Conrad and Masculinity

194 Conrad and Masculinity
She turned and looked at him attentively ... Heyst stood the frank
examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect those
veiled grey eyes produced—whether on his heart or on his nerves,
whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he was unable to say.
(193)
‘But why are you looking so hard at me? Oh, I don’t object, and I
shall try not to flinch. Your eyes—’
He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had
forgotten all about the late Morrison at that moment.
‘No ... What an impenetrable girl you are, Lena, with those grey
eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some poet has said ... Well,
nature has provided excellently for the shyness of your soul.’
(204)
The above passages explicitly render Heyst’s point of view, but at one
point the narrative voice shares his conception: ‘She turned upon him
her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing of her wonder could
be read’ (214). These passages recall Marlow’s assumption in Chance
that what is mysterious to him in a woman must be blankness. 7 But
why should the Conradian rhetoric of the incomprehensible be
brought into play merely because a woman looks at a man without
being ‘abashed’?
Susan Gubar places Heyst’s renaming of Lena in the context of a
Western cultural myth of male primacy which identifies female sexuality
with textuality and fears the female body ‘for its power to
articulate itself’: 8
Converted from artist to accompanist to accomplice, she seems
‘like a script in an unknown language’ or ‘like any writing to an
illiterate.’ Looking at her Heyst feels like ‘a man looking this way
and that on a piece of writing which he was unable to decipher, but
which may be big with some revelation’. 9
The process of renaming hints at a Frankenstein-like assemblage out
of parts, though these are parts of language rather than body parts:
‘the girl—to whom, after several experimental essays in combining
detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the name of Lena’
(186). It is as if Heyst is unable to write her identity in a new, Edenic
language, but can only reassemble elements of the patriarchal ideology
which has already named her. Lena herself is aware of not having