Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 187
The duality of black and white here is matched by the way in which
she is both enthroned in the chair and thus elevated as an image of
purity (that is, fetishized) and framed in the doorway as an object of
surveillance and desire (that is, subject to voyeuristic looking). In the
later death-bed scene death and sexual desire are explicitly juxtaposed,
placing it in a long and well-documented tradition of images of
dead or dying beautiful women. In her study of death, art and femininity
in Western culture, Elisabeth Bronfen takes as the epitome of
‘the modes of figuration of death and its linkage to femininity’ a
painting, Der Anatom, which has notable affinities with the image of
the dying Lena. 1 Der Anatom shows an anatomist looking at a dead
woman but a dead woman whose beauty is as yet unaffected, almost
alive as Lena is almost dead. The focalizing gaze of the anatomist
directs the eyes of the viewer to one white breast of the woman, just
uncovered by his hand. Similarly the reader of Victory finds his or her
gaze directed by that of Heyst and Davidson towards the ‘fascination’
of Lena’s breast. This scene lends itself readily to a Freudian reading.
The ‘sacred’ white breast, both sexual and idealized, suggests the
fantasy body of the mother, the perfect, unattainable object of desire,
while the small black hole, unmarred by blood, suggests the female
genitals, fearfully associated with death and castration. Such a
reading, however, tends to presume a male reader. Bronfen identifies
the fetishization of the dead woman as a way of expressing but also
repressing the knowledge that the spectator will also die, just as in
Freud’s conception the fetish serves both to record and to repress the
knowledge of the absence of the female phallus. An obviously phallic
fetish is present, since Lena at this point demands to be given the
dagger which she won from Ricardo and ‘which Davidson was still
holding unconsciously’ (405). 2 This dagger is described as ‘the symbol
of her victory’, and its masculine associations are fairly explicit: from
her early position as a victim of men Lena has gained power over both
Ricardo and Heyst, though at the cost of her life. It seems that a
woman who symbolically possesses the phallus must die. As often in
Conrad’s fiction, a Freudian reading is not so much unconvincing as
too obvious. The scene is also a set piece of homosocial visual
exchange. Two men gaze down at the body of a woman, its sexual
allure and physicality are stressed and the reader is invited to share
their contemplation. To analyse the scene in these terms allows a
theorization of the gendering of the implied reader, rather than a
replication of this gendering by critical discourse. Lena dies the
subject of the male gaze: ‘she breathed her last, triumphant, seeking for