Conrad and Masculinity

14 Conrad and Masculinity
argues that we have inherited from the nineteenth century a spurious
‘racialism’: a belief ‘that we could divide human beings into a small
number of groups, called “races,” in such a way that all the members
of these races shared certain fundamental, biologically heritable,
moral and intellectual characteristics with each other that they did
not share with members of any other race.’ 2 The term ‘race’ will, then,
be used in this book (without repetition of scare quotes) to refer to a
discursive and ideological construct, but with no implication that it
has any biological or genetic basis. 3 It may nonetheless make sense to
speak of racial identity in certain contexts, given the power of such
constructions in the discourses through which many individuals have
understood their own identity. 4
There are, then, good reasons why a discussion of Conrad and
masculinity begins appropriately with a discussion of imperialism and
race. As well as the general features of his work and his times already
mentioned, his fiction begins in a way which foregrounds these questions.
His first protagonists are European males in imperial settings:
Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands introduce us to Almayer,
unsuccessful Borneo trader, and Willems, disgraced clerk in a Dutch
imperial trading concern. In Conrad’s work, gender, racial identity
and national or cultural identity are, from the first, always already
interlocking and reciprocally determining: what it means to ‘be a
man’ begins with ‘what it means to be a white man’. Not only that,
but a white man in the realm of the Other. In these Malay novels
‘white’ women are on the whole conspicuously absent. European,
Malay and Arab men are engaged in various forms of competition,
bonding and hostility around the commercial and politics rivalries of
late nineteenth-century imperialism, while women, characteristically
presented as of mixed race, figure as temptation, danger, affliction and
objects of desire or hope for the European males. Thus in Conrad’s
first two novels, the emphasis is on rivalry, competition and aggression
between men. There are some significant male bonds, but these
turn out to be insecurely based, and generally lead to betrayal and
punishment. The most powerful bonds in these novels are those
between men and women, either as fathers and daughters or as the
result of sexual passion. My discussion of these two novels in the
present chapter will therefore focus primarily on the articulation of
masculinity through sexual relations with women. However, as his
writing develops, Conrad seems to more become progressively more
interested in the possibility of masculinity transcending race and
culture, and seeks to identify some way in which being a man might