Conrad and Masculinity

38 Conrad and Masculinity
possesses the social and gender power that enables him to masquerade
as the owner of the gaze so as to construct Nina as a traditional Malay
woman and finally to carry her off as the possession of his look:
‘Come, delight of my eyes’ (AF, 193). A comparable process occurs, in
much more compact form, in An Outcast of the Islands, in one of those
intensely rhetorical and symbolic passages describing Aïssa and
Willems:
She stepped back, keeping her distance, her eyes on his face, watching
on it the play of his doubts and of his hopes with a piercing
gaze, that seemed to search out the innermost recesses of his
thought; and it was as if she had drawn slowly the darkness round
her, wrapping herself in its undulating folds that made her indistinct
and vague.
(OI, 154)
Aïssa’s vagueness here helps her to appropriate the role of impersonal
gaze which, in a reversal of the more usual gender relations, penetrates
and fixes the male. Yet the allusions to darkness, veiling and ‘undulating
folds’ reinscribes her vagueness in the familiar symbolism of
dark otherness, so that ‘lack’ rebounds upon her. Her identity
dissolves into cliché even as her fierceness further undermines the
identity of Willems.
Conrad’s first two novels, then, raise questions as to how we should
read texts which are in many ways in the grip of a stereotyped imperial
and misogynistic discourse, and yet deploy irony and ambiguous
narrative technique so as to fracture the coherence of that discourse,
offering moral and political insight of far greater interest than mere
restatements of cliché. The complexity of this situation is in part a
result of the complexity of Conrad’s texts, and in part arises from the
historical situation of reading a century later, when critiques of race
and gender have acquired prominence. The tendency for discussion of
these issues to resolve into pro-Conrad and anti-Conrad polemics is
unhelpful. White’s ‘subversion’ model – essentially an attempt to
present Conrad as relatively in tune with late twentieth-century political
values – remains somewhat one-dimensional. Bhabha’s concept of
ambivalence as integral to colonial discourse seems to me more
convincing than postulating a monolithic colonial discourse which
Conrad (partly) subverts. However, ambivalence can easily become
too bland a concept, too lacking in the force that would enable us to
distinguish between, say, Haggard and Conrad. Hence my suggestion