Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 19
other’ (as opposed to the Other of the same) or in terms of plurality or
polymorphic identity. 13 The most useful formulation here is Homi
Bhabha’s concept of cultural hybridity, which ‘entertains difference
without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’, neither castigating the
Other for a difference assumed to be inferiority, nor assimilating it to
a sameness which assumes the superiority of the colonizer. 14
An attempt to relate masculinity and imperialism in Conrad’s work
requires some model of how the Same, the Other and the hybrid
operate in terms of gender and in terms of race. However, it is important
to avoid imposing too rigid a model on the complexity of the
individual instance and to avoid assuming a neat homology between
the discourses of gender and race, which are so different in structure
and history. What is in common, however, is a binary structure of
Same and Other which tends to subdue the multiplicity of differences.
15 Jonathan Dollimore, citing Derrida’s claim that the binary
opposition is a violent hierarchy, suggests that ‘the opposition masculine/homosexual,
a conflation of two classic binaries (masculine/
feminine; hetero/homosexual) has been one of the most violent of
all’. 16 While this specific conflation of binaries is highly relevant to
imperial masculinity, what is significant for the present argument is
the notion of a violent discursive conflation of binaries, linked to
material violence. There is a pressure to such a conflation operating in
imperial fiction where gender and race interact. The two oppositions
of masculine/feminine and European/non-European are in play, but
because both are hierarchical, there is pressure to resolve them into a
single opposition. One reason for suspecting a violent conflation of
binaries in imperial fiction is the strength of the impulse to exclude,
or at the least rigorously marginalize, ‘white’ or European women, as
if their presence on the scene of the imperial encounter would conflict
with its dominant dynamics. On one level it is a matter of experience
and realism, since in Conrad’s life as a merchant seaman in the Far
East he would have encountered relatively few European women. Yet
it is also a matter of choice of subject matter and presentation. A novel
which Conrad began in 1896 as The Rescuer was to admit a white
woman to centre stage on the imperial scene, but only as an implausibly
romanticized agent for the destruction of the male adventurer,
Lingard. Furthermore Conrad did not succeed in completing the novel
until 1919 (when it appeared as The Rescue). European women could
be neither the subject of the imperial encounter (because of their
gender), nor its object (because of their racial identity). This exclusion
is very explicitly stated in the fiction of Rider Haggard, which tends to