Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 191
kissing Lena and his retrieving her cork helmet ‘which had rolled a
little way off’, while she does up her hair ‘which had come loose’
(216). Framed by these two allusions to sex is a long scene in the forest
during which their relationship develops through growing intimacy,
misunderstanding and reconciliation, uncertainty and desire. Themes
of power and desire are articulated through visual exchange. At the
start of Chapter 4 Heyst declares himself ‘willing to sit here and look
at you till you are ready to go’ and the narrative voice explains:
He was still under the fresh sortilege of their common life, the
surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his possession of this
woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased to be masculine.
Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him, then returned
to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the straight treetrunks
... The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head.
She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying
herself. She felt in her innermost depths an irresistible desire to give
herself up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice.
This was something of which he did not seem to have an idea.
(201)
A play of looks is in evidence here: a steady, untiring, unembarrassed
male gaze at a posed and ‘possessed’ woman and, by contrast, a brief,
hesitant returned look by the woman, quickly averted for fear of
‘betraying herself’ – either disclosing her feelings or being untrue to
her own interests. While this passage specifically alludes to the ‘irresistible
desire’ of the woman, it can hardly be taken as constructing
the ‘conditions of visibility for a different [female] social subject’ or as
repositioning the subject in relation to pleasure in looking – tasks
which de Lauretis ascribes to feminist cinema – since Lena’s desire
here is a desire for loss of subjectivity to a man, and is appropriately
expressed by not looking. 4 There is a double-bind for Lena: a need for
intimacy and a need to be needed, combined with a sense that this is
on offer only through a certain role as possessed object. Lena’s vulnerability
(a result of her hard childhood, her poverty, her lonely position
and her mistreatment by the Zangiacomos, Schomberg and others)
has made her sense of herself, now that Heyst has rescued her, peculiarly
depend upon him. She feels that she would no longer be ‘in the
world’ (187) if Heyst stopped thinking about her and says ‘I can only
be what you think I am’ (187). By contrast, when Heyst is faced by the
possibility of being what Lena might think he was (someone who cast