Conrad and Masculinity

34 Conrad and Masculinity
the passage leading up to this scene includes, for the first time, a
narration focalized on Nina, thus opening up the possibility of the
representation of her desire.
The scene stages a contest of male and female desire and partially
unsettles the identification of masculinity with power and the right to
look, only decisively to reassert it. It begins by emphasizing a male
body as spectacle of power and wealth, as an excited Ali tells Nina of
a Malay visitor: ‘And his dress is very brave. I have seen his dress. It
shines! What jewels!’ (AF, 51). 54 Nina and her mother compete for the
position of voyeur at a rent in a hanging curtain, and Nina is described
in a clichéd sexualized manner:
Nina ... had lifted the conquered curtain and now stood in full
light, framed in the dark background of the passage, her lips
slightly parted, her hair in disorder after the exertion, the angry
gleam not yet faded out of her glorious and sparkling eyes.
(54)
Resisting her mother’s demand to veil her face (53), and matching her
father’s dismissive comment to Dain (‘It is nothing. Some women’)
with her own dismissal (‘It’s only a trader’) (54), she claims the right
to appear and to look: ‘She took in at a glance the group of white-clad
lanceman ... and her gaze rested curiously on the chief of that imposing
cortège’ (54). This is a description of Nina in the act of looking, yet
it reads as a description of her being seen: the rather weak epithets
‘glorious and sparkling’ present her eyes as object of desire and reflectors
of light, not as the means of expression of her own desire. Indeed,
the description is prefaced by a ‘reaction shot’: as Dain sees Nina
emerge Almayer is ‘struck by an unexpected change in the expression
of his guest’s countenance’ (54). Following the description of Nina,
there is a description of Dain as she sees him:
The crude light of the lamp shone on the gold embroidery of his
black silk jacket, broke in a thousand sparkling rays on the jewelled
hilt of his kriss protruding from under the many folds of the red
sarong gathered into a sash round his waist, and played on the
precious stones of the many rings on his dark fingers. He straightened
himself up quickly after the low bow, putting his hand with a
graceful ease on the hilt of his heavy short sword ornamented with
brilliantly dyed fringes of horsehair.
(54–5)