SOURCE: Shaffer, Brian W. “Swept from the Sea: Trauma and Otherness in Conrad's ‘Amy Foster.’” Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies 32, no. 3 (fall 2000): 163-76.

In the following essay, Shaffer views “Amy Foster” as a story about the trauma of emigration and culture shock.

“[Conrad] thought of civilized … life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.”¹

When not entirely overlooked by scholars, Joseph Conrad's story “Amy Foster” (1901, 1903)² has been treated either as a gloss on the author's marriage and his literary reception by English readers, or, in Albert Guerard's words, as “a generalized comment on the lonely, uncomprehended, absurd human destiny,” in which the castaway protagonist plays the role of an “Everyman.”³ What has not been adequately appreciated is the degree to which the story stands as a meditation...