Conrad and Masculinity

2
Imperialism and Male Bonds:
‘Karain’, The Nigger of the
‘Narcissus’, Lord Jim
In Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands male loyalties and
friendships, such as those between Lingard and Willems, and between
Dain and Almayer, are fractured by tensions surrounding the binaries
of race and gender. Sexual passion in the context of the imperial
encounter generates a mixture of fear and desire, evoking the death
drive and forcing resolutions which re-establish fantasies of racial
security, as Willems goes down to self-destruction and Nina is
despatched into the imaginary future of a purely exotic world. Aïssa,
whose racial and sexual otherness threatens to engulf the male imperial
self, is transformed from object of desire to object of pity and
disgust. Miscegenation or métissage, with its exciting and threatening
potentialities, is held at bay, while elements of otherness, even of
hybridity, within the male imperial self are evoked only to be
suppressed.
In the works which follow, Conrad seeks to re-establish the strength
of male bonds. In his next long work, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, this
involves the total exclusion of women characters (unless one counts
the Captain’s wife, who appears briefly when the ship reaches dock,
‘as strange as if she had fallen there from the sky’ (NN, 165)). In other
texts women are firmly inscribed in a homosocial structure which
reaffirms male power through the exchange of women, although male
weakness is also much in evidence: this applies to ‘Karain’, ‘Heart of
Darkness’ and Lord Jim. Imperialism and ideas of race play a major part
in all of these works, though in varying ways. This chapter will explore
the ways in which this reassertion of male bonds is haunted by the
anxiety of fin de siècle masculinity, leading Conrad towards the
creation of a masculine textual economy based around the act of
narration. 1
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