Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 207
Such a reading is illuminating in the broadly humanist terms that it
employs but we may also ask how far the doubts, losses and absences
of Conrad’s work reflect the structures of gender and cultural difference
as constructed in the societies he knew and represented.
Humanist readings do not necessarily neglect questions of gender or
cultural difference, but tend to essentialize these, so that the final
meaning of the absence or the abyss is referred back to a dilemma of
general human experience. As against this, feminist and postcolonial
theory would encourage us to consider whether the absence or abyss
is not integral to the forms of subjectivity and the discourses of knowledge
that Conrad’s characters deploy. In both novels the absence or
loss is strongly connected with characters’ sense of their own identity,
and specifically masculine identity. In The Arrow of Gold the gift of the
arrow is associated with Rita being ‘very much of a woman’ (348),
with her destruction of the young man’s romantic dreams, with a
‘something’ (‘lives which seem to be meant for something’ (350))
which is the ineffable purpose of life. In a sense it is a gift of masculinity,
as emancipation from the experience of being ‘penetrated’ by the
woman (274), an emancipation which enables M. George’s return to
the male life of the sea. In Victory nothingness is the legacy of Heyst’s
father, who ‘considered the universal nothingness’ (219). Heyst carries
that abyss within him and when Lena is brought into his world she
sees the void of her dependence on him, but rescues him from his
nothingness by making him love her, though at the cost of her own
life. Lewis identifies an association of visibility and nothingness with
Jones: ‘Mr Jones is perhaps the most fascinating instance in the novel
of the motion towards visibility, if only because it is the most paradoxical.
What becomes full and finally visible about him is a kind of
absence, a nothingness.’ Lewis, however, develops this idea in terms
of Jones’s devilish qualities, his role as ‘the source of nonbeing’ rather
than his ambivalent relation to conventional masculinity. 28
Problems of masculinity expressed in terms of absence, loss and of
‘nothing to see’ fit readily, and perhaps too readily, an interpretation
in terms of Freudian castration anxiety or Lacanian theories of lack
and Symbolic castration. If the absences and lacks in Conrad’s fiction
are read as expressions of this alleged general ‘Symbolic castration’,
signifying radical alterity within the self and the finally unfulfillable
nature of desire, the implications are ultimately not so different from
those of humanist readings of Conrad. The latter have frequently
responded to Conrad’s sense of the problematic and divided nature of
identity and his portrayal of human life as a quest that cannot