Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 155
are really women. And it’s no use talking of opportunities either. I
know that some of them do talk of it. But not the genuine women.
Those know better. Nothing can beat a true woman for a clear
vision of reality.
(C, 281)
Here, as elsewhere, Marlow seems to combine some understanding of
the social oppression which forced certain roles onto women (‘a man
can struggle’) with a rather patronizing essentialism (‘wisdom ... of
their own kind. But they are not made for attack’). Also typical of a
number of his assertions about women is his passing reference to
possibilities for emancipation (‘talking of opportunities’) which he
dismisses by means of a circular argument: women who are interested
in opportunities are not the ‘genuine women’, so that women are
proved to be essentially passive by only counting as women those who
conform. Interestingly, though, Marlow associates this supposed
passivity with ‘a clear vision of reality’. In Nostromo the narrator
observes that ‘action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and
the friend of flattering illusions’ (66). Presumably, then, women’s
‘clear vision of reality’ may, in Marlow’s theory, derive from their
inability to act. 22 Such a vision might be reached through ‘attention
[which] originated in idleness’, a phrase which Conrad uses to
describe his own creative meditation on the figure of Lena in Victory
(‘Author’s Note’, V, xv). Thus Marlow’s definition of the otherness of
the female rebounds on itself, for not only is Marlow’s own role in the
events that he narrates in Chance largely a passive one of observing
and waiting, but he repeatedly claims for himself, on the basis of this
detachment from the action, precisely that ‘clear vision of reality’
which, on his own account, is denied to those men more involved in
the action of the story than he. In relation to the climax of events on
board the Ferndale, recounted to Marlow by the second mate, Powell,
Marlow claims that:
The inwardness of what was passing before his eyes was hidden
from him [i.e. Powell], who had looked on, more impenetrably
than from me who at a distance of years was listening to his words.
(426)
Marlow’s language here, as in many places, suggests a strong voyeuristic
element: the scene to which he refers culminates in the sexual
consummation of Captain Anthony’s marriage to Flora, a woman