Conrad and Masculinity

100 Conrad and Masculinity
Creole families, who take no part in the miserable farce of governments.
Uncle Harry was no adventurer. In Costaguana we Goulds
are no adventurers. He was of the country, and he loved it, but he
remained essentially an Englishman in his ideas. He made use of
the political cry of his time.
(64)
This passage is replete with proleptic ironies, most notably bearing
on Gould’s later realization that his family are indeed adventurers,
and that he himself has been made use of by the material interests
which he imagined himself to ‘make use of’ (83): ‘with his English
parentage and English upbringing, he perceived that he was an
adventurer in Costaguana, the descendant of adventurers ... [with]
something of an adventurer’s easy morality’ (365). As we have seen,
Gould remains an Englishman, in his body as well as his ideas, but
the novel reveals that the colonial fantasy of the moral purity of the
English male body has no more substance than the fantasy of racial
purity underlying the above comments by Gould, in which the
‘essentially’ English gentlemen, with the help of the ‘pure’ Creoles,
take power, while imagining themselves above politics, and exploit
the body of the land and the bodies of its people, while imagining
themselves above adventuring.
Gould’s eventual realization of this is the revenge of the ‘cool
purity’ of Higuerota, which makes men physically appear like dwarfs
(26–7), and this symbolically corresponds to the historical and
economic forces which dwarf them morally. Furthermore, Gould’s
masculinity, and the complacent masculinity (at least at times) of the
narrative voice, are implicitly rebuked too. Wollaeger points to a deep
fear of ‘a dissolution of self’ in Nostromo, which he reads in terms of
philosophical scepticism (FS, 124). He cites Monygham’s awareness
of the ‘most dangerous element’ of physical dangers, ‘the crushing,
paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a
man struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his
fellows’ (N, 433), and Arnold Bennett’s sense that Higuerota is ‘the
principal personage in the story’. 9 Wollaeger concludes that ‘society
and consciousness alike ... are endangered by “the majesty of inorganic
nature” (SA, 14)’ (FS, 125). Yet is it not rather normative
masculinity which is endangered? – that masculinity which cannot
bear to feel little and so insists on Mrs Gould being little, which desires
to conquer the body of nature while retaining the firm boundaries of
its own body, which, like the chairman of the railway, shows ‘the