Conrad and Masculinity

6 Introduction
applied to the shared assumptions about gender of a given society at
a particular time. A more coloured definition of ideology (‘ideas and
beliefs which help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class
specifically by distortion and dissimulation’) is appropriate to the role
of men as a dominant group in society of Conrad’s time, maintaining
that dominance partly through the agency of a set of prejudicial ideas
about the capabilities of men and women. 17 The concept of ideology
also applies to masculinity as psychic structure or fantasy, if we bear
in mind Althusser’s definition of ideology as ‘a “representation” of the
imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.
18 Juliet Mitchell explicates the link between ideology and the
unconscious: ‘The patriarchal law speaks to and through each person
in his unconscious ... The unconscious that Freud analysed could
thus be described as the domain of the reproduction of culture or
ideology.’ 19
I shall therefore apply the term ‘ideological’ to the ways in which
Conrad’s fiction reproduces and re-enacts oppressive aspects of the
masculinity of his time. I also want to borrow Fredric Jameson’s
pairing of the terms ‘ideological’ and ‘Utopian’ for the ‘twin negative
and positive features of a given phenomenon – what in the realm of
political forces Marxism traditionally terms reactionary and progressive’
(PU, 235). This does not indicate that I am adopting Jameson’s
Marxist framework, but only that I am indebted to his sense that a
literary text, and even a broader cultural phenomenon such as
modernism, can be read both for its ideological expression of certain
values of the culture within which it was produced, and for its more
utopian possibilities. Jameson focuses on class repression and tends to
ignore gender, but some forms of feminism have also found a value in
the utopian. Margaret Whitford points out that a conception of the
individual as the product of the existing social forms tends to close off
the possibility of new social and ethical forms and new ways of being.
Hence ‘we need utopian visions ... imagining how things could be
different is part of the process of transforming the present in the direction
of a different future’. 20 I shall apply the term ‘utopian’ to those
moments and structures in Conrad’s fiction which offer a potential
transformation, ironizing or destabilizing of its own ideological
formations of masculinity.
This book does not have a single model of masculinity. Such a
model would tend to be ‘phallic’ in two senses: it would involve the
imposition of a single master discourse, and would also be likely to be
based around the idea of the phallus, given the dominance of that