Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 153
sign of sincerity (173). Although one of the novel’s psychological
subtleties is that Razumov remains at some level one of the most
sincere characters, his situation does not allow him to be sincere in
practice. The transaction between two men of the world, in which the
elder passes on a young woman to the younger in return for vicarious
satisfaction of his repressed desires, is traversed by a hidden fracture.
The language-teacher’s knowledge of the world will not serve him
here, because he has to deal with the unknown in the form of Russia.
This, at least, is how he comes to explain his own ignorance and
failure of understanding: in terms of the incomprehensibility of Russia
to a Westerner. (How far is this a post-hoc justification of his own
dubious role? After all, he lived in St Petersburg until the age of nine,
speaks fluent Russian and seems to know quite a lot about Russian
politics.) He expresses his ignorance in a phrase which echoes the
much quoted passage in ‘Heart of Darkness’, where women are said by
Marlow to be ‘out of it’ (HOD, 115):
I perceived that she was not listening. There was no mistaking her
expression; and once more I had the sense of being out of it — not
because of my age, which at any rate could draw inferences — but
altogether out of it, on another plane whence I could only watch
her from afar.
(170)
Is Conrad making a conscious reference back to ‘Heart of Darkness’
here? Not necessarily, since the phrase itself could easily enough
recur by accident (when, a little later, Peter Ivanovitch calls Razumov
‘one of us’ (208), an ironic echo of Lord Jim is more inescapable). Nor
do I think that Conrad, in Under Western Eyes, is offering an explicit
critique of male bonds and their consequences for women. What
seems to me to be happening here, as often in Conrad’s work, is that
his basic social conservatism is deflected from what might otherwise
have been its routine course by his experience of cultural dislocation,
and his resulting confrontation with alienation and the relativity of
social values. This experience clearly informs his portrayal of the
language-teacher, though in complex ways, not as direct representation.
The teacher gives voice to some of Conrad’s own suspicion of
the Russian temperament and fear of revolutionary ardour, yet is also
ironized and revealed as lacking in self-knowledge. Conrad’s ideas
about male and female roles, which are fairly conventional, cannot
remain untouched by the strain of radical scepticism about identity