Conrad and Masculinity
Conrad and Masculinity
Conrad and Masculinity
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22 <strong>Conrad</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Masculinity</strong><br />
transferred into the need to control the sexuality of the Other, the<br />
Other as sexualized female’. 29 Christopher Lane develops a sophisticated<br />
theoretical model of colonialism <strong>and</strong> sexuality, rejecting<br />
approaches such as Hyam’s, which ‘conceive of sexuality in a functional<br />
relation to colonialism’. Instead Lane offers a vision of Britain’s<br />
empire lying ‘in the midst of a complicated <strong>and</strong> indeterminate field of<br />
“unamenable” desires’, a ‘picture of colonial rule shrouded by doubt,<br />
ambivalence, <strong>and</strong> antagonism’. He focuses on<br />
the failure of self-mastery, the insufficiency <strong>and</strong> overabundance of<br />
drives to colonial sublimation, the relation between imperialism<br />
<strong>and</strong> the death drive, the service that colonialism performed in the<br />
realm of sexual fantasy, <strong>and</strong> the influence that all of these factors<br />
brought to bear on the symbolization of masculinity <strong>and</strong> homosexuality.<br />
30<br />
The linking of imperialism to the death drive (rather than to the<br />
assertion of the power of the ego) suggests ways of reading <strong>Conrad</strong>’s<br />
self-destructive anti-heroes without taking their failure as automatically<br />
a subversion of a coherent imperial project. Lane’s whole vision<br />
of Empire in terms of ‘doubt, ambivalence <strong>and</strong> antagonism’ is a useful<br />
corrective to a homogenizing idea of the imperial project which (as<br />
in White’s account), can make it rather too easy to categorize<br />
anything that does not fit the idea as ‘subversive’. The idea of ‘the<br />
service that colonialism performed in the realm of sexual fantasy’,<br />
inverting the more common tendency to see sexuality as recruited in<br />
the service of Empire, suggests a mutuality between the discourses of<br />
masculinity <strong>and</strong> of imperialism which avoids hypostatizing one as<br />
essence or cause.<br />
Faced with this profusion of competing <strong>and</strong> interrelating models, it<br />
is important to bear in mind that they are only models. That is to say,<br />
they are heuristic <strong>and</strong> interpretative devices with which we can<br />
analyse <strong>and</strong> perhaps explain imperial practice <strong>and</strong> discourse (<strong>and</strong>, in<br />
the present instance, <strong>Conrad</strong>’s fiction). Different models may be more<br />
appropriate in different instances, <strong>and</strong> any model must be liable to<br />
modification in the light of the specific instance, since neither imperial<br />
practice nor imperial discourse was unified <strong>and</strong> homogeneous. For<br />
example, S<strong>and</strong>er Gilman observes that<br />
Miscegenation was a fear (<strong>and</strong> a word) from the late nineteenthcentury<br />
vocabulary of sexuality. It was a fear not merely of