Conrad and Masculinity

10 Introduction
notes that this definition both makes ‘the power relationships
between men and women appear to be dependent on the power relationships
between men and men’ and implies that ‘large-scale social
structures are congruent with the male–male–female erotic triangles
described most forcefully by Girard’ (BM, 25). This congruence
between narrative structures, articulated by desire and knowledge, and
social power structures is a major source of meaning, and especially of
irony, in Conrad’s fiction. Of the other sources cited by Sedgwick,
Gayle Rubin and Luce Irigaray are of particular relevance to the
present book. Gayle Rubin, in her influential 1975 article ‘The Traffic
in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, develops a feminist
elaboration and critique of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology of kinship
structures, seeking ‘an alternate explanation’ of ‘the nature and
genesis of women’s oppression and social subordination’ (TW, 158,
157). She notes that the incest taboo orders a network of relations
through the exchange or giving of women, and quotes Lévi-Strauss:
The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is
not established between a man and a woman, but between two
groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in
the exchange, not as one of the partners.
(TW, 174)
She claims that in ‘civilized’ as well as in ‘primitive’ societies, men
are ‘trafficked – but as slaves, hustlers, athletics stars, serfs, or as some
other catastrophic social status, rather than as men’, while ‘women are
transacted as slaves, serfs, and prostitutes, but also simply as women’
(TW, 175–6). Luce Irigaray has developed most fully this economic
analysis of gender relations, to argue that ‘the economy ... that is in
place in our societies thus requires that women lend themselves to
alienation in consumption, and to exchanges in which they do not
participate’ (TS, 172).
There are of course significant divergences and problems here. In
particular, Sedgwick makes some telling criticisms of Irigaray’s direct
linking of male homosexuality to male supremacy, as well as of her
lack of a historical dimension. 30 Nevertheless, these various thinkers
provide the basis for an interpretation of the relations between men
portrayed in Conrad’s fiction, and the relations between men
produced by the reading of that fiction. In writing, as a male critic,
about gender structures in Conrad’s fiction, I must acknowledge that
complicity is inescapable; at the same time, by attempting to face