Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 71
vast solitude of the sea untroubled by the sound of the world’s
mechanical contrivances’. 18
Partly in response to the alienation which Buci-Glucksmann
describes, the male body became a focus of aesthetic and political
programmes for many modernist writers, a point made by John
Fletcher in a study of E. M. Forster’s Maurice:
The motif of the thinking body that bypasses a debilitating intellectuality
is characteristic of radical literary theories of the period –
Forster’s own ‘flesh educating the spirit’; Yeats’s ‘unity of being’;
T.S. Eliot’s ‘unified sensibility’ that experiences an idea as immediately
as the odour of a rose; D.H. Lawrence’s ‘sympathetic solar
plexus’ opposed to mental consciousness. 19
Many studies of masculinity concur in suggesting that the masculine
body is, normatively, impermeable, hard, active, and that ideas of
penetration into the male body, of the fluidity or the softness of its
insides, are repressed or provoke anxiety. Cixous suggests that such
anxiety cuts men off from the form of ‘writing’ which is open to
otherness:
Today, writing is woman’s ... woman admits there is an other ... It
is much harder for man to let the other come through him. Writing
is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the
other in me ... for men this permeability, this nonexclusion is a
threat, something intolerable. 20
The emphasis on borders, boundaries and control has wider social and
political significance, as suggested by Carole Pateman’s observation
that women have often been perceived as ‘potential disruptors of
masculine boundary systems of all sorts’, an idea developed by Elaine
Showalter who sees the crisis of masculine identity at the end of the
nineteenth century in terms of threats to established borders. 21
Showalter, in her study of the fin de siècle, notes that ‘there were few
overt cultural fantasies about the insides of men’s bodies, and opening
up the man was not a popular image’, going on to argue that ‘men do
not think of themselves as cases to be opened up. Instead, they open
up a woman as a substitute for self-knowledge.’ 22 Tim Armstrong
suggests that in modernist aesthetics, we see ‘states of interiority
coded as “feminine” succumbing to a “masculine” intervention seen
as “surgical”’. 23 Both penetration of the male body and permeability
to its own products seem threatening: Christine Battersby notes the