Conrad and Masculinity

212 Notes
9 See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle
(1990; London: Bloomsbury, 1991). Also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who
argues for ‘a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition,
indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century’ (EC, 1).
10 See Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, pp. 14, 171 and Ruppel, pp. 21–2.
11 The exception is the ‘Author’s Note’ to Almayer’s Folly, a note which was
written by early 1895 but not published until 1920. The ‘Author’s Notes’
for the other works were written in the period leading up to 1920.
12 Todd K. Bender, Preface to Krenn, p. vi.
13 Bernard C. Meyer claims that Conrad’s attitude to women was marked by
particular fear and mistrust. Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 289.
14 The debate about racism in Conrad has largely taken the form of responses
to Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness’, in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London:
Heinemann, 1988), pp. 1–13. My own brief discussion of the issues is
found in Joseph Conrad (Longman Critical Reader), ed. Andrew Michael
Roberts (London and New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 8–12 and 109–10.
15 Herbert Sussman’s distinction between ‘maleness’ (‘fantasies about the
essential nature of the “male”’) and ‘masculinity’ (‘those multifarious
social constructions of the male current within the society’) is thoughtprovoking,
but not easy to maintain, since fantasies about maleness are
surely integral to social constructions of masculinity. Herbert Sussman,
Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian
Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.
12–13.
16 For a discussion of the range of meaning of ‘ideology’, see Jeremy
Hawthorn, A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd edn (London:
Arnold, 1998), pp. 158–64.
17 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 30.
18 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 152.
19 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1975), p. 413.
20 Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and
New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13, 19.
21 Stephen Heath, ‘Male Feminism’, in Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and
Paul Smith (1987; New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1– 32 (p.
26).
22 Heath, ‘Male Feminism’, p. 26.
23 Heath notes that the only politically progressive project of male writing
that he can envisage is ‘in and from areas of gay men’s experience’ (‘Male
Feminism’, p. 25).
24 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p.
79.
25 The term ‘Strong Poet’ alludes to the influence theory of Harold Bloom,
according to which ‘Poetic Influence – when it involves two strong,
authentic poets – always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act
of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation’.