Conrad and Masculinity

226 Notes
edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1998), pp. 24, 284.
16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 25.
17 Jim Reilly makes a comparable point when he argues that Nostromo offers
a critique of ‘conservative positions and capitalist/colonialist assumptions
. . . from inside’, since both text and author are ‘enmeshed within’ those
positions and assumptions: Reilly, p. 145.
18 It happens on several occasions in Conrad’s fiction that the real name of a
woman is obscure or never revealed, as in the cases of Lena in Victory (see
Chapter 8) and Jewel in Lord Jim.
19 See, for example, Nadelhaft, p. 46.
20 But for an account which has affinities with my own, see Joanna M. Smith,
‘“Too Beautiful Altogether”: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness’, in
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Literature, ed.
Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press; London: Macmillan, 1989),
pp. 179–98.
21 This aspect of Marlow’s attitude is even more evident in the manuscript
and magazine versions of the novella, where the words quoted are
preceded by ‘that face on paper seemed to be a reflection of truth itself’.
Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 2nd
edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 74.
22 Rebecca Stott notes that ivory, the object of Kurtz’s exploitation of Africa,
appears in Brussels only in the keys of the Intended’s grand piano, so that
‘just as the source of the ivory in the white woman’s drawing-room is the
darkness of the African wilderness, the source of the white woman herself
is the savage mistress, correlated in the final pages through the motif of the
outstretched arms of both women’: Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the
Late Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death (London: Macmillan, 1992),
pp. 150–1.
23 Billy Budd was not published until 1924, so any links are not a matter of
influence but of comparable social and discursive contexts.
24 Sedgwick suggests that ‘What was new from the turn of the century was
the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was
necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now considered
necessarily assignable to a homo- or a heterosexuality, a binarized identity
that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly
least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this new development that
left no space in the culture exempt from the potent incoherences of
homo/heterosexual definition’ (EC, 2).
25 C. B. Cox argues that ‘Kurtz in Heart of Darkness . . . in certain ways reflects
the unconscious urges of Marlow’s soul’ (Cox, p. 7). See also David
Thorburn, Conrad’s Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1974), p. 143.
26 Sedgwick argues that ‘Irigaray’s writing about the “hom(m)osexual” is the
locus classicus of this trajectory . . . according to which authoritarian
regimes or homophobic masculinist culture may be damned on the
grounds of being even more homosexual than gay male culture’, a trajectory
which, Sedgwick claims, leads to ‘terrible commonplaces about fascism’
(EC, 154). Without attempting to arbitrate this point, let me say that the