Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 157
It’s difficult to imagine a victim as passive as all that; but granting
you the (I very nearly said: imbecility, but checked myself in time)
innocence of Captain Anthony...
(158)
During the incident of the near-collision on board the Ferndale, the
marital dilemma in which Anthony finds himself is expressed by his
lack of motion: ‘He stirred not ... Why is it that the stillness of a
human being is often so impressive, so suggestive of evil?’ (321–2).
This comment, which may remind us of the sinister immobility of the
jungle in Conrad’s earlier works, alludes to more than a passing
moment. Shortly before, Powell has stamped on the starboard side of
the deck to summon his Captain to deal with the emergency, but
contrary to ‘the immemorial custom and usage of the sea’ (316)
Anthony is not sleeping in the starboard cabin (because Flora is sleeping
there). The danger of the lack of sexual action on board the
Ferndale is symbolically reinforced by this incident, in which the ship
is nearly lost because the Captain is not sleeping with his wife. Powell
is also in danger of failing sexually because of passivity. At one point
in his narration Marlow opens a Pandora’s box of Freudian symbolism
when he develops the fancy of a young girl as ‘something like a
temple’, musing that ‘the privileged man, the lover, the husband, who
are given the key of the sanctuary do not always know how to use it’
(311). Near the end of the book, when Marlow suggests to Powell that
he declare his love to the widowed Flora, Powell’s eyes light up ‘like
the reflection of some inward fire tended in the sanctuary of his heart
by a devotion as pure as that of any vestal’ (441). It seems that middleaged
sailors, as well as young girls, may resemble temples. Thus
Marlow repeatedly attempts to constitute femininity as an Other in
terms that associate it with passivity, with covert action, or with the
enigmatic and unreadable, but these strategies are repeatedly
subverted as such qualities become associated with Marlow himself, or
with other male characters.
Marlow’s narrative in Chance, like that in ‘Heart of Darkness’, is a
heuristic process, a process of exploration and discovery, but what is
here explored is a more open form of masculinity, as opposed to the
discovery of a secret knowledge confirming a masculinist ideology. As
in ‘Heart of Darkness’, a certain truth is concealed from the young
woman, in this case the fact that her father tried to murder her
husband (Captain Anthony) out of jealousy. In this way some of the
intensity of the male competitiveness circulating around Flora is