Conrad and Masculinity

20 Conrad and Masculinity
present in cruder form aspects of imperial ideology which are
rendered more problematic in Conrad’s fiction. 17 Haggard’s narrator,
Allan Quatermain, assures the reader early on in King Solomon’s Mines
that:
I am going to tell the strangest story that I know of. It may seem a
queer thing to say, especially considering that there is no woman
in it – except Foulata. Stop, though! there is Gagoola, if she was a
woman and not a fiend. But she was a hundred at least, and therefore
not marriageable, so I don’t count her. At any rate, I can safely
say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history. 18
Quatermain only ‘counts’ women who (like Foulata) are potential
objects of sexual desire, while what is excluded here is less women as
such than the social and moral space attributed by Victorian society
to (respectable) white women: the domestic sphere of the ‘petticoat’. 19
Foulata, whose relationship with Good introduces the threat of miscegenation,
dies with a convenience that she herself recognizes in her
last words: ‘I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his
life with such as I am, for the sun may not mate with the darkness, nor
the white with the black.’ 20 Quatermain later reflects that ‘her
removal was a fortunate occurrence’, despite her ‘great ... beauty, and
... considerable refinement of mind’. 21
Although European women were by no means absent from the
Dutch East Indies at this time (and are indeed briefly mentioned in
Conrad – for example Mrs Vinck in An Outcast of the Islands is presumably
Dutch), they play no significant role in either of Conrad’s first
two novels. 22 It is as if Conrad, in his early work, can only approach
the otherness of women by heightening that otherness through ideas
of racial or cultural difference. The dual binaries of race and gender are
conflated into a single imperial binary between the white male and
the Other female, whose dangerously ‘mixed’ racial identity is part of
her Otherness and threat. A certain amount of discursive energy is
expended in presenting Aïssa, in An Outcast of the Islands, as of mixed
race. Aïssa’s father is described as an ‘Arab’ (OI, 59) and her mother as
‘a Baghdadi woman with veiled face’ (47), while Lakamba describes
her as ‘a she-dog with white teeth, like a woman of the Orang Putih’
[i.e. the white people] (47). 23 As critics have noted, in Almayer’s Folly
Conrad makes Almayer European where his real-life model Olmeijer
was of Eurasian descent. This makes the choice faced by Almayer’s
daughter Nina, between her father and Dain, into a choice between