Conrad and Masculinity

160 Conrad and Masculinity
while he attempts to use the frame-narrator as he uses the other men
in the novel, as naive foil for his own superior penetration, he defensively
attributes to the frame-narrator his own doubts. Their
interaction is at times strikingly like that of analyst and analysand, as
the frame-narrator uses silence to allow Marlow’s internal conflicts to
surface by projection onto him. Significantly, this occurs in relation to
one of Marlow’s claims to knowledge:
‘I did not ask Mr. Powell anxiously what had happened to Mrs.
Anthony in the end. I let him go on in his own way, feeling that no
matter what strange facts he would have to disclose, I was certain
to know much more of them than he ever did know or could possibly
guess . . . .’
Marlow paused for quite a long time. He seemed uncertain as
though he had advanced something beyond my grasp. Purposely I
made no sign. ‘You understand?’ he asked.
(310–11)
Just as Marlow let Mr Powell ‘go on in his own way’, so the framenarrator
allows Marlow to ‘go on in his own way’, perhaps also feeling
that ‘no matter what strange facts he would have to disclose, I was
certain to know much more of them than he ever did’. Subsequently
the frame-narrator responds with mockery of Marlow’s self-image as
an ‘honest backwoodsman with his incomparable knowledge’ (311).
What is interesting here is Marlow’s evident and uneasy competitiveness
with other men, both Powell and the frame-narrator, over
knowledge and penetration into the supposed mysteries of the female.
In this novel so centred on women, the ‘inwardness’ of events
becomes symbolically female, so that knowledge (and ignorance) of
women function as paradigms of all knowledge and ignorance.
Marlow’s first hidden motivation as narrator, then, is to compete
with the other men for the knowledge and, symbolically, for the
sexual possession of women. The frame-narrator seems to express his
awareness of this by his ‘sarcastic’ grin on the novel’s last page, in
response to which Marlow defensively denies such competitiveness: ‘I
am not afraid of going to church with a friend’ (447). No one has
suggested that he is afraid, so it is clearly Marlow’s own idea. Marlow’s
second and more complex motive is to consider a duality in his own
self and life by the familiar psychological process of projecting aspects
of oneself with which one is not fully at home onto some Other (here
onto women in general). Marlow has a contemplative, meditative,