Conrad and Masculinity

54 Conrad and Masculinity
We remember the faces, the eyes, the voices . . . and we seem to feel
the touch of friendly brown hands that, after one short grasp,
return to rest on a chased hilt.
(4)
In terms of the phallic, but also in terms of women. Gayle Rubin
proposes the complementarity of circulating women and circulating
the phallus:
In the cycle of exchange manifested by the Oedipal complex, the
phallus passes through the medium of women from one man to
another ... women go one way, the phallus the other.
(TW, 192)
Matara’s sister facilitates both the homosocial exchange between
Karain and Matara and its extension via the act of narration to the
Englishmen, in that the story of her beauty becomes a token of
exchange between Karain and them. He says that she was ‘ravishingly’
beautiful, but does not describe that beauty, whereas male bodies are
extensively described. In the token-exchange scene, where, in
exchange for the story of a beautiful woman Karain receives the image
of a powerful woman (Queen Victoria) in the form of a coin, the male
body is eroticized and aestheticized through this same tension
between shared maleness and cultural or racial difference:
One must have seen his innate splendour, one must have known
him before—looked at him then .... His dark head and bronze torso
appeared above the tarnished slab of wood, gleaming and still as if
cast in metal.
(26–7)
They looked close into one another’s eyes. Those of Karain stared
in a lost glance, but Hollis’s seemed to grow darker and looked out
masterful and compelling. They were in violent contrast together—
one motionless and the colour of bronze, the other dazzling white
and lifting his arms, where the powerful muscles rolled slightly
under a skin that gleamed like satin. Jackson moved near with the
air of a man closing up to a chum in a tight place.
(50)
We have earlier been told that Karain was obsessed with Queen