Conrad and Masculinity

52 Conrad and Masculinity
marriageable woman: he feels disgraced partly because ‘she had been
promised to another man’ (30). Matara’s obsessional pursuit of her
suggests the operation of unacknowledged sexual desires within this
patriarchal system of control. Karain’s desire for Matara’s sister might
seem to produce a disruption of this attempt violently to enforce patriarchal
rights, since it leads him to save her life. However, his action
might also be seen as the expression of his desire for his male friend,
displaced onto the sister, since the spirit or vision of the sister, which
haunts Karain up until the killing of Matara, is then replaced by the
ghost of Matara. Perhaps Karain saves Matara’s sister because her death
would have removed the woman who functioned as object of shared
desire, displacing and denying the desire between him and Matara.
The subsequent male bonding between Karain and the three
Englishmen, presented as potentially transcending cultural difference,
culminates in the scene of narration. This bond is reaffirmed by Hollis
as he is about to present Karain with a sixpence, as a magical charm to
protect him from the ghost of his murdered friend:
‘Every one of us,’ he said, with pauses that somehow were more
offensive than his words—‘every one of us, you’ll admit, has been
haunted by some woman . . . And . . . as to friends . . . dropped by
the way . . . Well! . . . ask yourselves . . .’
(47)
This remark oddly shifts what is presented as ‘literal’ in Karain’s story
into the metaphorical, so that the supernatural (or neurotic) haunting
of Karain by the image of Matara’s sister (succeeded by a haunting by
Matara’s ghost) becomes the colloquial ‘haunting’ of romantic desire,
while Karain’s ‘dropping’ (killing) of his friend becomes a social dropping.
This naturalizes obsession and aggression as part of a shared
universal masculinity.
The descriptions of Karain during the course of the story are, to
borrow a phrase from Richard Dyer’s description of a photograph of
Humphrey Bogart, ‘hysterically phallic’. 19 He is constantly associated
with guns, swords, knives, spikes, columns and erect male figures:
His followers thronged round him; above his head the broad blades
of their spears made a spiked halo of iron points, and they hedged
him from humanity by the shimmer of silks, the gleam of weapons,
the excited and respectful hum of eager voices.
(10)