Conrad and Masculinity

70 Conrad and Masculinity
of abstracting the physical can similarly only really be dealt with
(within discourse) by a combination of overall awareness and tactical
attempts to notice what might be being lost or left out of account.
A certain contradiction appears in accounts of the degree of visibility
of the male body in modern Western discourses. Much theorizing
about the construction of normative masculinity emphasizes an
estrangement from the body. Cixous states that ‘Men still have everything
to say about their sexuality ... Conquering her [woman], they’ve
made haste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of
body.’ 12 Rosalind Coward argues that ‘it is in reality men’s bodies,
men’s sexuality, which is the true “dark continent” of this society’. 13
Jane Gallop suggests that ‘men have their masculine identity to gain
by being estranged from their bodies and dominating the bodies of
others.’ 14 Clearly such statements need historical inflection. Recent
studies of masculinity in the Victorian period have found extensive
use of bodily metaphor and representations of the male body used to
construct, defend or vary ideas of maleness. Herbert Sussman finds in
a number of literary, philosophical and aesthetic texts of the period,
as well as in the visual arts, conceptions of male desire based on
hydraulic metaphors of fluidity, flow and eruption, linked to ideas of
the seminal but also of pollution, so that there is a perceived need for
containment or channelling of such energy. 15 Christine Buci-
Glucksmann argues (as summarized by Mary Ann Doane) that, in the
late nineteenth century,
the male seems to lose access to the body, which the woman then
comes to overrepresent. The ‘working body’ is ‘confiscated by the
alienation of machines’ and ‘submitted to industrialization and
urbanization’. At the same time, in a compensatory gesture, the
woman is made to inhere even more closely to the body. 16
Conrad’s life placed him in an unusual relationship to such alienation.
The role of officer in the merchant navy remained one in which
physical labour was compatible with middle-class status, and in which
it was possible to feel a certain distance from ‘industrialization and
urbanization’. This distance is thematized in Lord Jim in the description
of Jim ‘in the fore-top’ (LJ, 6), looking down with the contempt
of a romantic hero at the roofs and factory chimneys of urban modernity
(6). 17 In an essay on ‘Ocean Travel’, Conrad mourns the impact
of machine technology (in the form of steamships) as a loss of ‘the