Conrad and Masculinity

182 Conrad and Masculinity
So the form of male sexuality which constitutes a woman as a priceless
commodity requires that she be seen as unusual, or preferably
unique, and that she be desired by other men. The second requirement
makes voyeurism integral to this sexual complex. In order to be
sure of the value of his possession, the male needs other males to look
on, and envy him. Blunt, who is in pursuit of Rita, betrays this need
by his impulse to impress Rita’s desirability on Mills and M. George
and in passages such as the following:
‘An intimacy,’ began Mr. Blunt, with an extremely refined grimness
of tone, ‘an intimacy with the heiress of Mr. Allègre on the part of
. . . on my part, well, it isn’t exactly . . . it’s open . . . well, I leave it
to you, what does it look like?’
‘Is there anybody looking on?’ Mills let fall, gently, through his
kindly lips.
‘Not actually, perhaps, at this moment. But I don’t need to tell a
man of the world, like you, that such things cannot remain unseen.
And that they are, well, compromising, because of the mere fact of
the fortune.’
... [Mills replies:]
‘Whereas the woman herself is, so to speak, priceless.’
Mr. Blunt muttered the word ‘Obviously.’
(59)
There is a certain irony here, in that Blunt, so concerned to protect his
good name from the imputation of fortune-hunting, betrays the fact
that his desire for Rita is an economic desire, for the possession of a
rare commodity. The antithesis between the ‘fortune’ and the ‘priceless’
woman is based on the contrast between that which has a price,
and that which doesn’t. But the word ‘priceless’ is incurably contaminated
by its use for objects which are beyond price only in the sense
of being extremely valuable, and which obey the laws of supply and
demand. Blunt returns elsewhere in the novel to his unconscious
concern with voyeurism. During a quarrel with Rita he refers to M.
George as ‘our audience’ (147). Indeed, this concern with the third
party is encoded in one of his habits of speech, which M. George
describes as ‘his particular trick of speaking of any third person as of a
lay figure’ (148), a comment which oddly recalls the dummy.
M. George presents himself as the representative of ‘a perfect freshness
of sensations and a refreshing ignorance’ (31) and Hampson
interprets The Arrow of Gold as a novel of initiation into passion. 37 Yet