He quotes Pierre Vergniaud as saying, "She kills us, but she teaches us how to die." (Béraud 229) Antonia seems to have had the same effect on Decoud. He declares that she would have "without compunction" dispatched him to murder Bento and that she holds him in Costaguana writing "deadly nonsense" in the newspaper Porvenir. "You seem satisfied to see my life hang on a thread," he tells her. (Conrad 153) Like Charlotte Corday, Antonia teaches Decoud how to die, perhaps a little too well.
Béraud also describes a childishness in Corday's nature, established through a comparison which echoes Decoud's very contrast between her and Antonia. Béraud writes that "when [Corday] talked, her voice sounded very childish, suggesting a comparison between her and Joan of Arc, who always remained a little girl" (Béraud 222). Like Joan of Arc, Corday dies a "virgin with the pure heart" in Béraud's eyes at least (Béraud 221). Again, Antonia's life mimics Corday's; while Conrad does not directly establish her virginity, Antonia remains unmarried and presumably chaste after Decoud's death, living with her bishop uncle in the years that follow (Conrad 379).
Thus although Antonia's virginity is not preserved by her own demise as in the case of Joan of Arc and Corday, Decoud's death effectively martyrs her. In his author's notes to Nostromo, Conrad describes Antonia as "a relic of the past disregarded by men awaiting impatiently the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more Revolutions," going out into the sunlight with "her upright carriage and her white head" after "a lingering, tender, faithful glance" at Decoud's memorial in Sulaco's cathedral (Conrad 14). In this description, Antonia seems to be almost dead herself, a "disregarded relic" who exists only to haunt, spectre-like, the memorials of her father, her uncle, and her betrothed. Unlike Corday, Antonia survives her revolution since she did not, after all, take to Guzman Bento with a knife; yet Conrad's implication is that after she loses the men she loved to the revolution, she might as well have sacrificed her own life as Corday did.
By extension of the Corday metaphor, further comparisons emerge between the Costaguanero and French revolutions. Decoud speaks of Antonia "sticking a knife in" the dictator Guzman Bento, drawing a connection between Bento and Jean-Paul Marat who was murdered by Corday. Marat was a Jacobin, one of a group of radical leaders of the National Assembly who met in a Jacobin convent in Paris (Doyle 142). He published the newspaper L'Ami du Peuple, in which he called for increasingly more people to be executed as the revolution progressed (Béraud 122). Corday was of the more moderate Girondin party which had attempted to impeach Marat from the National Assembly in 1793 and which fled from Paris to Caen, where Corday was living with her aunt. According to Béraud, the railing of these exiles against Marat inspired Corday to murder him. (Doyle 228, Béraud 222-23)
While Bento had more power than Marat as "Perpetual President" and dictator of Costaguana, he too fought a war against privilege, the aristocrats known as the "Sulaco Oligarchs" in his time and the "Blancos" during most of the action of Nostromo. Like Marat, Bento believed in death as the key to freedom for the common people, and he "had put to death great numbers of people." The executed were, Conrad notes tongue-in-cheek, "martyred in the cause of aristocracy." (Conrad 52)
After his death, Marat became a veritable secular saint. When Paris was dechristianized in 1794, his busts actually replaced those of Christian saints, although they were later smashed after the Jacobins fell from power (Doyle 261, 287). Bento received recognition after his death as well, though it was fame of a slightly different sort: upon the theft of his body from its mausoleum, the priests of Sta. Marta declare that "the devil in person" took the body and that Bento has become transformed into a "sanguinary land-haunting spectre" (Conrad 52).
The point of view of Nostromo reconciles the differences between Marat's martyrdom and Bento's demonization. At the time of his murder, Marat's party was in power. In their view, he was a hero who died for his country, a perspective still held by historians sympathetic to the Jacobin cause. However, Nostromo is far from Jacobin. Only the moderate revolutionaries such as Giorgio Viola, Nostromo, Decoud, and Antonia herself are valorized, while the radicals like Bento are condemned. The idea seems to be that revolution is only good if it doesn't harm the capitalistic ruling class, the Blancos like the San Tomé mine superintendent Charles Gould. Because Bento attacked the Blancos, embodied in the persons of Gould's uncle and father, he is not a martyr; he is a demon doomed to haunt Costaguana like the legendary undead gringos who lost their lives searching for treasure.
Although Decoud attempts to trivialize Bento by extension of his description of Antonia-- would Bento, then, be a "schoolgirl Marat"?-- the fallen dictator is likely as revered as the fallen Jacobin by his surviving followers. Regrettably, Conrad does not provide his readers with their point of view; save for brief interludes into Nostromo's own mind, we see Costaguana only through the eyes of the Sulaco Oligarchs such as Gould and the moderate (and wealthy) revolutionaries such as Antonia and Decoud.
Decoud's metaphor can be carried further: if Bento is Marat and his followers the Jacobins, the Riberist regime is comparable to the Thermidorian Reaction that followed Robespierre's demise, smashing Marat's busts in its wake. There is also, of course, the matter of Nostromo who, like the other great "Incorruptible" Robespierre, was corrupted by his own virtue. Even Decoud has a parallel in the journalist Camille Desmoulins, his equal in revolutionary ideals and emotional instability. Antonia is right to take little stock in Decoud's implications that Costaguana's affairs are only a schoolgirl revolution. She is as martyred by the Costaguanero revolution as Charlotte Corday is by the French, and Guzman Bento ends up as dead-- and undead-- as Jean-Paul Marat.
Works Cited
Béraud, Henri. Twelve Portraits of the French Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928.
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004.
Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Second ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.