Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 161
listening aspect, evident in his quiet dealings with Powell (which
contrast with his assertive loquacity in relation to the frame narrator).
Yet the suggestions of passivity in such an aspect and the associated
fear of a clear view of a possibly unbearable reality make his relationship
to such qualities necessarily ambivalent. Despite his misogynistic
clichés, Marlow also exhibits intermittently a power of sympathetic
identification with Flora’s psychological traumas as a repeated victim
and an interest in the idea of himself as feminine, as evinced in his
comment that ‘there is enough of the woman in my nature to free my
judgement of women from glamorous reticency’ (53). As in ‘Heart of
Darkness’, the act of narrating in Chance is an open-ended process,
involving the potential for Marlow to move beyond his existing
conceptual and ideological limitations.
It is in Chance that the presence of narrative chains implicates the
male reader and critic most challengingly. If Marlow constitutes his
role as story-teller by the arrogation of a largely spurious superiority of
insight into women as against Anthony, Fyne, Powell and the framenarrator
(while the frame-narrator may return the favour), I cannot
analyse this process without implicitly constituting myself as reader
and critic through the assumption that I know more about women
than Marlow does, that I ‘know much more of them [the facts] than
he ever did know or could possibly guess’ (311) – perhaps an equally
spurious claim. One effect of this implication of the male reader or
critic is to make Chance a gender-specific text in the way that Straus
claims ‘Heart of Darkness’ to be (a text that women will read differently)
(EI, 130–5), yet with a greater questioning of the status of
masculinity. Another effect is to make it a very interesting text for the
male reader concerned with his own relation to ideas of self and femininity,
and this despite the fact that the overt treatment of women is
heavily reliant on idealization and cliché. For it draws the male reader,
through its narrative strategy, into a dialectic of understanding and
ignorance, of superiority and self-accusation in relation to the gender
conceptions of other men – a dialectic of liberating self-criticism and
inescapable complicity. 24 The possibility of this relation extending to
the author is implied by Erdinast-Vulcan’s idea that Conrad felt
himself ‘being forcibly drawn into his own fiction’, an idea which she
convincingly deduces from the changes between the serial and book
versions of the novel. 25
Chance is a revealing, if uneven, study of certain aspects of male
figuration and representation of women and the dynamics of the
circulation of these representations among men. How far this is