Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 109
It must not be supposed that Mrs. Gould’s mind was masculine. A
woman with a masculine mind is not a being of superior efficiency;
she is simply a phenomenon of imperfect differentiation—interestingly
barren and without importance.
(66–7; emphasis added)
‘Barren’, with its suggestion of childlessness, implies that for a woman
to challenge men in the sphere of the mind would detract from her
body (an idea commonly used by the reactionary side in the ‘New
Woman’ debate of the 1890s). Yet a symbolic reading of the Goulds’
childlessness would more plausibly relate it to the barrenness of
Gould’s heart rather than the liveliness of his wife’s intelligence. The
identification of women with the body helps to generate the feminine
predicament: to constrain the possibilities for women of attaining
even limited autonomy and status. But the identification of men with
mind and will and the overidentification of women with the body
conceals the existence of masculinity and femininity as correlative
though unequal forms of bodily discipline. Gould, Mrs Gould and
Nostromo all find themselves trapped within systems of meaning
which determine them. All three have believed that their way of being
bodied forth their inner selves, but discover that their bodies have
been written upon by history and ideology (a fact of which Hirsch is
the symbol). All three have taken pleasure in others’ attribution of
meaning to their bodies: Mrs Gould has enjoyed being admired and
condescended to by Gould; Nostromo has enjoyed the physical
display of his status and reputation; Gould has enjoyed the admiration
of Holroyd and others for his imperturbability. In each case this
pleasure turns bitter. However, the narrator seems more complicit
with the inscription of Mrs Gould’s body. The identification of the
males with mind and will and the overidentification of the females
with the body has the further consequence, perhaps unintended by
Conrad, that the novel’s progressive revelation of the subjection of
the male characters to ‘material interests’ implies a deconstruction of
their masculinity. This masculinity is revealed as, borrowing
Althusser’s words, an ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their
real conditions of existence’, and therefore a form of ideology. 25
The ending of the novel expresses an unwillingness to accept this
deconstruction. The traditional romantic troping of nature and landscape
as female represents a displacement of the body parallel to the
displacement of the body onto women. By exerting mind and will in
an effort to dominate nature, men deny their bodily existence as part