Encountering the Other: ‘Race’ and Gender in ‘The Lagoon’ and ‘Karain’

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).