Conrad and Masculinity

108 Conrad and Masculinity
experience’, and ‘although aware of his own alienation and in search
of a remedy for it ... cannot admit that this alienation is what actually
constitutes him’ (EM, 10). For Foucault ‘subject’ and ‘subjection’ are,
as we have seen, closely related terms: that which forms us as modern
subjects or individuals also subjects us to disciplinary power.
Exoticism, according to Bongie, is a strategy for maintaining ‘the illusion
of spontaneous desire’ and of autonomous subjectivity, by
seeking a realm of experience outside an alienating modernity (EM,
10). He distinguishes two forms of exoticism: ‘whereas imperialist
exoticism affirms the hegemony of modern civilization over the less
developed, savage territories, exoticizing exoticism privileges those
very territories and their peoples, figuring them as a possible refuge
from an overbearing modernity’ (EM, 17). Nostromo is dominated by
the former fantasy and Gould in particular embodies its paradoxical
project. Discovering in Costaguana (a colonial context where modernization
and urbanization come relatively late) a field for the assertion
of individual autonomy over against an Other seen as inferior he
nevertheless directs that assertion towards the establishment of a
modernity which will erode that autonomy (or reveal it to have always
been illusory).
Bongie notes the possibility that ‘modern individualism and
masculist ideology feed into each other’ (EM, 10), a possibility illuminated
by Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s account of the late nineteenth
century as the moment when an alienation of men from their bodies
is matched by an excessive identification of women with the body. 24
This also suggests one way in which the male and female roles in
Nostromo are connected to its theme of economic and social change.
The process of ‘confiscation’ of the male working body by industrialization
and urbanization underlies the alienation of Gould and
Nostromo, revealing their respective versions of heroic male masculinity
(encoded in their bodies) to be increasingly outmoded or
delusionary. One thing which distinguishes the subjection of Gould
and Nostromo from that of the female characters is the displacement
of the idea of the body onto the women. Mrs Gould, the Morenita and
Giselle Viola ‘overrepresent’ (to use Buci-Glucksmann’s term) the
body, while the fictive heroic autonomy of Gould and Nostromo is
invested in their power and will. The narrator, particularly liable to
take a position of sexist condescension when led into generalization
(a quality which is shared with narrators elsewhere in Conrad’s work,
notably Marlow), betrays such an identification of women with the
body when he opines that: