Conrad and Masculinity

180 Conrad and Masculinity
would-be rapist (Ortega) and M. George’s chivalrous impulse to protect
Rita does not prevent him from gaining a certain illicit excitement from
the situation. His aesthetic fetishization of Rita is a repression of a sadistic
voyeurism, so that the dummy (the mutilated, punished woman)
might be seen as the unconscious of M. George’s desire.
Although Geddes associates Rita’s tendency to freeze into immobility
with the fact that she has been a victim of what he terms Allègre’s
‘Olympian indifference’ he does not seem to recognize the extent to
which M. George is implicated in the reductive and oppressive nature
of an exclusively aesthetic response to another person, especially a
person in difficulty. 34 The dummy acts as a link between M. George
and Allègre, signalling a further complicity. Both treat Rita as an
aesthetic object and both use the dummy as a substitute for her.
Geddes’s discussion of the novel illustrates the way in which this circulation
of Rita as object may extend to the author and to male critics
and readers. Geddes comments on the ‘quality of caught life’ in The
Arrow of Gold, and goes on to quote Conrad’s letter to Sidney Colvin,
where he calls the novel: ‘a study of a woman, prise sur le vif’. He glosses
the French phrase as ‘very life-like’, or, more literally, ‘taken alive’,
‘caught on the quick’. 35 There are worrying connotations here, for did
not Allègre, who so damaged Rita psychologically, ‘take her alive’,
‘catch her on the quick’? Bickley and Hampson defend the novel as
‘not a clumsy piece of autobiographical writing but rather a serious
attempt to create an aesthetic object’. 36 Like Geddes’s comment, and
the words from Conrad’s letter, this would seem to implicate the
author, and by extension the male reader, in the treatment and
mistreatment of Rita, her construction by men as an aesthetic object
for their own pleasure, and the pleasure or envy of other men.
The dummy may be contrasted with another marginal, but symbolically
significant, female figure: the girl taking the part of Night in the
carnival masque in Chapter 1 of Part I. Subjected to the male gaze, this
girl is not shrinking, motionless and embarrassed, but challenging,
mobile and a cause of embarrassment to the male observer:
They filed past my table; the Night noticed perhaps my fixed gaze
and throwing her body forward out of the wriggling chain shot out
at me a slender tongue like a pink dart. I was not prepared for this,
not even to the extent of an appreciative ‘Trés joli,’ before she wriggled
and hopped away. But having been thus distinguished I could
do no less than follow her with my eyes.
(9)