Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 179
It is presumably on the basis of such responses that Gary Geddes sees
M. George as set apart from ‘the false world of culture’ by his
‘genuinely artistic sensitivity’, and claims that M. George and his
sailing companion Dominic ‘are both artists in the purest sense,
natural men whose sensitivity enables them to perceive the form and
the beauty that may underlie the commonest experience or enterprise’.
31 Yet as an emotional or human response to Rita’s statement M.
George’s line of thought is woefully inadequate. He goes on to say
vaguely ‘Yes, you ought to come along with us for a trip’ (149), but the
proposal is clearly not a serious response to Rita’s original statement,
which was essentially an expression of constraint and an appeal for
help.
Laura Mulvey’s distinction between sadistic voyeurism and idealizing
fetishism corresponds to the Manichean overt structure of The
Arrow of Gold noted by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. 32 On this scheme the
dummy serves as the object of sadistic voyeuristic looking for Blunt
and for Ortega (who has pursued Rita with savage violence since her
childhood), whereas fetishism is the strategy of the inexperienced and
idealistic M. George and is expressed in the aestheticized images of
Rita. However, Mulvey identifies voyeurism and fetishism as two
responses to the same male anxiety and my own argument is that
these two apparently opposed responses to Rita are complementary.
M. George’s aestheticizing denies Rita ‘the forms of actual life’ (66)
and the sadistic lurks beneath the idealizing. The connection is
implied by M. George’s realization of fellowship with Ortega: ‘She
penetrated me, my head was full of her ... And his head, too, I thought
suddenly with a side glance at my companion’ (274). 33
The aestheticizing aspect of M. George’s response reaches its peak
during a scene where he is in a locked room with Rita, defending her
from the manic attentions of Ortega. He admits that: ‘All I wanted was
to keep her in her pose, excited and still, sitting up with her hair loose,
softly glowing, the dark brown fur making a wonderful contrast with the
white lace on her breast ... I cared for nothing but that sublimely
aesthetic impression’ (304). This moment, when M. George most explicitly
evokes the aesthetic, is also the moment when his language is most
sexually suggestive. This applies not only to ‘excited’ and ‘glowing’ but
also to the ‘dark brown fur’ which, placed in contrast to the white lace
associated with her breast, suggests a mapping onto the female body of
the duality of sexualized and pure woman, in the form of the ‘dark’ genitals
contrasted to the white breast. The situation here is also highly
charged with sexual sadism, since Rita is under threat from a violent