Conrad and Masculinity

Imperialism and Male Bonds 61
ideological state apparatus of religion: 28 ‘Jim’s father possessed such
certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of
people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom
an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions’ (5). The other
vision of home in the novel is the London where the end of Jim’s story
is read, the slightly sinister, modern, urban world of the crowd.
I have suggested a structure in which the crisis of masculinity at
home operates as the unconscious of the imperial novel. This might
involve the newly problematic binaries of gender being replaced (via
a turn to the imperial setting) with an alternative, and seemingly more
secure binary between dangerous otherness abroad (confronted via
adventure) and a seemingly safe, stable home of moral values.
Another version, as in Haggard, involves a rediscovery of triumphant
‘primitive’ masculinity through exoticizing adventure, critiquing and
rejecting a home which has lost its masculine vigour. 29 In Conrad the
impulse to simplify ‘home’ as a place of secure identity and values is
present, but his own cultural and personal history and his sense of
epistemological relativism does not allow Conrad to sustain this
fiction. The satirical treatment of the parson as an ideologist of class
domination conflicts with Marlow’s presentation of him as a locus of
stable, if insular, values and infects it to the extent that, even for
Marlow, these values are somewhat deathly (‘as a tomb’ (342)).
Furthermore the visions of the chaos of London streets and the threatening
crowd of modernity suggest the repressed unconscious of
imperial discourse: the crises and transformations of class and gender
relations in Britain.
In René Girard’s model of mediated or triangular desire, desire is
prompted by the imitation of another’s desire (the mediator). He
distinguishes between external mediation, as in Don Quixote and
Madame Bovary, where the mediator is sufficiently distant not to be a
rival, and internal mediation, as in Le Rouge et le Noir, where the mediator
is close enough to be seen as a rival, and hence is both the model
for desire and the obstacle to its fulfilment. Denial is essential to the
structure of internal mediation:
In the quarrel which puts him in opposition to his rival, the subject
reverses the logical and chronological order of desires in order to
hide his imitation. He asserts that his own desire is prior to that of
his rival; according to him, it is the mediator who is responsible for
the rivalry.
(DD, 11)