Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 27
narrative point of view also unsettles the centrality of the white male
self, though not decisively so. The presentation of Aïssa remains within
the racist and misogynist stereotypes of imperialist discourse, as when
she feels ‘with the unerring intuition of a primitive woman confronted
by a simple impulse’ (OI, 75) and when she is repeatedly linked to
nature and to darkness, appearing to Willems as ‘the very spirit of that
land of mysterious forests’ (70), and as part of ‘that exuberant life
which, born in gloom, struggles forever towards the sunshine’ (76).
This linking is akin to that in Haggard, in whose work, as Gail Ching-
Liang Low notes, ‘the deliberate gendering of the natural world as
female, and all human agency as male, means that women who
possess agency ... are inevitably punished for it.’ 41 Yet while this ideological
construction of the female Other remains in place, the ‘self’
pole of the imperial binary is shaky. Jeremy Hawthorn has shown that
‘a study of the role of FID [free indirect discourse] in Conrad’s fiction
leads us straight into the moral complexities of these works’ (NT, 4).
The sustained use of irony and free indirect discourse in order to
reveal Willems’s faults and weaknesses risks, at times, implicating the
narrative voice with certain of his attitudes. From the first sentence of
Chapter 1 there is a strong sense of proleptic irony, as we observe a
character whose false sense of security proceeds from self-deception.
This irony pervades the chapter, with its account of Willems’s complacent
fantasies of security and future success. As soon as we read the
first sentence we know that Willems is heading for trouble: ‘When he
stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was
with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into
the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion
into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect’ (OI, 3).
Indeed, by the end of the chapter the irony has become somewhat
heavy-handed: ‘He saw him[self] quite safe; solid as the hills; deep –
deep as an abyss; discreet as the grave’ (11). When, later in the novel,
we are told that Willems ‘had a sudden moment of lucidity – of that
cruel lucidity that comes once in life to the most benighted’ and
‘seemed to see what went on within him, and was horrified at the
strange sight’ (80), we may momentarily imagine that the anti-hero is
being afforded a brief glimpse of his own true nature. Yet the next
sentence tells us that this is still a complacent delusion: ‘He, a white
man whose worst fault till then had been a little want of judgement
and too much confidence in the rectitude of his kind!’ (80). This
passage hovers between interior monologue (which is simply the
thoughts of the character), free indirect discourse (which renders the