Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 41
people that steals every land, masters every sea, that knows no mercy
and no truth’ (OI, 153). Commenting that this is ‘comically inadequate
as an interpretation of the nexus of political and social forces
that govern human action’, Stape argues that ‘her reading of the colonial
situation is a characteristic splitting-off and projection of the
negative upon the Other, with the outsider as a convenient scapegoat
for one’s own moral inadequacies and failures.’ 67 But Aïssa’s comment
is not an interpretation of a ‘nexus of political and social forces’, but
a subjective and heartfelt comment on her own life, which has been
traumatically marked by a colonial conflict in which the Dutch are
increasingly dominant. Aïssa is indeed simplifying matters, but it is
hardly just to describe the European colonial exploitation of the
Malay Archipelago as equivalent to one of her ‘own moral inadequacies’.
It is the idea that Aïssa might represent some positive feminist
value that prompts Stape’s particular scorn:
Aïssa’s total misunderstanding of him [Willems], combined with
her desire for his conquest, makes her relation to him yet another
colonizing project pointedly resembling those that form the
novel’s larger historical and political backdrop ... she symbolizes a
poisoned blossom bringing perfumed death, and any sentimentalizing
of their relationship – whether articulated as a meditation on
the nature of love or as an attempt to see her as an alternative to
male power systems, confronting and undermining patriarchal
hegemony – necessarily ends in an egregious misreading of the
novel ... [Willems] never clearly sees that he has merely been a
means by which she hopes to achieve her self-serving ends, ends
that differ not a whit from those of the ‘colonizers’ who figure
among Conrad’s main targets. 68
Stape’s argument here, like his earlier use of the ideas of projection
and the Other, is characteristic of male backlash criticism, in appropriating
the language of political criticism while misrepresenting the
politics of the situation. The point of a feminist or postcolonial
critique is not (or at least should not be) to idealize the disempowered,
but to point out the mechanisms of their disempowerment.
The critic to whom Stape is probably responding here (though he
does not name her) is Ruth Nadelhaft, who celebrates Aïssa’s ‘mental
and emotional power of analysis and speech’ as carrying a ‘critique of
patriarchal Western values’. 69 Nadelhaft’s reading is strongly argued,
but it does indeed tend to idealize Aïssa, prompting I would suspect