Conrad and Masculinity

200 Conrad and Masculinity
senior involves a loss of faith in words and ideals:
I suppose he began like other people; took fine words for good,
ringing coin and noble ideals for valuable banknotes . . . Later he
discovered—how am I to explain it to you? Suppose the world were
a factory and all mankind workmen in it. Well, he discovered that
the wages were not good enough. That they were paid in counterfeit
money.
(195–6)
Heyst learns the barrenness of life without hope, love and trust, so we
have here a version of the Conradian theme of the saving illusion: for
life to be of value, it is necessary to believe in ideals, even though they
may be philosophically untenable or illusory. But in this novel scepticism
is identified with the intellectual speculations of the detached
male philosopher, while ideals are identified with the woman as
object of voyeuristic observation and sexual speculation. Heyst
senior’s loss of faith in a semantic gold-standard generates irony on
two levels. First, he nevertheless uses words to pass on his scepticism
to his son: ‘He dominated me ... I have heard his living word. It was
irresistible’ (196). Second, a meta-level of irony bears on Conrad’s text
itself, which, in accordance with Heyst senior’s view, would be
engaged in passing a false coin to us as readers. If gender is a
constructed set of differences, then semantic scepticism might also
question masculinity and femininity. Jacqueline Rose links language,
gender identity and the visual image as systems in which certainty is
a fantasy. She observes that for both Freud and Lacan ‘our sexual identities
as male or female, our confidence in language as true or false,
and our security in the image we judge as perfect or flawed, are
fantasies.’ 20 Heyst senior did not question the gold standard of sexual
difference so far as we know, but his son is drawn into a battle which
revolves around precisely that: Lena figures as a treasure, competed
for, but also as a coin, circulated, while her identity hovers between
that of the ‘essence’ of ‘woman’, evoked in images of idealized femininity,
and that of token of exchange in a contest of male desire,
jealousy, revulsion and repression, involving Schomberg, Ziacomo,
Heyst, Ricardo, Jones and Davidson.
Heyst’s existence as an ‘inert body’ after the failure of the mine
company suggests a passivity at odds with conventional, active
masculinity, a passivity from which he is aroused by his observation
of Lena. When Conrad, in the ‘Author’s Note’ to Victory, recalls the