Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 31
With that look she drew the man’s soul away from him through his
immobile pupils, and from Willems’ features the spark of reason
vanished under her gaze and was replaced by an appearance of
physical well-being, an ecstasy of the senses which had taken
possession of his rigid body ... [producing] an appalling aspect of
idiotic beatitude.
(140)
A range of discourses are evidently in play here, including ironic use
of a clichéd ‘primitive’ superstition (the stealing of a soul) and of the
discourse of degeneracy (facial features marking the absence of
reason). Shortly afterwards Willems lies with his head in her lap, and
expresses the romantic desire for death: ‘I wish I could die like this –
now!’ (141).
The fear of, and desire for, ‘regression’ and the ‘primitive’ in imperial
discourse can easily join forces with the fantasy of a return to a
pre-rational, pre-human, even pre-organic self, given the tendency of
imperial discourse to construct the Other in terms which involve darkness
and death. The discourse of gender shows a similar compatibility.
As Elisabeth Bronfen points out, Freud selected three objects of choice
for man: the mother, the beloved (woman) and Mother Earth.
Moreover, there is a
cultural convention that the mother’s gift of birth is also the gift of
death, and that the embrace of the beloved also signifies a dissolution
of the self. Woman functions as privileged trope for the
uncanniness of unity and loss, of independent identity and selfdissolution,
of the pleasure of the body and its decay ... Given that
woman is culturally constructed as the object of a plethora of
contradictory drives, the death drive and the drive for femininity
are readily aligned. 49
In Haggard’s fiction the death drive is projected outwards in celebratory
visions of mass slaughter (of both humans and animals) and
demonized portrayals of monstrous women. Conrad’s writing is more
able to explore the idea of an internalized self-destructiveness, and so
his vision of imperial masculinity is a far more troubled and sceptical
one. An Outcast of the Islands, then, reveals the fault lines in imperial
masculinity, representing powerfully the destructive and self-destructive
aspects of male imperial desire. What Conrad’s text seems unable
to do is to represent the desire of the Other in non-ideological terms. 50