Conrad and Masculinity

Gender and the Disciplined Body 117
[his spine broken in two, his nose on the floor between his feet; his
legs and arms flung out stiffly in that attitude of profound despair,
so pathetically droll, of dolls tossed in a corner.] 39
Passivity as non-being, as bodily subjection, as loss of identity: the
author as abject, in the feminine predicament, grotesque. Perhaps
only in such fragmentary self-revelation and in the oblique manoeuvres
of his narrators can Conrad tentatively embody his own
masculinity.