Conrad and Masculinity

154 Conrad and Masculinity
and truth that is found in his thought. In Under Western Eyes the
knowledge that circulates between men is deeply flawed by misunderstanding,
misinterpretation, failure of communication and betrayal
of trust.
In Conrad’s late work gender becomes a more explicit theme.
Chance, published two years after Under Western Eyes (though it had
been long in the writing) was a marked departure for Conrad. Not
only does it have a happy ending (uniquely among his novels), but it
also, by design, pays more attention to women’s lives. Conrad wrote
to his literary agent, James Pinker, ‘It’s the sort of stuff that may have
a chance with the public. All of it about a girl and with a steady run
of references to women in general all along, some sarcastic, others
sentimental, it ought to go down.’ 17 The novel did indeed sell better
than any of its predecessors. 18 Despite Conrad’s implication of a deliberate
strategy of populism, the novel has a highly intricate narrative
structure. 19 As Martin Ray observes, ‘Marlow is called upon to collect
and collate the reports of six or more observers in the chain of narration
and to trace his way through seven different temporal levels in
the course of the story, whose time-span covers some seventeen years,
concluding in the dramatic present.’ 20 As I have argued in greater
detail elsewhere, the terms of exchange along this narrative chain
between a series of male figures involve a competitive arrogation of
superior knowledge of an essentialized ‘woman’ or ‘women’. 21 In a
sense this is also a mode of misinterpretation, both because of the
inherent falsification of such gender essentialization, and because the
claim to superior interpretative powers by each male figure collapses
by virtue of the reflecting effect of the chain: each individual’s claim
to understanding is supported by the dismissal of the claims of
another. The figure of Marlow in Chance is distinctly different from his
earlier avatar in ‘Heart of Darkness’. However, as part of the deliberate
focus on women in Chance, Marlow’s tendency to generalizations
about women is extended via his comments to the frame-narrator.
The following is one of his more striking pronouncements on the
subject of female passivity:
And this is the pathos of being a woman. A man can struggle to get
a place for himself or perish. But a woman’s part is passive, say
what you like, and shuffle the facts of the world as you may,
hinting at lack of energy, of wisdom, of courage. As a matter of fact,
almost all women have all that—of their own kind. But they are not
made for attack. Wait they must. I am speaking here of women who