Conrad and Masculinity

102 Conrad and Masculinity
Nostromo’s heroic status through unconvincing romantic hyperbole.)
However, Klein’s account raises two problems concerning masculinity
and the body. First, the priority which she gives to gender oppression
as a paradigm paradoxically ends up by risking dilution of its specificity
to the point where the issue of gender tends to disappear. Klein
argues that ‘the feminine predicament pertains to all females’, but
modifies this with the suggestion that ‘many appear to escape the
component of hierarchical inferiority through economic class’ (FP,
107). However, she implies that men move between the masculine
situation and the feminine predicament according to their access to
power. There is thus a tendency in her argument for ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ to become merely markers for degrees of power or powerlessness.
In practice the relationship to power inscribed in masculinity
seems more recalcitrant. The second and related problem pertains
more specifically to Nostromo. If Nostromo is shown to be the tool of
Gould and the aristocrats, then ultimately Gould is shown to be the
tool of his American backers and their ‘material interests’. Is Gould,
then, also in the feminine predicament by the end of the novel? If so
– if, that is, a wealthy, successful, powerful colonial mine-owner and
power-broker, with a fine house, a supportive wife and many servants,
is seen to lack bodily autonomy and status – then it begins to seem
almost like a universal human condition. What happens in Klein’s
article, I think, is that a liberal, feminist concern for the rights of the
individual overlaps with a Marxist view of society in terms of largescale
impersonal power-structures, and this generates a
methodological aporia. The account of the pervasive influence of
‘material interests’ in Nostromo makes it highly conducive to Marxist
readings. 10 In terms of the body, though, Foucault would be equally
relevant. In Discipline and Punish he sees power in modern society as
operating upon the body through what he terms ‘disciplinary
methods’. 11 These methods involve the detailed analysis and regulation
of bodily and mental activity characteristic of prisons, hospitals,
factories, schools, barracks and other such institutions in the modern
period (i.e. since the late eighteenth century). They produce ‘docile
bodies’: that is, bodies that are productive and subjected to social
control without the need for overt coercion or violence. 12 As Foucault
specifies in The History of Sexuality, his concept of power does not
attribute it to particular groups:
By power, I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and
mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given