Conrad and Masculinity

Notes 215
1914’ (AT, 88). See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
(London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 155.
18 H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885; London: Cassell, 1893), p. 9.
19 Conrad himself expressed a comparable sentiment in a letter: ‘the Secret
Sharer, between you and me, is it. Eh? No damned tricks with girls there.’
Letter of 5 November 1912 to Edward Garnett, CL, V, 128.
20 King Solomon’s Mines, p. 282.
21 King Solomon’s Mines, p. 301.
22 See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995).
23 The editors of the World’s Classics edition note that her white teeth merely
mean that she does not chew betel. An Outcast of the Islands, eds J.H. Stape
and Hans van Marle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 375.
24 See Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 37.
25 See Ann Laurer Stoler, who comments that the ‘“vast theoretical and
legislative edifice” that was the theory of degeneracy secured the relationship
between racism and sexuality’. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire,
p. 31.
26 See Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century 1815–1914: A Study of Empire
and Expansion (London: Batsford, 1976) and ‘Empire and Sexual
Opportunity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14.2 (1986),
34–89.
27 Ann Laurer Stoler, ‘Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race
and Morality in Colonial Asia’, in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge:
Feminist Anthropology in a Postmodern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkely:
University of California Press, 1991), pp. 51–101 (p. 52). For another
critique of the hydraulic model, see Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion:
British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 2.
28 Stoler, ‘Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power’, p. 56.
29 Sander L. Gilman, ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of
Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and
Literature’, in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 223–61 (p. 256).
30 Lane, p. 2.
31 Gilman, p. 256.
32 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 46; ‘Carnal Knowledge and
Imperial Power’, p. 58.
33 Stoler, ‘Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power’, p. 60.
34 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 37.
35 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 38–9.
36 To say that Haggard’s fiction is ideological is not, of course, to imply that
its representation of masculinity is monolithic and unproblematic. The
paradoxical structure of masculinity to which I refer in the Introduction is
apparent in Haggard’s idea that the highest ideal to which a boy can aspire
is to become an English gentleman. Unless Haggard has in mind upward
class mobility (which seems unlikely), his remark implies that secure
gender and national identity are ideals which must be struggled for.