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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

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