Conrad and Masculinity

Epistemology, Modernity and Masculinity 119
modify gender differences. Nina Pelikan Straus’s article ‘The Exclusion
of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, as
it became widely known in the early 1990s, helped to spark a debate
on these issues. 5
Such an investigation has significance that goes beyond questions of
Conrad’s own attitudes. Conrad is widely regarded as a major literary
modernist and as a prophet and critic of the condition of social modernity.
While modernity (a social phenomenon) and modernism (a
movement in the arts) are by no means identical or co-extensive,
modernist experiment in the arts can be understood as a response to
the experiences of modernity. 6 The modernist techniques of writing
which Conrad used and in certain respects pioneered, such as the use
of multiple narratives, unreliable narrators and non-linear narrative,
also enabled him, as Ian Watt argues, to represent what have been seen
as some of the key philosophical dilemmas of modernity or the
modern condition: principally epistemological and ethical doubt. But
feminist writing has questioned the universalizing assumptions of
many accounts of the problems of ‘modern man’, and suggested that
women’s experience of modernity and women’s relations to issues of
knowledge and truth were significantly different from those of men. 7
Many of the grounds for asserting such a difference are very applicable
to Conrad’s work. It has been pointed out that many of the archetypal
figures of modernism as traditionally conceived are necessarily male.
For example, Janet Wolff argues that ‘the literature of modernity
describes the experience of men’, citing the example of the flâneur, the
idler or stroller with the ‘freedom to move about in the city, observing
and being observed, but never interacting with others’. 8 As Wolff
points out, women did not enjoy such freedom during the second half
of the nineteenth century, since an idling woman might be taken for a
prostitute, while the exchange of anonymous gazes in which the
flâneur indulges was one which the conventions of respectability did
not allow to women. 9 While these conventions were increasingly challenged
and gradually eroded during the period of literary modernism
(c. 1890–1930), the city wanderers of Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s early
poetry, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and other modernist classics remained
crucially male (a version of the flâneuse appears in 1925, in Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway). Conrad’s fictional settings are prior to the First World War
and Victorian conventions of female respectability remain potent
(though open to challenge in a novel such as Chance). Such a construction
of femininity can be understood in terms of a sexual politics
which made women the object of the male gaze. The wanderer in the