Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 183
the fact that the scene of night-time narration precedes M. George’s
first meeting with Rita serves to emphasize that what he is initiated
into is the homosocial exchange system of patriarchy. Although the
passion which Rita awakes in him is, in one sense, fresh, it is in
another sense firmly inscribed in the always-already existing discourse
of desire. M. George sees the dummy (a substitute for Rita) before he
sees Rita, so that the relationship of substitution is reversed: the
dummy occupies a subject-position between the three men into which
Rita is then inserted. Robert Hampson interprets Rita’s behaviour
partly in terms of a ‘morbid psychology’, arising from her childhood
trauma at the hands of Ortega. He further suggests that Allègre’s
actions have produced in her what R. D. Laing terms a ‘false-self
system’. This interpretation is valid in its own humanist terms, but I
prefer to develop Hampson’s suggestive comment that ‘the art-world
of the novel [its emphasis on the aesthetic aspect of perception] acts
as a metonym for European bourgeois society: its alienation, its reification
of others, its exchange-relations’. 38 Since gender was an
important factor in all these processes, Rita’s responses to her treatment
as an aesthetic object may usefully be interpreted in terms of a
feminist and gender politics rather than a humanist psychology. Such
an interpretation would suggest, not that she possesses a ‘false-self’
and therefore needs to acquire a ‘true’ one, but that her mode of selfassertion
in a patriarchal context is necessarily through the evasion of
a ‘true’ self, since such a self (socially constructed) could only internalize
her own objectification. That is, the system of
exchange-relations and its discourse of reification interpellates a ‘true
self’ which is subjected to the ideology of aestheticization. What
Hampson, quoting Paul Wiley, terms Rita’s ‘hysterical gesture[s]’ of
desperate self-transformation may be interpreted according to a feminist
understanding of hysteria and madness as resistance to an
oppressive construction of female subjectivity. 39 Hampson interestingly
points to M. George’s experience of being treated as an
instrument or object by Mills and Blunt as parallel to the treatment of
Rita by Allègre. 40 M. George’s slightly ambiguous role in the gender
system of the novel is, in realist terms, a product of his youth.
However, it also illustrates Kaja Silverman’s observation that ‘we all
function simultaneously as subject and object’ (MS, 144) and Steven
Neale’s emphasis on the mobility of fantasy identification.
M. George’s intense fantasy investment in the Rita whom Blunt
discursively ‘creates’ for him aligns his subjectivity with the male
subject who looks at and exchanges the female object. Yet his boyish