Conrad and Masculinity

4 Introduction
works which began to appear in 1920. 11 These often relate his life to
his work in suggestive though enigmatic ways, showing a certain playfulness
around the borders of fictionality and treating Conrad’s
characters as figures in his inner life.
In 1990, Todd K. Bender stated that ‘the two most hotly argued
issues in current criticism of Conrad can be summed up in the question:
“Is Conrad fundamentally racist and sexist?”’. 12 Although the
issue of Conrad’s attitude to gender is potentially illuminating with
regard to his work, the question ‘Is Conrad fundamentally sexist?’
seems to me unhelpful. First, it doesn’t allow adequately for the
distinction between the values prevalent in Conrad’s time (many of
which are obviously sexist by today’s standards) and Conrad’s own
attitude to women. 13 Second, it blurs the distinctions between
Conrad’s personality, his work and our reading of his work. A far more
interesting question, I would suggest, would be ‘Is our reading (or a
particular reading) of Conrad’s work fundamentally sexist?’ We can
read Conrad’s novels, some one hundred years on, recognize their
different values and learn from that difference, without compromising
our own values. Where that process become problematic is if we
start to claim that those novels embody universal and transhistorical
values. If we argue that ‘Heart of Darkness’ reveals a timeless truth
about man’s soul then we do indeed risk producing a racist and sexist
interpretation. 14 It is not the intention of this book simply to defend
Conrad’s treatment of masculinity, nor simply to attack it, but rather
to chart the ways in which masculinity interacts with the themes and
techniques of Conrad’s fiction. This is not to deny, of course, that I am
engaged in making value judgements about masculinity, and ones
which reflect my own values. This will emerge most specifically in my
use of the terms ‘ideological’ and ‘utopian’.
Masculinity as a socially constructed identity needs to be distinguished
from biological maleness which has a genetic basis. The
relationship between the two remains a subject of research and debate
within various disciplines, including genetics, philosophy, psychology,
literary criticism and cultural studies. The dominant assumption
of Conrad’s time was that masculinity was innate, an essential and
‘natural’ quality of the male. Yet masculinity was also employed as a
moral or social ideal, as in the common injunction, ‘be a man!’ (which
is somewhat ironically addressed by Belfast to Wait’s corpse (NN,
160)). As a result the dominant idea of masculinity was always internally
incoherent. How can masculinity be both an innate, biologically
given quality and a moral status to which men should aspire?