Conrad and Masculinity

90 Conrad and Masculinity
into others finds expression in the destruction of the body, as well as
in an authorial imprinting of meaning on characters via their appearance
and physical fate.
A number of discourses are evoked or alluded to in ways that bear
on the problematic meaning of Stevie’s body. Theories of degeneracy
overload the body with meaning, and this is one of a number of ways
in which Stevie’s body is linked to that of his sister. As Rebecca Stott
argues, Conrad mobilizes ‘the discourses of criminology and degeneracy’
in this text which ‘teems with references to Lombroso and
Nordau and their studies of degenerate types’, and ‘although Stevie is
chosen initially as the degenerate subject, Winnie becomes progressively
the site of Ossipon’s (and the text’s) investigations into
degeneracy’. 46 Stott’s conclusion is that, through the association of
Mrs Verloc and other female characters in Conrad with the ‘linguistic
and epistemological void’ of London (or of the jungle, or of the abyss),
Conrad associates the female body, and especially the maternal body,
with disruption and dissolution. 47 Hence at the end of the novel
‘Winnie slips back into the interstices of that black, atavistic space ...
a temporal and spatial alterity whose presence in the text is itself part
of a breakdown of “configurations of sexual, racial and political asymmetry
underlying mainstream modern Western culture”’. 48 While the
marks of degeneracy inscribed on Stevie become transferred to his
sister, her association with a disruptive bodily alterity also reflects
back onto him, through their bodily closeness, which extends from
their physical resemblance to Stevie’s idyllic memory of sharing
Winnie’s bed as a child, ‘a heaven of consoling peace’, which generates
‘a symbolic longing’ (167) to take to bed with him any objects of
his compassion. This memory has all the hallmarks of the pre-
Oedipal, since Winnie plays a maternal role in relation to Stevie. Such
pre-Oedipal closeness to the mother is arguably what is repressed in
constructions of the normative masculine body, which Stevie thus
doubly transgresses by his continued symbiotic closeness to and
dependence on his mother/sister, and by his own identification with
the maternal body, as in his tragic-comic desire to take the cabman
and horse to bed with him to comfort them for their sufferings.
Stevie’s remains are also subjected to the forensic gaze of the police,
and such investigations, whether by police, detectives or amateurs,
function in many Victorian fictional narratives to highlight the attribution
of meaning to the material and to the body. 49 Foucault’s
account of nineteenth-century configurations of power and knowledge
stresses the internalization of control and surveillance as part of