Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 101
indifference of a man of affairs to nature, whose hostility can always
be overcome by the resources of finance’ (39).
Karen Klein sees Nostromo as concerned with ‘many forms and
degrees of oppression’, of which bodily subjection is both a symbol
and a powerful instance, so that the suspended body of the tortured
and murdered Hirsch is ‘the core symbol of this novel’. But, as she
rightly points out, the ‘most iterated’ image of the novel is that of the
San Tomé mine – which is both symbol and instance of economic and
productive forces as the engine of history (FP, 114). A coherent
reading of masculinity and the body in Nostromo needs to relate the
various constructions of masculinity in the novel to its account of
historical and social change. Klein bases her analysis of Nostromo on a
distinction between the ‘masculine situation’, involving ‘the sense of
one’s body as autonomous’ and ‘a security based on the knowledge of
the cultural assignment of superiority to males in the hierarchy of
values’ (FP, 104) and ‘the feminine predicament’, characterized by ‘the
sense of the body as not under one’s own control, but subject to the
force and will of others’ (FP, 104) and ‘the sense of the self as inferior
in the hierarchies of status and power’ (FP, 106). Arguing that it is
possible for men and women to occupy either situation in certain
contexts and situations, she reads Nostromo’s realization that he has
become the tool of the ‘hombres finos’ as a shift from the masculine
situation to the feminine predicament. In the scene where he gives his
buttons to the Morenita he is in the former, she in the latter, but ‘in
the course of the narrative, Nostromo comes to occupy the place of
the Morenita in relation to the real power-brokers: the English, the
Spanish, American interests’ (FP, 110). Nostromo’s awareness of this is
triggered by his confrontation with Monygham and with the body of
the tortured and murdered Hirsch. The latter, as a Jewish victim of
extreme cruelty, has experienced the worst consequences of the feminine
predicament, while Monygham is a past victim of torture (FP,
111–12). Klein’s rationale for describing such events in terms of
gender is Engels’s claim that ‘women represent the first oppressed
group’. Hence she argues that ‘gender oppression ... precedes other
forms of group oppression ... and serves as the paradigm for them’,
and is also the most pervasive form of such oppression, as women are
found in virtually all groups (FP, 102–3).
I find Klein’s argument convincing and thought-provoking, including
her claims that the ending of the novel evades, through contrived
ironies, the truths which have been revealed. (The unsatisfactory
nature of the novel’s ending is also a result of its attempt to reinstate