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Conrad and Masculinity

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120 <strong>Conrad</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Masculinity</strong><br />

city plays a role in certain of <strong>Conrad</strong>’s works, in particular Under<br />

Western Eyes, The Secret Agent <strong>and</strong> Chance. The flâneur as described by<br />

Walter Benjamin in his writings on Baudelaire is a figure indicative of<br />

modernity yet also ‘on the margins both of the great city <strong>and</strong> of the<br />

bourgeois class’. 10 The flâneur has affinities with the detective, with the<br />

victims <strong>and</strong> murders of Poe’s stories which Baudelaire translated as well<br />

as with Baudelaire himself as alienated poet. 11 Razumov <strong>and</strong> the<br />

language-teacher in Under Western Eyes, Verloc, Ossipon, Heat <strong>and</strong> the<br />

Professor in The Secret Agent <strong>and</strong> Marlow in Chance all adopt at certain<br />

points a role like that of the flâneur, while women characters, such as<br />

Mrs Verloc <strong>and</strong> Flora de Barral, are placed in such a situation only at<br />

moments of risk or vulnerability. Furthermore, many of <strong>Conrad</strong>’s<br />

central figures occupy roles which were characteristically or exclusively<br />

male during that period: sea-captain, trader, entrepreneur, spy, detective.<br />

This gives a decisively gendered inflection to the experience of<br />

modernity which he represents. The availability to men of certain sorts<br />

of experience <strong>and</strong> knowledge, <strong>and</strong> the exclusion of women from these,<br />

must be understood as systematic, <strong>and</strong> therefore integral to the epistemological<br />

basis of the novels, rather than as merely contingent upon<br />

plot <strong>and</strong> setting. If we see one reason for <strong>Conrad</strong>’s interest <strong>and</strong> importance<br />

as a writer as being his representation of the epistemological<br />

position of the subject of modernity, then the gendering of that<br />

subject must crucially determine the form of modernity which his<br />

work presents.<br />

An account of the gendered epistemology of <strong>Conrad</strong>’s work requires<br />

a model of the interaction between knowledge, power, sexuality <strong>and</strong><br />

gender within late nineteenth-century <strong>and</strong> early twentieth-century<br />

European society. The basis for such a model is found in the work of<br />

Nietzsche <strong>and</strong> Foucault, as read <strong>and</strong> revised by feminist critics, in<br />

particular Eve Sedgwick. Nietzsche’s radical underst<strong>and</strong>ing of knowledge<br />

as something produced, <strong>and</strong> as a tool of power rather than as a<br />

neutral description of the world, is developed by Foucault, who asks<br />

‘what is at stake in the will to truth, in the will to utter this “true”<br />

discourse, if not desire <strong>and</strong> power?’ 12 Eve Sedgwick argues that<br />

many of the major nodes of thought <strong>and</strong> knowledge in twentiethcentury<br />

Western culture as a whole are structured – indeed,<br />

fractured – by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual<br />

definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth<br />

century.<br />

(EC, 1)

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