Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 89
mother and with the furniture ... The furniture was disposed to the
best advantage all over the house, but Mrs. Verloc’s mother was
confined to two back rooms.
(10)
The furniture seems to come off best out of this arrangement; only in
retrospect, or on second reading, are we struck by a parallel with
Stevie’s body, ‘disposed’ (though hardly ‘to the best advantage’) over
Greenwich Park, ‘disposed of’ all too effectively in one sense, but also
hard to dispose of, since the police have to scrape it up with a shovel.
Given the tension in theories of the body between the sense of the
body as site of social meaning, and the idea of it as resistant to such
meaning, there is a significant oscillation in the novel between the
ideas of Stevie’s body as meaningful or meaningless. Masculinity itself
constitutes an attribution of meaning to the body, marked as male.
Stevie is ambiguous in this respect, an ambiguity which is introduced
in the context of writing itself: ‘He was delicate and, in a frail way,
good-looking, too, except for the vacant droop of his lower lip ... He
had learned to read and write, notwithstanding the unfavourable
aspect of the lower lip’ (8). Though his bodily limitations do not
prevent him learning to write, it is what is already written on his body
that is to determine the course of his life. His positive attributes (‘delicate
and, in a frail way, good-looking’) tend to the conventionally
feminine, while his marks of conventional masculinity are partial and
ambivalent: ‘a growth of thin fluffy hair had come to blur, like a
golden mist, the sharp line of his small lower jaw’ (10). His negative
attributes inscribe on his body his lack of rational subjecthood (‘the
vacant droop of his lower lip’). The only form of inscription in which
we see him engaged is the drawing of circles with compass and pencil
(45). While Stevie’s ability to write indicates a degree of rational
subjecthood, his drawing seems only to confirm his status as symbolic
victim, since the circles suggest, among other things, the circles of
deceit and conspiracy that lead to his death and the symbolic centrality
of the place of that death (the meridian at Greenwich). Mark
Wollaeger sees Stevie’s circles, and other geometric details in the text
(such as Verloc’s code ‘name’, which is a triangle) in terms of a ‘play
between geometry and chaos’, and associates this with ‘the attack on
the body’ in the novel, which he sees as an expression of Conrad’s
‘desire for order’ (FS, 150–1). Wollaeger’s argument is that a certain
fantasy of rational order requires complete control of others, and a
complete transparency of individuals. This desire to control and see