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Conrad and Masculinity

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34 <strong>Conrad</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Masculinity</strong><br />

the passage leading up to this scene includes, for the first time, a<br />

narration focalized on Nina, thus opening up the possibility of the<br />

representation of her desire.<br />

The scene stages a contest of male <strong>and</strong> female desire <strong>and</strong> partially<br />

unsettles the identification of masculinity with power <strong>and</strong> the right to<br />

look, only decisively to reassert it. It begins by emphasizing a male<br />

body as spectacle of power <strong>and</strong> wealth, as an excited Ali tells Nina of<br />

a Malay visitor: ‘And his dress is very brave. I have seen his dress. It<br />

shines! What jewels!’ (AF, 51). 54 Nina <strong>and</strong> her mother compete for the<br />

position of voyeur at a rent in a hanging curtain, <strong>and</strong> Nina is described<br />

in a clichéd sexualized manner:<br />

Nina ... had lifted the conquered curtain <strong>and</strong> now stood in full<br />

light, framed in the dark background of the passage, her lips<br />

slightly parted, her hair in disorder after the exertion, the angry<br />

gleam not yet faded out of her glorious <strong>and</strong> sparkling eyes.<br />

(54)<br />

Resisting her mother’s dem<strong>and</strong> to veil her face (53), <strong>and</strong> matching her<br />

father’s dismissive comment to Dain (‘It is nothing. Some women’)<br />

with her own dismissal (‘It’s only a trader’) (54), she claims the right<br />

to appear <strong>and</strong> to look: ‘She took in at a glance the group of white-clad<br />

lanceman ... <strong>and</strong> her gaze rested curiously on the chief of that imposing<br />

cortège’ (54). This is a description of Nina in the act of looking, yet<br />

it reads as a description of her being seen: the rather weak epithets<br />

‘glorious <strong>and</strong> sparkling’ present her eyes as object of desire <strong>and</strong> reflectors<br />

of light, not as the means of expression of her own desire. Indeed,<br />

the description is prefaced by a ‘reaction shot’: as Dain sees Nina<br />

emerge Almayer is ‘struck by an unexpected change in the expression<br />

of his guest’s countenance’ (54). Following the description of Nina,<br />

there is a description of Dain as she sees him:<br />

The crude light of the lamp shone on the gold embroidery of his<br />

black silk jacket, broke in a thous<strong>and</strong> sparkling rays on the jewelled<br />

hilt of his kriss protruding from under the many folds of the red<br />

sarong gathered into a sash round his waist, <strong>and</strong> played on the<br />

precious stones of the many rings on his dark fingers. He straightened<br />

himself up quickly after the low bow, putting his h<strong>and</strong> with a<br />

graceful ease on the hilt of his heavy short sword ornamented with<br />

brilliantly dyed fringes of horsehair.<br />

(54–5)

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