Almayer's Folly

Ford recalled having seen ‘the copy of Madame Bovary’ from which Conrad had not only translated passages when at sea but ‘upon the end papers and margins of which Almayer's Folly was begun’. Whatever the truth of this statement, there are many similarities beween the two novels in subject matter and treatment which indicate an undeniable influence. Both protagonists, essentially mediocre people, suffer from the curse of an over-fertile imagination which isolates them in grandiose visions of a life at odds with what could reasonably be expected from their changeless, dreary and oppressive environment. Both are the victims of that form of ‘bêtise’ consisting of a fundamental delusion about oneself, which Jules de Gaultier called ‘bovarysme’. The theme of Romantic illusion, the ‘bovarysme’ of Emma and Almayer, represents a major point of contact beween Conrad and Flaubert. In response to Garnett's criticism of chapters 11 and 12 of An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad explained on 15 March 1895 that Willems was lying buried under his ‘pet theory’, which, as a previous remark suggests (‘truth is no more immortal than any other delusion’ (CL, I, p. 205)) refers to his view of man as a victim of his own illusions, a theme which is central in Conrad's work as it is in Flaubert's.