Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 193
treated as a sexual / aesthetic commodity since her childhood. On the
island, Heyst (until the arrival of the villains) in effect becomes the
sole embodiment of the gaze for Lena, the only source from which her
subjectivity can be maintained, supported or undermined.
The process which Silverman terms the transferral of male lack to
the female subject is also in evidence in the relationship of Heyst and
Lena at this stage. Irigaray regards the specularization of the woman –
her objectification by the male gaze – as an exertion of male power
and a means by which male anxiety is relieved and male ego-identity
supported, while the ambiguities of masculinity are concealed or
repressed (S, 54). In the passage quoted above (‘He was still under the
fresh sortilege ...’), the narrative voice seems to be reassuring itself in
the face of a certain hesitancy as regards Heyst’s masculinity. His gaze
at a possessed woman bolsters up his allegiance to a conventional
masculinity, threatened by his passivity and perhaps his involvement
with Morrison.
After Lena’s long look at Heyst, she realizes that ‘addressing her, he
was really talking to himself’. Then:
Heyst looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and caught himself
up ... ‘All this does not tell you why I ever came here. Why, indeed?
It’s like prying into inscrutable mysteries which are not worth scrutinising
...’. He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that
she felt obliged to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand
what he meant. Her smile was reflected, still fainter, on his
lips.
(196–7)
There is a sense of a mutual regard, of exploration and a quest for
understanding, although limited by Heyst’s self-absorption and
marked by traces of power (‘she felt obliged’). Here Heyst proposes
himself as incomprehensible, but elsewhere in this scene it is Lena’s
firm gaze that is constructed or interpreted, not as an expression of
her desire or need, but as a mark of her incomprehensibility and the
occasion for the stimulation of male desire:
In the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him
the sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity
or inspiration, weakness or force—or simply an abysmal emptiness,
reserving itself even in the moments of complete surrender.
(192)