Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 141
oppression as a possessed object. As in ‘Heart of Darkness’, confessing
to a woman is a tempting but terrifying possibility. The woman is held
to represent a ‘sacred’ or metaphysical truth and to protect this role as
living embodiment of an ‘ultimate’ truth she must be denied knowledge
of mundane truths, of men’s truths. Here, though, it is not the
potentially sympathetic figure of Marlow who seeks to enforce such
protection, but the corrupt and grotesque Verloc. Male critics (or
readers) are unlikely to ‘identify the imaginative autobiography of
their masculinity’ with that of Verloc, as Straus argues they do with
that of Marlow (EI, 130).
In Under Western Eyes as in ‘Heart of Darkness’ we find an idealized
figure of a beautiful young woman, from whom the truth of a male
crime must be kept. However, in this case the concealment becomes
unbearable to the man who knows of that crime. The result is the
novel’s climactic double confession, to Natalia Haldin and to the
assembled Russian revolutionaries. It is the latter confession which, in
literal and realistic terms, leads to the deafening and crippling of
Razumov. Nevertheless, symbolically this punishment, leading to his
anticipated early death, seems to confirm the taboo established in
‘Heart of Darkness’ on the passing of male secrets to a woman. The
parallel with ‘Heart of Darkness’ is evident when, for example, Natalia
expresses the hope of learning from Razumov some of her brother’s
last words (137), just as the Intended asks Marlow for Kurtz’s last
words, and also when the language-teacher describes Natalia as ‘a
frank and generous creature, having the noblest—well—illusions’
(192). The crime that Razumov confesses is his own, not that of
another, and we know what that crime was: the betrayal of Natalia’s
brother to torture and execution at the hands of the Russian state. It
is not a question, as with Kurtz and Marlow, of some unspeakable
transgression with sexual overtones. Or is it? Razumov has something
worse to confess (he feels) even than his betrayal of Victor Haldin to
the authorities:
Listen—now comes the true confession. The other was nothing. To
save me, your trustful eyes had to entice my thought to the very
edge of the blackest treachery ... Victor Haldin had stolen the truth
of my life from me, who had nothing else in the world, and he
boasted of living on through you on this earth where I had no place
to lay my head. She will marry some day, he had said—and your
eyes were trustful. And do you know what I said to myself? I shall
steal his sister’s soul from her ... If you could have looked then into