Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 177
model for Rita. Later in the novel, this dummy becomes a substitute
for Rita in the minds of other characters; most crucially, that of M.
George himself. Here is how it is first introduced:
Mills without a word flung himself on the divan and, propped on
his arm, gazed thoughtfully at a distant corner where in the shadow
of a monumental carved wardrobe an articulated dummy without
head or hands but with beautifully shaped limbs composed in a
shrinking attitude seemed to be embarrassed by his stare.
(21)
This dummy functions as a symbolic projection of a male sadistic
fantasy, in a way which would accord with Toril Moi’s conception of
the male gaze. Although it does retain its limbs, which, like Rita’s are
‘beautifully shaped’, it otherwise resembles William Faulkner’s formulation
of such a fantasy in Mosquitoes: ‘a virgin, with no legs to leave
me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me’. 28 What threatens it
is the male gaze, since it appears ‘embarrassed’ by Mills’s stare, and is
later described as ‘lurking in the shadows, pitiful and headless in its
attitude of alarmed chastity’ (48). In one of those odd, indicative
moments of gender instability in Conrad’s fiction, this description
occurs as a gloss on how one man refers to another: Blunt alludes to
Mills (who is present at the time) ‘as though ... he had been as much
a dummy as that other one lurking in the shadows ...’ When M.
George first enters the room, he finds that his ‘eyes kept on straying
towards that corner’ (22). Its status as an object for sadistic fantasy is
apparent from M. George’s later reference to it as ‘that amazing,
decapitated, mutilated dummy of a woman lurking in a corner’ (122).
This reference occurs in a conversation during which he tells Rita that
he supposed she might have been ‘a product of Captain Blunt’s sleeplessness’
(123); that is to say, that he wondered whether Blunt had
simply invented her and the story of her life. Here there is a strong
suggestion that the effect of the narration has been to mutilate Rita’s
identity (at least in M. George’s mind) and to construct her as a
dummy, an object but not a subject.
The first direct appearance of Rita (that is, the first time M. George
sees her himself, as opposed to hearing about her) immediately
connects his tendency to regard her as an aesthetic object with his
difficulty in recognizing her autonomous subjectivity and his compulsive
imagining of her as ‘woman’ (in Teresa de Lauretis’s sense) rather
than as a woman: 29