Conrad and Masculinity

228 Notes
18 Martin Ray notes that Chance sold 13 000 copies in the first two years,
three times as many as Under Western Eyes in the corresponding period.
Martin Ray, Introduction to Chance (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), pp. vii–xix (p. vi).
19 On the question of the novel’s putative appeal to women readers, see
Laurence Davies, ‘Conrad, Chance and Women Readers’, in CG, 75–88.
20 Ray, p. x.
21 Roberts, ‘Secret Agents and Secret Objects’.
22 This is a notable reversal of the attitude of the Marlow of ‘Heart of
Darkness’, who notoriously claims that women’s lack of involvement in
worldly action renders them ‘out of touch with truth’ (59).
23 On the distinction between story time (the time in which events occur)
and narrative time (the time of their telling), see Genette, p. 35.
24 This process clearly extends into the critical debate about feminist and
gender issues in Conrad’s work, in so far as male critics participate in this.
Scott McCracken commented, as he and I were exchanging drafts and ideas
on the subject, that ‘all this traffic between us must surely amount to a
textual configuration in itself: men writing to men about Conrad and
women.’ Thus Conrad’s narrative strategy takes on a form of life outside
his text, continuing to demand self-questioning by men.
25 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, ‘Textuality and Surrogacy in Conrad’s Chance’,
L’Époque Conradienne (1989), 51–65 (pp. 64, 54–5).
Chapter 7 Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange
1 Critics who deal with aspects of the visual in Conrad’s work include: David
Simpson, Fetishism & Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad (Baltimore, MD
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 102ff.; Moser, pp.
111–30; Leo Gurko, Joseph Conrad: Giant in Exile (New York: Macmillan,
1962), pp. 197–223. Gurko makes the misogynist assumption, derived
from Moser, that women who show determination are thereby exhibiting
‘sexual aggressiveness’ (Gurko, p. 202).
2 On Conrad’s use of the romance genre, see Hampson, Joseph Conrad;
Betrayal and Identity, p. 25 and Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the
Modern Temper, pp. 186–95, 197–200.
3 See Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine R. Grontkowski, ‘The Mind’s Eye’, in
Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics,
Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, eds Sandra Harding and Merril B.
Hintikka (Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 207–24.
4 Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, pp. 93–4.
5 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 79.
6 Koestenbaum, p. 169.
7 Derrida argues that the white/black, light/dark oppositions are fundamental
to Western metaphysics. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The White Mythology:
Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 207–71.
8 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 526.