Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 181
Carnival is traditionally a time for the licensed transgression of
normal social and sexual roles, and this passing girl offers an image of
female sexuality which is the inverse of the masochistic male fantasy
represented by the dummy. The mask which she wears both invites
and rejects the male gaze, since it covers the upper half of her face,
protecting her identity, while leaving exposed ‘her uncovered mouth
and chin’, which, M. George notes, ‘suggested refined prettiness’ (9).
Instead of shrinking back before the power of M. George’s voyeuristic
gaze, she throws her body forward and sticks out her tongue in a
mocking but sexually provocative gesture. If M. George is abashed,
however, Blunt knows how to treat such behaviour with an appropriately
patronizing response. Faced with the same provocation, he ‘with
great presence of mind chucked her under the chin’ (9), at the same
time flashing his white teeth like a villain out of melodrama, a habit
he also indulges with the dummy (122) and with Rita (148). Rita too
reacts to M. George’s fixed gaze: after her quarrel with Blunt, and the
latter’s departure, the first words she says to M. George are ‘Don’t stare
at me’ (150).
The scene of the night-time narration is a scene in which the idea
of a woman as a visually-defined object of desire is circulated among
men. M. George envies Mills and Blunt, not because they know Rita,
but because they have seen her: ‘For these two men had seen her, while
to me she was only being “presented,” elusively, in vanishing words,
in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar voice’ (31). In this scene Rita is
persistently imagined as a figure in a picture, ‘a feminine figure which
to my imagination had only a floating outline ... She was being
presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne’ (31). The recurrence of
the idea of Rita as being ‘presented’ to M. George by the other men is
also significant, suggesting the circulation of an image of the female
among several male psyches, with a combination of competitiveness
and sharing. What is being passed around among them is both an
object of desire and a possession, as is made apparent at the first
mention of her:
Mills was also emphatic in his reply ...
‘I am not an easy enthusiast where women are concerned, but
she was without doubt the most admirable find of his amongst all
the priceless items he had accumulated in that house.’
(23)
An object acquires economic value if it is both scarce and in demand.