Conrad and Masculinity

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange 185
past, of all asides, disquisitions, and explanations addressed directly
to the friend of his childhood’ (4). Thus a female reader is notionally
implied, hinting at a reversal, in the narrative frame, of the hierarchy
of vision and power in the main body of the text. While Rita is
narrated to M. George before she is seen by him (a narration which
installs her as the object of male looks that hesitate between fetishism
and voyeurism), M. George himself is called into textual existence by
a women’s desire to see. Feminist film critics have identified the
exclusion of the desiring look of the woman as central to patriarchal
structures of looking. Here that desiring look appears, in a crucial yet
also marginal location, as the instigating moment of the text yet set
aside in a ‘note’. The concluding ‘second note’ reveals no more about
this excluded female reader, but admits a further excision in that M.
George’s account of his affair with Rita is omitted and replaced by the
sententious generalizations of the editor: ‘Whether love in its entirety
has, speaking generally, the same elementary meaning for women as
for men, is very doubtful’ (337). Conrad fails to develop the possibilities
for a radical revision of the structures of gender exclusion which
are present in ‘Heart of Darkness’. Indeed, as Hampson notes, the
editor’s address to ‘those who know women’ in the second note (338)
seems to imply a male reader, so that ‘the editor has suppressed the
female addressee and appropriated the revised text for a male audience’.
41 The final chapter will examine how this male homosocial
exchange interacts with the economic and psychic structures of
imperialism (with the visual again playing a crucial role) in a novel
which surrounds masculinity with philosophical scepticism and
sexual ambiguity.