Abstract
At the centre of Almayer’s Folly is the search for identity of Nina, the child of a Dutch father and an Asian mother. In a world which is represented as polarised along racial lines, Nina chooses her mother’s tradition, rather than her father’s, and this decision is apparently fixed by her choice of Dain, a ‘Malay chief’ (AF, 64) from Bali, as her husband. Just before she leaves with Dain, however, Nina is given a quick lesson in sexual politics by her mother. To be more specific, she asks her mother what she must do to exercise ‘power’ (AF, 152) over Dain. In the following chapter, when she is re-united with Dain, she shows how well she has learned the lesson. She gives him what the narrator calls ‘the look of woman’s surrender’ (AF, 172):
She drew back her head and fastened her eyes on his in one of those long looks that are a woman’s most terrible weapon; a look that is more stirring than the closest touch, and more dangerous than the thrust of a dagger, because it also whips the soul out of the body, but leaves the body alive and helpless, to be swayed here and there by the capricious tempests of passion and desire … bringing terrible defeat in the delirious uplifting of accomplished conquest. (AF, 171)
This passage is part of the novel’s extended consideration of the ambiguities of power and powerlessness (in terms of both sexuality and the complicated colonial politics of the area).
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Notes
Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 18.
I have discussed Almayer’s Folly in relation to Schopenhauer and Victorian erotophobia in Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. See also J.D. Patterson, ‘The Representation of Love in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: 1895–1915’, D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University (1984). In addition, I am grateful to Dr Zawiah Yahya for drawing my attention to the way in which the representation of Nina draws on and repeats conventional European representations of Malay women. As she argued in her paper, ‘Of White Man and Brown Woman in Colonialist Discourse’, given at the 34th International Congress of Asian and North African Studies, Hong Kong 1993: ‘Western discourse has constructed the oriental woman as a relentless and perversely sexual animal’.
For the femme fatale, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the ‘Fin de Siècle’ (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 144–68,
and Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late Victorian ‘Femme Fatale’ (London: Macmillan, 1992); for the figuring of the colonial space as female and the situating of women and non-Europeans as part of nature not culture,
see Helen Carr, ‘Woman/Indian: “The American” and His Others’, in Francis Barker et al., Europe and Its Others (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), 14–27; for an exploration of such figuring in Conrad’s work, see Padmini Mongia, ‘Empire, Narrative, and the Feminine in Lord Jim and “Heart of Darkness”’, in Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles, and Wieslaw Krajka (eds), Contexts for Conrad (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993), 135–50. See also Susan Jones, Conrad and Women (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 10, for Aissa as femme fatale.
Joanna de Groot, ‘“Sex” and “Race”: The Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century, in Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989).
Conrad wrote to Cunninghame Graham (8 February 1899) that ‘Fraternity means nothing unless the Cain-Abel business’ (CL2, 159). Kristeva has observed that ‘the assertion “all men are brothers” has to include “that portion of conflict, hatred, violence and destructiveness” that is part of the reality of “fratricidal closeness”’ (J. Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 27).
‘Ghost-writing (in) “Karain”’. I am indebted to Conroy’s paper for certain points in my discussion of ‘Karain’. For other recent work on ‘Karain’, see Erdinast Vulcan and Andrew Michael Roberts. See also Mark A. Wollaeger, Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 42–51.
Richard Ambrosini, Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 75. Ambrosini here fuses two distinct issues: (1) the narrator’s use of theatrical references; (2) the theatrical quality of Karain’s power. The former is obviously revealing about the narrator; the latter relates to the nature of leadership in Malay culture.
The scene of reading, after all, involved a newspaper account relating to ‘the intelligence of various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago’ (TU, 3). Curiously, although Karain has been involved in anti-colonial struggles against both the Dutch and the Spanish, he seems to have a blind spot towards the English. The narrator suggests that he seems to identify Victoria with memories of his dead mother (TU, 13). His acceptance of the charm with its Jubilee sixpence again might suggest that Karain identifies with English colonised subjecthood even as he buys weapons to resist the Dutch. (In the same way, Karain might be read as rejecting the ‘oriental’ femme fatale but subjecting himself to an idealised image of woman, in the shape of Queen Victoria.) See Linda Dryden, Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Bongie, for example, reads this episode as revealing ‘a condescending attitude towards native superstition’. See Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1991), 160; hereafter cited as EM.
For an analysis of the description of the Strand, see Robert Hampson, ‘“Topographical Mysteries”: Conrad and London’, in Gene M. Moore (ed.), Conrad’s Cities: Essays for Hans van Marle (Amsterdam/Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 1992), 159–74, esp.161–3; also Wollaeger, 42–5. Wollaeger is particularly good on the narrator as a man ‘consistently unwilling to pursue the implications of his own words’ (47) and resistent to ‘unsettling redefinitions of the real’ (48).
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Civilisation and National Cultures’, in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 278.
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© 2000 Robert Hampson
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Hampson, R. (2000). Encountering the Other: ‘Race’ and Gender in ‘The Lagoon’ and ‘Karain’. In: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598003_6
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