Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 45
Conrad’s early works, with their Far Eastern or nautical settings and
their links to adventure fiction and to the imperial novel as practised
by Kipling, Stevenson and others, are often seen in isolation from
their British social context, in particular the crisis of masculinity
outlined in the Introduction. 2 However, as Daniel Bivona has argued,
the maintenance of a wall between the ‘imperial novel’ and the
‘domestic novel’ can obscure the discursive and material interdependence
of British society with British colonial activity; an
interdependence which Bivona conceptualizes by seeing imperialism
as the unconscious of nineteenth-century Britain. 3 In considering
Conrad’s imperial and sea fiction, one might invert this formulation,
and ask whether the crisis of masculinity at home operates as the
unconscious of Conrad’s texts. Such a view gains much support from
the role of Britain as ‘home’ in Lord Jim, from its role as epistemological
frame in ‘Karain’, and from the parallel and contrast in The Nigger
of the ‘Narcissus’ between shipboard society and land society, as well
as the mood of the ending in London. We also find at the boundaries
of Conrad’s fiction, in his ‘Author’s Notes’, and in associated texts
such as letters and memoirs, images of Conrad himself which chime
suggestively with some of the characteristic images and concerns of fin
de siècle and decadent masculinity, and it is with these intertexts of
the fiction that I shall begin.
The year in which Conrad completed his first novel, 1894, was also
marked by two major events in his personal relations with other men.
In that year his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who had served as effective
guardian and as mentor to Conrad since his father’s death when he
was eleven, died. This event, Conrad recorded, made him feel ‘as if
everything has died in me’. 4 In the same year he met Edward Garnett,
senior reader for the publisher Unwin’s, who was to become Conrad’s
friend and literary mentor. In the ‘Author’s Note’ to An Outcast of the
Islands, Conrad gives a somewhat mythologized account of this
meeting, making Garnett responsible for the inception of his second
novel, and implicitly for Conrad’s decisive shift to a literary career.
The note begins by invoking that state of ‘immobility’ and ‘indolence’
which recurs in his accounts of himself and is so much at odds with
the dominant Victorian ideals of masculinity, and so much a part of
their decadent mirror-image. He describes himself as a ‘victim of
contrary stresses’, adding that ‘since it was impossible for me to face
both ways I had elected to face nothing’ (OI, vii). Elsewhere Conrad
famously described himself as ‘homo duplex’ or double man, as if
facing both ways was not unknown to him. 5 Here, however, he claims