Conrad and Masculinity

192 Conrad and Masculinity
off Morrison), he is very angry, and solaces himself by having sex with
her (212–15). Lena herself seems to indulge in a fantasy of having
been recreated by Heyst, a fantasy which fits in with the occasionally
Edenic overtones of the situation. 5 She tells him that she has been
called Alma and Magdalen, and asks him to give her a new name, in
accordance with his desire: ‘you can call me by whatever name you
choose ... Think of one you would like the sound of—something quite
new. How I should like to forget everything that has gone before’ (88).
Yet Heyst (who earlier in his life has mentally criticized in himself the
Adamic impulse to action or naming (173–4)) calls her Lena (186),
which recalls rather than forgets her earlier names. These names are
obviously loaded with associations. Magdalen suggests the stereotype
of the ‘fallen woman’. ‘Alma’, as Susan Gubar points out, means ‘soul’
but is also a word for an Egyptian dancing girl, hinting at the classic
male-constructed duality of woman as idealized soul or as sexual
commodity (a duality corresponding to the fetishistic/voyeuristic
duality). 6 Heyst’s choice of name raises the question of how different
he is from Schomberg and the other men who have pestered or
exploited Lena. Though he is very different in character, his genuine
kindness does not free him from the sexual dynamics of his society.
Despite his philosophical scepticism and pessimism he cannot repress
the ‘original Adam’ (173) in himself, nor can he escape entirely from
the snares of ‘the world’. Heyst saves Lena out of chivalry (but also in
order to fulfil his own repressed needs, sexual and emotional). Heyst
is a gentlemen, but Lena is still dependent on her sexual role to maintain
his support. Here we may usefully evoke Silverman’s distinction
between the gaze – the social construction of subjectivity – and the
desiring look of the individual. Both Heyst and Lena can act as
subjects of the look: when Lena looks at Heyst it is not always hesitantly,
for we find statements such as ‘For a long time the girl’s grey
eyes had been watching his face’ (196). The point is that the social
power of the man enables the male look to appropriate, and masquerade
as, the gaze, a process by which it ‘transfers its own lack to the
female subject, and attempts to pass itself off as the gaze’ (MS, 144).
Heyst’s rescue of Lena saves her from the Zangiacomos’ attempts to
capitalize on her sexual desirability. But in appropriating that desirability
for himself, temporarily removing it from commodified
circulation, Heyst also takes upon himself the role of reconstituting
Lena’s subjectivity, which has been so much inscribed in that circulation
that she is uncertain of her identity outside it. Her situation in
this respect resembles that of Rita in The Arrow of Gold, who has been