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Conrad's fictional treatment of women in most cases leads to a confrontation with the questions of reality and truth. In the Malay novels (Almayer's Folly [1895], An Outcast of the Islands [1896], The Rescue [1920]) the question of reality and truth in the white colonizer's relation to the women of the colonial territory is bound up with their relation to the setting itself. That is to say, the motivations that lead to those relationships and the developments that follow from them parallel and reflect each other.
Although most women in these novels appear to be insignificant, they play structurally and thematically important roles. By their presence and developments in the stories these women expose the doubtful nature of the white men's claim to superiority over the indigenous population: the hollowness of their self-image as benefactors and redeemers, their insensitivity, self-assertion, and greed, and the demoralizing and deteriorating consequences that result from all this for the colony.
The Malay novels are in effect not only a record of the generally acknowledged consequences of white domination in colonial countries. Added to the complex of racial and national tensions and revenge is a sexual one the nature of which is mainly decided by the women's function to make truth assert itself.
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