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Conrad and Masculinity

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Vision, Power <strong>and</strong> Homosocial Exchange 181<br />

Carnival is traditionally a time for the licensed transgression of<br />

normal social <strong>and</strong> sexual roles, <strong>and</strong> this passing girl offers an image of<br />

female sexuality which is the inverse of the masochistic male fantasy<br />

represented by the dummy. The mask which she wears both invites<br />

<strong>and</strong> rejects the male gaze, since it covers the upper half of her face,<br />

protecting her identity, while leaving exposed ‘her uncovered mouth<br />

<strong>and</strong> chin’, which, M. George notes, ‘suggested refined prettiness’ (9).<br />

Instead of shrinking back before the power of M. George’s voyeuristic<br />

gaze, she throws her body forward <strong>and</strong> sticks out her tongue in a<br />

mocking but sexually provocative gesture. If M. George is abashed,<br />

however, Blunt knows how to treat such behaviour with an appropriately<br />

patronizing response. Faced with the same provocation, he ‘with<br />

great presence of mind chucked her under the chin’ (9), at the same<br />

time flashing his white teeth like a villain out of melodrama, a habit<br />

he also indulges with the dummy (122) <strong>and</strong> with Rita (148). Rita too<br />

reacts to M. George’s fixed gaze: after her quarrel with Blunt, <strong>and</strong> the<br />

latter’s departure, the first words she says to M. George are ‘Don’t stare<br />

at me’ (150).<br />

The scene of the night-time narration is a scene in which the idea<br />

of a woman as a visually-defined object of desire is circulated among<br />

men. M. George envies Mills <strong>and</strong> Blunt, not because they know Rita,<br />

but because they have seen her: ‘For these two men had seen her, while<br />

to me she was only being “presented,” elusively, in vanishing words,<br />

in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar voice’ (31). In this scene Rita is<br />

persistently imagined as a figure in a picture, ‘a feminine figure which<br />

to my imagination had only a floating outline ... She was being<br />

presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne’ (31). The recurrence of<br />

the idea of Rita as being ‘presented’ to M. George by the other men is<br />

also significant, suggesting the circulation of an image of the female<br />

among several male psyches, with a combination of competitiveness<br />

<strong>and</strong> sharing. What is being passed around among them is both an<br />

object of desire <strong>and</strong> a possession, as is made apparent at the first<br />

mention of her:<br />

Mills was also emphatic in his reply ...<br />

‘I am not an easy enthusiast where women are concerned, but<br />

she was without doubt the most admirable find of his amongst all<br />

the priceless items he had accumulated in that house.’<br />

(23)<br />

An object acquires economic value if it is both scarce <strong>and</strong> in dem<strong>and</strong>.

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