Conrad and Masculinity

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Masculinity and the Body:
Typhoon, The Secret Agent
The first sentence of Conrad’s story ‘Typhoon’ informs us that
‘Captain MacWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy
that, in the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart
of his mind’ (T, 3). This description not only attributes meaning to the
body, but seems to heal the mind–body split by making the body the
exact correlate or transparent signifier for the mind. We are then
given eight sentences of detailed physical description, as if
MacWhirr’s body were the key fact about the story to follow. However,
this description immediately creates problems for the opening claim
of transparent correspondence. For one thing, what his face accurately
reveals about his mind is, specifically, nothing in particular, since it
presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had
no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary,
irresponsive, and unruffled.
(3)
Furthermore, the very details of Conrad’s description seem a challenge
to the reader’s ingenuity. For example MacWhirr has hair on his face
which ‘resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of
the lip ... no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed,
when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks’ (3). If his
physiognomy is the exact counterpart of his mind, then what mental
attribute corresponds to fiery gleams passing over the surface of his
cheeks? Lively romantic imagination or fiery passions might come to
mind, but these are precisely the qualities which MacWhirr lacks to an
exaggerated and comic extent, since this is a portrait of a man whose
strengths and weaknesses are the result of a total lack of imagination.
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