Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 169
within Conrad’s fiction, of awareness of the process of production and
of ‘its class content under capitalism’ (PU, 215). Jameson’s analysis is
very revealing of Conrad’s use of the sea, paradoxically seen both as a
place of work and as an escape from the social world which that work
organizes, as a microcosm of society and as an alternative to it.
However, the politics of the visual, of distance and of aestheticization
involve gender as well as class, as many feminist writers have argued.
One way in which the visual has been related to gender is by the claim
that heterosexual male sexuality, as modern Western society shapes it,
is marked by a wish to look which is also a wish to dominate. This
claim has both sociological and psychological bases. The analysis of
‘images of women’ in the visual arts, the media and pornography,
combined with the knowledge of the extent of male violence and
discrimination, provides a strong basis for the argument that:
Whether it is a man looking at women on the street, the male
artist’s gaze at the model, or the male audience for a blue movie,
women do not share in the culture of looking in the same way ...
This gender difference in who has the power to look and at whom
is embedded in cultural forms. 12
At the same time a theory of looking as a controlling or sadistic male
activity can be evolved from the Freudian concept of ‘scopophilia’.
Feminist accounts draw on Freud’s theories of childhood voyeurism
and the castration complex, while criticizing Freud’s ‘law of the selfsame’:
his reading of female development in terms of male
development. 13 Thus Toril Moi suggests that ‘the gaze enacts the
voyeur’s desire for sadistic power, in which the object of the gaze is
cast as its passive, masochistic, feminine victim.’ 14 One feminist
reaction to this, and to the inadequacy with which Freud deals with
the desire of girls and women, has been to assert the radically different
structure of women’s desire, as does Luce Irigaray, stressing the
other senses:
Investment in the look is not as privileged in women as in men.
More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a
distance, and maintains a distance. In our culture the predominance
of the look over smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought
about an impoverishment of bodily relations. The moment the
look dominates, the body loses its materiality. 15