Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 25
can observe most clearly the ideological and utopian strains in
Conrad’s representation of masculinity. The depiction of this sexual
relationship is ideological in so far as it draws on a misogynistic and
imperialist discourse, made more explicit in Haggard, according to
which women, their beauty, their sexual desire and desirability, are
fatal to the white male hero of the adventure narrative. 36 It is,
however, susceptible of a more utopian reading in part because, as
many critics have pointed out, Conrad’s white male heroes (unlike the
stereotyped boy’s adventure heroes of Haggard) are always, in fact,
white male anti-heroes. Conrad’s intense scepticism about ‘human
nature’ necessarily infects his representation of masculinity. As
Willems’s infatuation with Aïssa develops, he feels that his masculinity
is threatened:
he ... realized at last that his very individuality was snatched from
within himself by the hand of a woman ... All that had been a man
within him was gone.
(OI, 77)
Were a Haggard hero to experience such a threat, he would be likely
to be saved by the gruff warning voice of a fellow English gentleman,
or the threatening non-white female would conveniently die. (When
the adventurers in King Solomon’s Mines realize they are buried alive,
Quatermain does note that ‘All the manhood seemed to have gone out
of us’, but this is only a temporary phenomenon.) 37 But in the fiction
of Conrad (who allegedly ‘stigmatized’ Haggard’s work as ‘too horrible
for words’), the masculinity that is under threat is itself a tissue of
vanity, illusion and self-deception: 38
Where was the assurance and pride of his cleverness; the belief in
success, the anger of failure, the wish to retrieve his fortune, the
certitude of his ability to accomplish it yet? Gone.
(OI, 77)
Although Willems’s ‘anger of failure’ may be real enough, the reader
is already well aware, at this point in the novel, that his pride is
conceit, his cleverness largely illusory, his certitude of success a
precursor of defeat. In Willems’s mind, his individuality, his manliness,
and his success as an ambitious servant of imperialism are all
interlocked, and are all lost together through his desire for Aïssa. Yet
the reader knows that that ‘manliness’ was always a sham. Here