Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 99
the characteristic pattern of homosocial exchange, Mrs Gould serves
to mediate the relationship between Charles Gould and his father: to
experience the emotion, desire, excitement which Gould cannot allow
himself to feel at the prospect of symbolically joining with and
displacing his father. This is very evident in their responses to news of
the death of Mr Gould senior. The son sweats and stares fixedly, the
woman cries in sympathy for both father and son, and the patronizing
voice of the narrator, obsessed as ever with the smallness of the
woman, describes her as ‘very small in her simple, white frock, almost
like a lost child ... while he stood by her, again perfectly motionless in
the contemplation of the marble urn’ (62). Charles Gould is really the
lost child here, turning to her and to the mine to rediscover his lost
father. The mine involves extraction of material from the body of the
earth, a symbolically sexual penetration of ‘a wild, inaccessible, and
rocky gorge of the Sierra’ (54). Such a Freudian reading might seem
glib, were it not supported by the fact that, as Jeremy Hawthorn points
out, ‘the mine ... becomes as a mistress to [Gould], usurping the place
of his wife in his thoughts and affections’. 8 One might develop this
insight: if women serve as forms of mediation and tokens of exchange
in the homosocial economy of a patriarchal society, then the mine,
accorded the place of the women, may do the same for Gould. In
Nostromo the natural landscape, rather than the city, is the object of
transcodings of the human body: the ‘great body of motionless and
opaque clouds’ (5) smothering the quiet gulf, clouds which the sun
can later be seen ‘eating ... up’ (6); the ‘cool purity’ of Higuerota with
its ‘white dome’ (26); the pain of Mrs Viola, the gnawing of which ‘for
years ... had been part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the
harbour under the wooded spurs of the range’ (25). If Gould has
cathected (to use the Freudian term for attaching a quantity of psychic
energy to a particular object) the mine more than his wife, this is
indicative of a masculinity which has to find obscure routes to bodily
and emotional closeness with other men: the body of the earth is also
the body of his father, since the mine and his father have become
profoundly identified in his psyche. The cool, white purity of Mr
Gould’s family allies itself with a South American aristocracy claiming
racial purity, itself a form of (delusory) physical separation: ‘The name
of Gould has always been highly respected in Sulaco’, Gould tells his
future wife:
My uncle Harry was chief of the State for some time, and has left a
great name amongst the first families. By this I mean the pure