Conrad and Masculinity

120 Conrad and Masculinity
city plays a role in certain of Conrad’s works, in particular Under
Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Chance. The flâneur as described by
Walter Benjamin in his writings on Baudelaire is a figure indicative of
modernity yet also ‘on the margins both of the great city and of the
bourgeois class’. 10 The flâneur has affinities with the detective, with the
victims and murders of Poe’s stories which Baudelaire translated as well
as with Baudelaire himself as alienated poet. 11 Razumov and the
language-teacher in Under Western Eyes, Verloc, Ossipon, Heat and the
Professor in The Secret Agent and Marlow in Chance all adopt at certain
points a role like that of the flâneur, while women characters, such as
Mrs Verloc and Flora de Barral, are placed in such a situation only at
moments of risk or vulnerability. Furthermore, many of Conrad’s
central figures occupy roles which were characteristically or exclusively
male during that period: sea-captain, trader, entrepreneur, spy, detective.
This gives a decisively gendered inflection to the experience of
modernity which he represents. The availability to men of certain sorts
of experience and knowledge, and the exclusion of women from these,
must be understood as systematic, and therefore integral to the epistemological
basis of the novels, rather than as merely contingent upon
plot and setting. If we see one reason for Conrad’s interest and importance
as a writer as being his representation of the epistemological
position of the subject of modernity, then the gendering of that
subject must crucially determine the form of modernity which his
work presents.
An account of the gendered epistemology of Conrad’s work requires
a model of the interaction between knowledge, power, sexuality and
gender within late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
European society. The basis for such a model is found in the work of
Nietzsche and Foucault, as read and revised by feminist critics, in
particular Eve Sedgwick. Nietzsche’s radical understanding of knowledge
as something produced, and as a tool of power rather than as a
neutral description of the world, is developed by Foucault, who asks
‘what is at stake in the will to truth, in the will to utter this “true”
discourse, if not desire and power?’ 12 Eve Sedgwick argues that
many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentiethcentury
Western culture as a whole are structured – indeed,
fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual
definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth
century.
(EC, 1)