Conrad and Masculinity

158 Conrad and Masculinity
hidden from her. However, the murder attempt is rapidly followed by
her father’s suicide and (in narrative time though not in story time)
by the accidental drowning of her husband, who insists on Powell
leaving the sinking ship before him. 23 The latter disaster has to be
reported to her by Powell, the same young man who has helped to
conceal the murder attempt and who himself secretly desires her.
Thus Powell, though devoted to Captain Anthony, unwittingly participates
in and announces the death of the older man who, in Girard’s
terms, stands as the mediator of, and obstacle to, his desire. In almost
the last scene of the novel we find an echo of Marlow’s lie to the
Intended. Some years after Anthony’s death Marlow is alone with
Flora, whom he comes to visit partly in order to facilitate some expression
of the love he detects between her and Powell. She alludes to the
night of the murder attempt (which remains unknown to her):
‘“That night when my poor father died suddenly I am certain
they had some sort of discussion about me. But I did not want to
hold out any longer against my own heart! I could not.”
She stopped short, then impulsively—
“Truth will out, Mr. Marlow.”
“Yes,” I said.’
(444)
Again Marlow conceals a male horror from an idealistic woman. Yet
the psychological and ethical implications are very different. The
truth of the Intended’s heart was, we are led to believe, a delusion.
Flora may not realize the depths to which her father sank, but the
truth of her heart has been shown to be superior to the male delusion
of chivalry (under which Anthony laboured) as well as to her father’s
vicious competitiveness. The end of the novel, with a marriage
between Powell and Flora in prospect, is a triumph for Flora’s sort of
truth. Furthermore, rather than Marlow protecting his own masculine
heroic identification, his masculinity is called into question by that
ending. He has himself enough understanding of ‘the heart’ generously
to bring Powell and Flora together in the face of their mutual
inhibition. He suggests to Flora that Powell has given up the sea
because of his love for her (445). But this echoes the frame-narrator’s
puzzlement as to why Marlow seems to have given up the sea himself:
‘The sea is the sailor’s true element, and Marlow, lingering on shore,
was to me an object of incredulous commiseration like a bird, which,
secretly, should have lost its faith in the high virtue of flying’ (34). We