Conrad and Masculinity

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1973), p. 30.
26 Ruppel, p. 35.
27 Ruppel, pp. 23–34.
28 Ruppel, p. 24.
29 Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Towards a More Progressive Union’, in Women and Revolution: A Discussion
of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent
(Boston: South End Press, 1981), pp. 1–41 (p. 14); quoted BM, 3.
30 See BM, 26 and EC, 36n, 154.
31 For a discussion of the ‘achievement and decline’ thesis, derived from
Thomas Moser’s Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1957), see Gary Geddes, Conrad’s Later Novels
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980), pp. 1–10 and passim;
Hampson, Betrayal and Identity, pp. 1–2 and passim.
Chapter 1 Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire
Notes 213
1 Paul Gilroy, ‘White Man’s Bonus’, review of Richard Dyer, White, Times
Literary Supplement, 29 August 1997, p. 10.
2 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Race’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds
Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 274–87 (p. 276).
3 Appiah suggests that ‘there is a fairly widespread consensus in the sciences
of biology and anthropology that the word “race,” at least as it is used in
most unscientific discussions, refers to nothing that science should recognize
as real’ (Appiah, p. 277). While the debate concerning race within
biology is clearly outside the scope of the present discussion, it may be of
interest to note that a 1998 international conference of biologists and
palaeontologists was reported as showing growing support for the thesis
that so-called racial differences ‘are the product of comparatively recent,
and therefore superficial, adaptations to environment’. A ‘leading geneticist’,
Walter Bodmer, was quoted as stating that ‘most of the genetic
variation in human populations is found within any population, and a
minority of it relates to difference between them. You can take a population
of 1,000 from anywhere and they will have as much variation, almost,
as a population of 1,000 sampled from all over the world. The differences
between populations is far less than the differences within them. There is
no credence to a demarcation of human populations into clearly separated
population groups.’ The Guardian, 6 July 1998, p. 11.
4 This includes the affirmative use of a form of ‘racial’ identity by groups
which have been oppressed on racist grounds (for example forms of black
identity).
5 ‘Karain’, together with ‘The Lagoon’ which is a shorter work with some
related features, was collected in the 1898 volume Tales of Unrest. Of the
other stories in that volume, ‘The Idiots’ and ‘The Return’ have European
settings, while ‘An Outpost of Progress’, set in Africa, is a much more
directly satirical piece than Conrad’s other early ‘imperial’ fiction.