Conrad and Masculinity

188 Conrad and Masculinity
his glance in the shades of death’ (407, emphasis added). She herself
internalizes this role by imagining herself as seen by another:
‘Exulting, she saw herself extended on the bed, in a black dress’ (407).
So, while a female reader might be invited to empathize with Lena,
this empathy would be recruited to the service of male desire. Steve
Neale’s account of the potential fluidity and mobility of fantasy identification
in cinema is revealing if applied by analogy to Conrad’s
narrative technique here. Neale identifies three intersecting levels on
which sexual difference is constructed and on which a tension may be
operative between the mobility of identificatory processes on the one
hand, and the organization and systematization generated by narrative
structures on the other:
1) positions and identifications constructed from moment to
moment in a film through its organisations of point of view, 2)
positions and identifications as these are systematised in relation to
the story thus narrated (character identification would be particularly
important here), and 3) positions and identifications available
to the subject across the structure of the fantasy scenario.
(SD, 125)
Neale also identifies various configurations of gender, power and
looking involving the spectator’s look at the screen, the look of the
camera and the look of the protagonist. If we consider the scene of
Lena’s death in relation to these three levels and three looks then
what emerges is the closing down of the possibilities of identification
established earlier in the novel. In this culminating, penultimate
chapter, levels of identification and looks are aligned into a single
structure. The narrative, long concentrated on a small group of characters
on the island, now further narrows with the defeat of the
villains, whose death we hear about in retrospect in the final chapter.
Lena and Heyst assume their full centrality, with Davidson present as
a representative of the outside world. The organization of point of
view structures the relationship between Neale’s three looks which,
translated into fictional terms, are the looks of reader, narrator and
character. All the characters are looking at the iconic image of Lena:
Heyst and Davidson orienting the look of narrator and reader towards
her body. Even Lena, at the moment of her death, imagines herself as
seen by a male other. Although the narrator allows us to know a little
more than any of the characters (in that we are allowed glimpses into
the minds of both Heyst and Lena), the ‘positions and identifications