Conrad and Masculinity

40 Conrad and Masculinity
quotes Conrad, asserting a universal similarity of humanity, inflected
by a universal difference of gender: ‘They [Willems and Aïssa] both
long to have a significance in the order of nature or of society. To me
they are typical of mankind where every individual wishes to assert
his power, woman by sentiment, man by achievement of some sort –
mostly base.’ 61 Conrad is obviously using gender stereotyping here.
But the conclusion Stape wishes to draw is that, because Conrad sees
all races and peoples as equally subject to greed and ambition, he is
repudiating colonialism. Are we not back here with the ‘Empire of the
Selfsame’, in which the Other takes its place ‘in a hierarchically organized
relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines and
assigns “its” other’? 62 Again the forced interaction of binaries is part
of the process, since Conrad is able to assert the unity of races by
subsuming them in a strongly marked gender binary (an effect which
we shall observe in his fiction in the next chapter). Stape has earlier
argued that the exoticism in the novel is ‘largely a matter of setting’,
since ‘the cultures and peoples of the Malay Archipelago serve mainly
as a backdrop for quintessentially Western crises of identity’. 63 The
Empire of the Selfsame: Westerners have identity and quintessentially
Western crises, whereas the Malays are at best the same as, or no better
than, the Europeans. Our identity is distinct and theirs is merely part
of (our) ‘universal’. While overtly critical of colonialism, Stape’s argument
comes close to justifying it on the grounds that everyone does
it, or would if they could. To illustrate how Conrad transcends any
‘claims to cultural or racial superiority’, Stape point out that the Arab
trader Abdulla is ‘as much a colonizer as Lingard’, and that Babalatchi
is ‘another outsider’ who only ushers in a more ruthless ‘system of
exploitation’. 64 He is making a valid point here, in that Conrad is
portraying a society of competing adventurers and traders from
various parts of the world, all in search of wealth and power, while the
indigenous population of Sambir play very little part in the story. But
is it not a little too convenient for a Western critic to defend a Western
author as anti-colonial, because that author supposedly sees imperialism
as ‘only another manifestation of a fundamentally human
rapaciousness, limited neither by time nor by place’? 65 Just as the
combination of gender and racial otherness produces Conrad’s darkest
rhetoric (and bearing in mind that Cixous describes the Empire of the
Selfsame as a system which supports both patriarchy and colonialism),
so it is gender and racial otherness (in the character of Aïssa) which
rouses Stape to a defensive attack on feminism and on Aïssa herself. 66
He cites her statement that all evil come from the outside, from ‘that