Conrad and Masculinity

8 Introduction
whether one can ever know definitively what is true (even subjectively
true of one’s own experience), whether one could ever express such
truth if one attained it, and whether it would be understood were it
expressed. Not only does this generate scepticism about the ‘truth’ of
masculinity, but it also means that his novels attend closely to
processes of communication and exchange. Conrad’s fondness for
setting up chains or groups of male tellers and listeners creates structures
which, by implication, can extend beyond the bounds of the
fiction to include both author and readers. Such a process raises
crucial questions of gender-specific reading, placed on the agenda by
Nina Pelikan Straus when she describes her experience, as a woman
reader of ‘Heart of Darkness’, as one of exclusion. Straus argues that
‘Marlow’s relation to Kurtz as his commentator is a paradigm of the ...
male critic’s relation to the Strong Poet’ (EI, 134) and that ‘Marlow’s
cowardice consists of his inability to face the dangerous self that is the
form of his own masculinist vulnerability: his own complicity in the
racist, sexist, imperialist, and finally libidinally satisfying world he has
inhabited with Kurtz’ (EI, 135). 25 As much feminist work has pointed
out, patriarchy involves social, economic and psychic structures in
which men exchange women. In such structures, men are assigned the
role of subjects, those who do the exchanging, while woman are
objectified and possessed as that which is circulated or exchanged.
Precisely because Conrad’s novels are mostly about men, and are
highly self-conscious about the processes of exchange between men
(exchange of stories and thus of fantasies), they reveal with particular
force the functioning of such patriarchal structures.
My account of masculinity in Conrad is, therefore, particularly
indebted to those critics who have elaborated the idea of a gendered
economy (involving both social practices and psychic structures) and
the related concept of the ‘homosocial’. René Girard’s Deceit, Desire
and the Novel, though it neglected the asymmetries of gender, laid
important groundwork in its idea of mediated desire, in which the
(usually male) subject’s desire for the object (typically a woman), is
prompted by imitation of the desire of another (also usually a male,
and termed ‘the mediator’ by Girard) (DD, 2). Girard’s crucial insight,
that ‘the impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward
the mediator’ (DD, 10), offers rich potential for the understanding of
bonds of rivalry between men, based on a shared female object of
desire and competition. This potential has been developed by Eve
Sedgwick in her conception of ‘male homosocial desire’, a continuum
of sexual and non-sexual forms of bond between men. She argues that