Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 35
This description anticipates those of the Malay chief, the eponymous
hero of the story ‘Karain’, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
In particular, the rather insistent allusions to the sword suggest
fetishization, a need to reassert the phallic. Masculinity is then overtly
stressed: ‘Nina, hesitating on the threshold, saw an erect lithe figure
of medium height with a breadth of shoulder suggesting great power’
(AF, 55). When it comes to Dain’s face the idea of the feminine is
explicitly introduced as a supposed racial feature, but only after
having been equally explicitly ‘corrected’ in advance:
a face full of determination and expressing a reckless good-humour,
not devoid, however, of some dignity. The squareness of lower jaw,
the full red lips, the mobile nostrils, and the proud carriage of the
head gave the impression of a being half-savage, untamed, perhaps
cruel, and corrected the liquid softness of the almost feminine eye,
that general characteristic of the race.
(55)
Here femininity is safely distanced by projection onto a racial Other.
Nevertheless, if it is the impression of the ‘savage’ that protects Dain’s
masculinity, that protection is partial: is ‘half-savage’ equivalent to
half-masculine? Steve Neale notes that ‘within the image ... the male
body can signify castration and lack, can hence function as the object
of voyeuristic looking, insofar as it is marked as such’, one sort of
marking occurring when the male body is ‘specified as racially or
culturally other’. On the other hand, ‘the male body can be fetishised
inasmuch as it figures within a fetishistic image or inasmuch as it
signifies masculinity, and, hence, possession of the phallus, the
absence of lack’ (SD, 130). The Lacanian concept of Symbolic castration
(the self as constituted by lack) has affinities with Bhabha’s sense
of otherness and hybridity within the self. Objections to Lacan’s
gender-specific terminology will be considered in a later chapter, but
for the present I want to allow Neale’s Lacanian assumption that both
men and women are subject to ‘Symbolic castration’. His argument,
then, is that since ‘Symbolic castration is distinct from and irreducible
to the Symbolic specification of sexual difference’, there is a considerable
degree of mobility and variety in the symbolic meaning of images
of the male body (SD, 130). His suggestion that a male body marked
as ‘racially or culturally other’ can thereby ‘signify castration’ is highly
suggestive in relation to the presentation of Dain, but needs refining.
As Bongie observes, Dain belongs to the traditional world of nine-