Conrad and Masculinity

42 Conrad and Masculinity
Stape’s dissent. Although a contrapuntal or utopian reading of Aïssa’s
character, such as Nadelhaft offers, is possible, the presence of a
misogynist and imperial ideology in the novel is not confined to the
discourse of characters such as Willems and Lingard, but also inhabits
the discourse of the narrator (for example in the descriptions of the
jungle). However, in response to Stape I would suggest that the difference
between the colonial project and Aïssa’s relationship to Willems
is that whereas the Dutch (and, to a lesser extent, the Arab and Malay
traders) possess social and military power, Aïssa has no power apart
from her supposed erotic power, which is a projection of a white male
fantasy. Artfully bracketing a politicized feminist reading of the novel
with an apolitical reading of it as a meditation of love, Stape argues
that Aïssa cannot represent an alternative to male power systems
because her motives are not pure, as if a woman is only allowed to
have idealistic motives. She is only after power, Stape objects. Yet that
is, after all, what the disempowered usually are after.
The significance of my disagreements with Stape for the wider aims
of the present book is not merely to contrast my own reading with his,
but to highlight the role of masculinity in the processes of critical
reception and debate. Stape’s introduction is that of a scholarly and
intelligent Conradian critic, and has much to offer the reader in terms
of both information and critical judgement. Yet it also strikes me as
distorted by a sort of possessive and defensive rage against feminist
criticism intruding its critiques onto the imaginative bond between
male author and male reader/critic. Here Nadelhaft’s suggestion that
‘along with Willems, it is the Conradian critics who have been threatened
by the characterisation of Aïssa’ seems apposite. 70 Somehow, in
Stape’s argument, it is a non-European woman, treated as a possession
by her father, as a tool by Babalatchi and as an object of desire and
disgust by Willems, a woman who ends up a prematurely aged
servant, who becomes the epitome of oppressive power.
I am aware that my own criticisms of Stape reveal my own
emotional investment in both Conrad and certain critical values and
positionings, an investment vulnerable to Stephen Heath’s question:
‘To what extent do men use feminism for the assurance of an identity,
now asking to belong as a way of at least ensuring their rightness, a
position that gets her with me once more?’ 71 The response has, I
think, to proceed from the comment which Heath quotes from Claire
Pajaczkowska: ‘I am tired of men arguing amongst themselves as to
who is the most feminist, frustrated by an object feminism becoming
the stakes in a displaced rivalry between men because of a refusal by