Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 201
experience which gave him the idea of her character, he stresses both
idleness and vision:
It was at her, whom I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and
with a most sustained attention. This attention originated in idleness
for which I have a natural talent ... Having got a clear line of
sight I naturally (being idle) continued to look at the girl through
all the second part of the programme.
(xv–xvi)
Unlike Heyst, however, Conrad was not stirred into action by the sight
of this girl being pinched on the arm:
I believe that those people left town the next day.
Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big café ... I did
not go across to find out. It was my perfect idleness that had
invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to
destroy it by any superfluous exertion.
(xvii)
Here Conrad sets up a homosocial relationship between himself and
Heyst, with Lena (elided with her real life model) as an object of
exchange between himself and his male character: ‘I let her go with
Heyst, I won’t say without a pang but certainly without misgivings’
(xvii).
While homosocial exchanges structure many of Conrad’s fictions,
Victory is unusual in making relatively overt reference to homosexuality.
The relationship between ‘Mr. Jones’ and Martin Ricardo is a
combination of criminal partnership, feudal master–servant bond
and barely denied sexual attachment. Jones’s hatred and fear of
women and his murderous jealousy when Ricardo pursues Lena are
fairly obvious indicators of his homosexuality, though the portrait is
much distorted by a homophobia which can represent same-sex
desire among men only negatively, as misogyny and a male couple
only as a criminal partnership. Ricardo pursues women but shows a
Sweeney-like inclination to murder them: ‘Take ’em by the throat or
chuck ’em under the chin is all one to me—almost’ (166) (one might
recall Blunt’s gesture of chucking a girl under the chin in The Arrow
of Gold). He claims to have no feelings, but he clearly does have
strong feelings about Jones. These are apparent from his tedious
idealization of Jones, but are made most explicit during his long