SOURCE: Kingsbury, Celia M. “‘The Novelty of Real Feelings’: Restraint and Duty in Conrad's ‘The Return.’” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 32, no. 1 (spring 2000): 31-40.

In the following essay, Kingsbury investigates the role of self-restraint in “The Return.”

Alvan Hervey, protagonist of Conrad's 1897 story “The Return,” tells his estranged wife that “Self-restraint is everything in life.”¹ And in much of Conrad's work, restraint is the key to personal decency and social stability. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow reminds us that Kurtz's lack of restraint functions as a primary factor in his downfall. But restraint itself becomes the key to Hervey's downfall. Crushed when he discovers that his wife of five years has almost left him for a poet and editor with large teeth, a “rank outsider” of “no class at all” (147-48), Hervey thinks only of maintaining appearances, a criticism Marlow levels at the manager who accompanies...