Conrad and Masculinity

110 Conrad and Masculinity
of the natural. However, the landscape in Nostromo tends to sound
rather male, from the domineering Higuerota to the Golfo Placido
which ‘goes to sleep under its black poncho’ (6). The ending of the
novel, however, reinscribes the landscape under the sign of (Linda’s)
lost romantic love:
In that true cry of undying passion that seemed to ring aloud from
Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon,
overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver,
the genius of the magnificent Capitaz de Cargadores dominated the
dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.
(566)
Both Linda and the landscape appear as feminine objects of
Nostromo’s heroic conquest, and the key fact that Nostromo was
(morally) conquered by the treasure is seemingly forgotten. Invoking
romantic cliché, this ending serves to repress the homosocial: the fact
that Gould’s primary desire has been formed around the figure of his
father, while Nostromo’s primary desire has been to impress other
men, whether the Cargadores or the ‘hombres finos’.
A Foucauldian account of Nostromo seems most effective, then, in
relating the fate of the body in Nostromo to its themes of social and
historical change. However, Foucault’s theory needs to be supplemented
by feminist writing, including Cixous’s concept of écriture
féminine. Foucault is widely seen as neglecting the importance of
gender. As Sandra Lee Bartky notes: ‘Women, like men, are subject to
many of the same disciplinary practices Foucault describes. But he is
blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of embodiment that
is peculiarly feminine.’ 26 Bartky suggests one reason for this neglect:
despite his insistence that power is diffused and does not ‘belong’ to
institutions, she suggests that his analysis of its operations (in Discipline
and Punish) is carried out too exclusively with respect to institutions:
Foucault tends to identify the imposition of discipline upon the
body with the operation of specific institutions, for example, the
school, the factory, the prison. To do this, however, is to overlook
the extent to which discipline can be institutionally unbound as
well as institutionally bound. The anonymity of disciplinary power
and its wide dispersion have consequences that are crucial to a
proper understanding of the subordination of women ... The social
construction of the feminine body ... at its base ... is discipline ...