Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence (review)

Dangerous Masculinities, we are told by its author, "grounds its approach in Judith Butler's theories of gender-as-performance" (3). It focuses in particular on Ernest Hemingway's "The Capital of the World," Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love as "modernist theaters of manhood-fashioning" in which male characters assert, display, and constitute their claims to manhood by means of conscious or unconscious, honest or dishonest performances (3). Thomas Strychacz is, furthermore, concerned to shift "away from conceiving of masculinity as a purely authorial or narrative function—an essence or characteristic located within an author's psychosexual makeup and/or his cultural milieu and embedded within his texts" and rather to conceive of it "as a scholarly construction" (5). Finally, in addition to the performative claims to masculinity located in his chosen texts, and further constructed by scholars, the book aims to show how readers "of Lawrence, Conrad, and Hemingway constantly used their fictions to defend certain constructions of masculinity and to rule others out of bounds" (6).

The book is never less than interesting and, at its best, offers a succession of very stimulating and rewarding challenges to its own readers. The focus on just three primary texts, and further on certain key scenes within these texts, produces some illuminating and convincing readings. Strychacz is an acute, sensitive, but probing close reader, whose comments on passages that will doubtless be very familiar to students of his chosen authors and works are original and persuasive. Most readers of this journal will have read and reread the scenes from Lord Jim that are singled out for analysis: Captain Jones's report on his quarrel with Montague Brierly's successor; Jim's "failure to jump" in the first chapter of the novel; the "yellow cur" misunderstanding; Marlow's discussion with the French lieutenant; Jim's encounter with Gentleman Brown; and finally Marlow's letter to the privileged man. But even those of us who have read and considered these scenes much as Marlow remembers Jim—"many times […] at length, in detail"—will find that rereading them as assertive and competitive performances by actors in "theaters of manhood-fashioning" strips off veils of familiarity from them and confronts us with something new and thought provoking (3).

So far as the opening chapter of Lord Jim is concerned, Strychacz focuses not so much on Jim's behavior but more on the behavior of "the hero of the lower deck" and the manner in which he reports his exploit to his admiring fellows (and to the ostensibly unimpressed Jim).

As Judith Butler notes, one consequence of postulating a gendered self in process of construction—forced to repeat the performances that seem to maintain its security and thus always hesitating between being and "being"—is that the gendered self is perpetually "in trouble," particularly within a cultural matrix that emphasizes an essentialist and therefore supposedly trouble-free acquisition of a gendered identity. From the moment the "hero of the lower deck" seeks to convince his fellow trainees of his manliness, Lord Jim analyzes masculinity as a dramatized and constantly negotiated symbolic representation.

(155)

Strychacz's analyses of the scenes between Jones and Marlow, and between Marlow and the French lieutenant, are especially rewarding. So far as the latter scene is concerned, Strychacz argues that it "builds a convincing case for a theatrical representation of masculinity, not because we should suspect the lieutenant of being a fraud but because his narration depends on fashioning a series of poses even if he is wholly sincere" (114). Particularly interesting is Strychacz's singling out of the story that the French lieutenant does not tell ("Eh bien! I, who am speaking to you, once …"—the ellipsis indicates where the Frenchman declines to continue his account). Strychacz comments, "The story that is never told accomplishes many things. Since it can never be opened up to analysis, doubt, or miscomprehension, it remains a potent sign of the lieutenant's...