Conrad and Masculinity

138 Conrad and Masculinity
needs. To maintain the identification of women with the ideal, the
unattainable, the metaphysical ultimate requires that they be seen
from a distance. This identification draws on traditional myths such
as the Sphinx and appears most clearly in ‘Heart of Darkness’ in
Kurtz’s painting of a veiled woman carrying a lighted torch. However,
the possibility of women gaining possession of knowledge exists as a
focus of fear and desire. At key points in many texts the truth or a
truth is somehow revealed to an important female character, or such
a revelation is threatened. These points are moments of crisis, often
identified with violence and death. Examples are: Marlow’s lie to the
Intended in ‘Heart of Darkness’; Winnie Verloc’s overhearing of the
story of Stevie’s death in The Secret Agent; Razumov’s confession to
Natalia Haldin in Under Western Eyes; the concealing from Flora of her
father’s attempt to murder her husband in Chance. Each of these
events is followed and/or preceded by violence and/or death, or associated
symbolically with death. In each of these texts this moment
threatens to disrupt a pattern of knowledge circulating primarily or
exclusively among men: Kurtz, Marlow and his male audience in
‘Heart of Darkness’; the world of police, anarchists, spies, civil servants
and diplomats in The Secret Agent; the network of understanding,
deceit and misunderstanding involving Razumov, Haldin, Mikulin,
General T., the students, the revolutionaries and the language-teacher
in Under Western Eyes (Sophia Antonovna is an interesting exception
to the largely male character of this network); the chain of men with
designs on Flora, including her father, her husband, Powell and
Marlow in Chance. We may even see a shadow of this paradigm in
Nostromo’s deathbed confession to Mrs Gould. The association of
women gaining knowledge with death can be explained in terms of
the inconsistency between woman as an image of truth and a woman
as the subject or possessor of knowledge. When these two collide, at
moments of revelation and confession, it is a system of distances,
prohibitions and barriers that collapses, and that collapse threatens
the death of a masculine heterosexual self constructed in imaginary
opposition to the feminine. Another way of putting this would be to
say that for a woman to both represent truth and possess it would give
her an aura of omnipotence, since the maintenance of male power
requires a separation between the idea of ‘woman’ and women.
Sedgwick has pointed out that ignorance can be a source of power as
well as knowledge and has suggested that ‘ignorance and opacity
collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy,
desire, goods, meanings, persons’ (EC, 4). The power relations among