Conrad and Masculinity

16 Conrad and Masculinity
from a few interesting historical observations on late nineteenthcentury
debates about manliness, White tends to ignore gender issues
(AT, 83). Furthermore, in praising Conrad for representing sympathetically
the point of view of non-European characters, she fails to
consider whether the point of view represented may be a projection of
the hankering of the European male for a violent heroism which
seems no longer available to him. So she argues that in An Outcast of
the Islands the ‘heroic discourse of the white man in the tropics is
absent’, while we are asked to ‘take a sympathetic view’ of the heroism
of the Malay adventurers Babalatchi and Omar (AT, 148). But what
exactly is at stake in sympathizing with their ‘manly pursuits of
throat-cutting, kidnapping, slave-dealing, and fire-raising, that were
the only possible occupation for a true man of the sea’ (OI, 52)? Might
not a male European longing for ‘heroic’ aggression express itself
through the representation of the supposedly untrammelled
masculinity of the male Other? While White sees Conrad as increasingly
subverting the adventure genre, Joseph Bristow argues that
‘Heart of Darkness’ ‘remains within the generic frame of popular
adventure writing’, so that it ‘exposes, but never the less maintains,
the presuppositions – of race and gender – of the genre it is ostensibly
contesting’. 7 Bristow’s sensitivity to issues of masculinity renders him
more sceptical than White about Conrad’s degree of resistance to the
ideology of the genre (White also assumes too readily that to subvert
the genre is politically subversive). Bristow argues that the celebration
of male bonds blunts the potential radical edge of ‘Heart of Darkness’:
To come to terms with Kurtz ... is, for Marlow, to know what
manhood means. Heroism has not so much been eradicated but
[sic] raised to a metaphysical power. The glamour of adventure has
been exposed, and in its place there is [the] altogether more resonant
‘glamour’ of the ‘idea’. 8
In a later chapter I shall suggest ways of reading ‘Heart of Darkness’
which might reinstate some radicality. At this point I merely want to
note that Bristow’s account highlights the way in which the ideological
contents of such a fiction is overdetermined by the discourses of
race and gender, since he regards the critique of imperialism in ‘Heart
of Darkness’ as weakened by its allegiance to heroic masculinity. Both
race and gender involve ideas of sameness and otherness, and when
both are in play these ideas can reinforce, undermine or complicate
each other in a variety of ways. Feminist theory and postcolonial