Conrad and Masculinity

170 Conrad and Masculinity
Questions of looking, gender and desire as they bear on cultural artefacts
have been developed most extensively in the field of film theory,
particularly in relation to the structures of looking constructed by the
cinematic apparatus, by the use of the camera and by the manipulation
of narrative and image. A recurrent point of reference and
departure for such theory has been Laura Mulvey’s article ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which argues that:
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has
been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining
male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is
styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are
simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance
coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said
to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. 16
Mulvey’s paradigm is psychoanalytical. She sees pleasure in looking
(scopophilia) as basic to cinema and as divisible into ‘pleasure in using
another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight’ and
narcissistic ‘identification with the image seen’. She basically follows
Freud in seeing these two (desire and identification) as in tension,
although ‘interacting and overlaying each other’. 17 Mulvey argues
that mainstream cinema displays ‘the woman as icon ... for the gaze
and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look’ but that
these images of women also provoke castration anxiety. 18 Filmic structures
represent two unconscious reactions to this anxiety: fetishistic
scopophilia (disavowal of castration), associated with the static, the
aesthetic and the idealization of women, and voyeuristic scopophilia
(an investigative, controlling response), associated with narrative,
denigration of women and sadism. Subsequent critiques and revisions
of Mulvey’s article (by herself as well as others) have focused on such
issues as its neglect of the female spectator and her pleasure in
looking, its failure to consider gay and lesbian desire, its conflation of
the looks of the spectator, the camera and the male protagonist, and
on the validity or otherwise of its psychoanalytical basis. 19 Certain of
these critiques and elaborations of Mulvey’s account are particularly
helpful for an analysis of the relationship of masculinity to the visual
in Conrad’s fiction.
Steve Neale distinguishes between a general and a gender-specific
application of the Lacanian concept of castration: