Conrad and Masculinity

98 Conrad and Masculinity
masculinity (a version, in fact, of the ‘stiff upper lip’). His response to
his father’s anguished letters denies emotional identification with his
father, a denial which is justified in terms of bodily separation: ‘The
view he took of it was sympathetic to his father, yet calm and reflective.
His personal feelings had not been outraged, and it is difficult to
resent with proper and durable indignation the physical or mental
anguish of another organism, even if that other organism is one’s own
father’ (58–9). Here, as in The Secret Agent, the attitude of the impersonal
narrator is problematic. The above could conceivably be free
indirect discourse (that is, Gould himself could reflect thus about the
separation of organisms), but it seems unlikely. If the generalization
belongs to the narrator or narrative voice, then that voice is inconsistent
or short of memory, since Mrs Gould does not find it difficult to
resent the physical and mental anguish of others, whether her
husband, Dr Monygham or the oppressed peoples of Costaguana.
Arguably, what the narrative voice here does is less to adopt Gould’s
point of view than to adopt a male point of view: taking as universal
an emphasis on bodily separation, a resistance to penetration by the
feelings of others and a concomitant suppression of sympathy which
are typically male. Indeed, in its attitude to Mrs Gould, the narrative
seems (as Klein notes) consistently to adopt the attitude of a patronizing
and idealizing male. Rather like Gould, the narrator seems, in
respect of Mrs Gould, ‘the most anxious and deferential of dictators’ –
an attitude, we are told, that ‘pleased her immensely’ (62) when they
were courting. The observation quoted above concerning Gould’s
response to his father’s anguish is only superficially accurate: since a
desire to make the mine profitable becomes the guiding obsession of
Gould’s life, his ‘calm and reflective’ view of it conceals an excessive
identification with his father, which involves a diversion of his
sympathy from humans to mines: ‘Abandoned workings had for him
strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of
human misery’ (59). His relationship with the future Mrs Gould is
(fatally for her future happiness) formed via the mediation of this
obsession. We are told that her delight in him takes wings when she
discovers it (59), and that much of their courting involved discussion
of the Gould concession, ‘because the sentiment of love can enter into
any subject and live ardently in remote phrases’ (60). When she agrees
to go with him to Costaguana as his wife, her enthusiasm for the plan
offers him an unprecedentedly ‘fascinating vision of herself’ (65), yet
this vision is really a reflection of his own enthusiasm. Gould perhaps
never does achieve a clear vision of her as an autonomous person. In