Conrad and Masculinity

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