Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 145
literally desire his sister, at least not in a sexual sense, but he possesses
her through her devotion and admiration, and imaginatively places
her in the role of his partner by implicitly seeing her as the mother of
his spiritual posterity. Indeed, the fact that it is Natalia’s brother who,
as it were, offers her to Razumov, places the situation more firmly
within the structure outlined by Rubin, in which the incest taboo
serves to establish relations of kinship between men through the
exchange of women. All this, of course, takes place in a context which
is both ironic and tragic, in which the exchange is also to become an
(intended) revenge on Razumov’s part.
However, it does not seem appropriate to describe Razumov’s
heterosexual desire for Natalia in Sedgwick’s terms as ‘a more or less
perfunctory detour on the way to a closer, but homophobically
proscribed, bonding’ with her brother (and this is not merely because
her brother is by this time dead). Razumov’s desire in relation to
Victor Haldin seems primarily one of identification: the desire to be
him, or to be in his place. Chosen because he has no family of his
own, Razumov is tempted to steal Haldin’s family, to take his place as
the idolized heroic young male in the eyes of Natalia and her mother.
Haldin had boasted of ‘living on through’ Natalia’s children; instead
Razumov, his betrayer, would appropriate this patriarchal line of
succession. The Conradian theme of the double operates between
Haldin and Razumov, given the tinge of the uncanny by Razumov’s
(imagined) vision of Haldin lying corpse-like on his (Razumov’s) bed
(32) and his (hallucinatory) vision of Haldin’s body in the snow
(36–7). Of course Kurtz and Marlow also have aspects of doubling, and
Marlow’s fascination with Kurtz is an inextricable blend of identification
and desire (as well as repulsion). It would, in principle, be
possible to make the same argument that I made in relation to Marlow
and Kurtz in respect of Razumov and Haldin: to read Razumov’s wish
to be Haldin in terms of Sedgwick’s fifth transformation/denial of
male homosexual love: ‘I do not love him, I am him’ (see Chapter 5
above). However, the argument does not seem convincing in relation
to Under Western Eyes. There are no evident overtones of the sexual in
Razumov’s response to Haldin. Rather Razumov’s primary desire
seems to be for a family and a place in the patriarchal succession: to
that extent, and for those reasons, he would like to be Haldin, or to be
his brother, as he would perhaps have liked to be brother to the two
privileged girls who are in fact his half-sisters. All this is of course
traceable to his virtually orphaned position as an illegitimate child,
and to the figure of Prince K—. The latter, Razumov’s biological father,