Conrad and Masculinity

176 Conrad and Masculinity
competition between different viewers, introduce an economy of the
gaze (as in Mulvey’s tripartite structure). When looking is an activity
shared among men looking at a woman or at a feminized object,
matters of power, desire, fantasy and control are inescapably present.
I now turn to look more closely at one of Conrad’s late fictions in
order to consider such structures of looking and to illustrate the gendering
of the visual. It is worth pausing, however, to note that my last
sentence is itself firmly within the discourse of vision as knowledge or
mastery: the phrases ‘to look more closely’ and ‘to illustrate’ rest on a
model of criticism or interpretation as the result of visual scrutiny on
the part of the critic, and as an invitation to visual scrutiny on the part
of the reader. The same would be true of many alternative phrasings: to
examine, to illuminate, to offer some insights into, to review, to reflect
on, to reveal. Literary criticism has tended to figure texts as objects of
the critic’s inquiring gaze. When writing as a male critic about gender
issues in the work of a male author, one must necessarily be concerned
with the question of one’s own participation in the economy of text
and interpretation. In this context reflexivity (a sustained awareness of
one’s own writing practice) is integral to understanding.
Conrad’s late novel The Arrow of Gold: A Story between Two Notes
(1919) contains a curious scene of dramatized narration, mixed with
conversation (20–61), in which three men, Mills, Blunt and the young
protagonist (referred to as Monsieur George), sit up together most of
the night, and Blunt tells the story of the life of Rita de Lastaola, the
novel’s central female character. She is referred to as the epitome of
charm, beauty and sexual desirability. In one corner of the room in
which they sit a tailor’s dummy, without head or hands, cowers in
what seems like a posture of embarrassment or fear. From time to time
the eyes of the men stray towards this dummy. The visual plays a
central role in the novel, and in the male attitudes which it explores.
In particular the denial of autonomous subjectivity to Rita involves
the visual fixing of her by the male look masquerading as the gaze.
Related to this are various other responses: an idea of her as an object,
in particular some sort of art object; a repression of her voice, manifested
in a tendency to ignore what she says in favour of
contemplating her appearance; an emphasis on her stillness, lack of
movement; a denial that she exists at all outside the mind of the male
observer.
The theme of voyeurism and the gaze is decisively established in
this episode of night narration. The tailor’s dummy, we learn, had
been used by Allègre, the painter who was Rita’s lover, as a substitute