Conrad and Masculinity

184 Conrad and Masculinity
admiration for the experience and self-assurance of Mills and Blunt hints
at a slightly different role. He remarks: ‘I knew very well that I was
utterly insignificant in these men’s eyes’ [emphasis added], continuing:
Yet my attention was not checked by that knowledge. It’s true
they were talking of a woman, but I was yet at the age when this
subject by itself is not of overwhelming interest. My imagination
would have been more stimulated probably by the adventures and
fortunes of a man. What kept my interest from flagging was Mr.
Blunt himself. The play of the white gleams of his smile round the
suspicion of grimness of his tone fascinated me like a moral
incongruity.
(31)
A little earlier M. George has been impatiently hanging around in the
streets hoping to meet Mills, rather as if he were in love with him and
he is chaffed by his companions who ‘wanted to know whether she,
whom I expected to see, was dark or fair’ (11). As elsewhere in
Conrad’s work, the conventional social construction of masculinity is
unsettled when there is a suggestion of desire between men unmediated
by the exchange of women. However, Blunt’s narrative of vision
and desire relocates M. George’s subject position from that of the
object of the gaze (‘in these men’s eyes’) to that of its subject and redirects
his imagination and desire from men to women, or rather to a
relationship with men via a woman.
Given the prominence of voyeurism and the aestheticization of the
woman in The Arrow of Gold, it is intriguing that the novel is notionally
based on ‘a pile of manuscript which was apparently meant for
the eye of one woman only’ (3), although this manuscript has been
edited by the frame-narrator, whose identity and sex remain unspecified.
Indeed, the very existence of the text is the result of a woman’s
desire to see, if not a man, then at least the textual record of his life:
‘she wrote to him: “... I confess to you I should like to know the incidents
on the road which has led you to where you are now.” ... He
succumbed’ (3–4). The shared male discourse of ‘Heart of Darkness’ is
emphasized by the allusions, during the course of Marlow’s narrative,
to his circle of male listeners and their possible responses.
Tantalizingly, the equivalent allusions to M. George’s relations with
his intended female reader have been removed by the frame-narrator,
who tells us that: ‘In the form in which it [M. George’s story] is
presented here it has been pruned of all allusions to their common