Conrad and Masculinity

36 Conrad and Masculinity
teenth-century exoticism, being one of those ‘sovereign figures who
conjure up the image of what Conrad would much later refer to ... as
those “real chieftain[s] in the books of a hundred years ago”’ (EM,
151). Dain represents the nostalgic (European) fantasy of a heroic
masculinity untrammelled by bureaucratic modernity. He signifies
both the possession of the phallus (that is, a fantasy of male power)
and its absence (the Other within the self). His racial otherness allows
both sides of this polarity to be rhetorically indulged.
Up to the point where Dain is described in these ambivalent terms,
the scene has employed a mobility of viewpoint. We see Almayer
observing Dain looking at Nina, then we see Nina looking at Dain and
see her as she is perceived by him and then we see Dain as perceived
by Nina. The effect might be understood on analogy with the concept
of ‘suture’ in film theory, or ‘the constant reconstruction of the spectator/subject
through each successive image of the film’. 55 In cinema,
this is often effected though the ‘shot-reverse shot structure, which
establishes the optical point-of-view of characters within the fictional
space of the film at moments ... when they are looking at one
another’. 56 The concentration on the visual appearance of the characters,
combined with the shifting point of view, might be seen as
effecting a suture: constructing the reader via a series of identifications
with the looks of different characters. The mobility of the focalization
would thus draw on the fluidity of fantasy identification claimed by
Neale, who cites Constance Penley’s argument that in fantasy ‘all the
possible roles in the narrative are available to the subject’. 57 However,
it is precisely the instability of the location of the look in this scene
which distributes identification according to gender, staging an
effacement of the woman’s desire even as it evokes it. The description
of Nina hesitates between evoking the inception of her desire and
fetishizing her as desired object. Her active assertion of her right to
look in defiance of her mother’s attempt to restrain her paradoxically
serves only to heighten a conventional eroticization, since the struggle
leaves her with ‘lips slightly parted’ and ‘hair in disorder’. This
creates for a male reader a potential identification with the desire
produced in Dain, while inviting the female reader to identify with
Nina on the terms described by Mary Ann Doane:
For the female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the
image – she is the image. Given the closeness of this relationship,
the female spectator’s desire can be described only in terms of a
kind of narcissism – the female look demands a becoming. 58