Conrad and Masculinity

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity 195
escaped. The phrase ‘abysmal emptiness’ (192), used to describe
Heyst’s sense of her gaze, resonates with a moment in which Lena
perceives starkly her dependence on Heyst:
The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended
with a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious
before, because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging
between the abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm.
(209)
This vertigo of powerlessness recalls and explains Lena’s fear of the sight
of the empty sea which ‘was to her the abomination of desolation’ (190)
and which reminds her of childhood trauma in the loss of a mother
figure (192) and of the deluge (191), figuring the destruction of life, and
hence of identity. This ‘flaming abyss of emptiness’ which makes Lena
‘long for the friendly night’ (216) frames the scene in the forest since
they pass it on their way up and on their way back. While Lena perceives
in the empty sea an image of the fragility of her own identity, dependent
upon a sexual relationship with a man, Heyst identifies her firm gaze
with the abyss, with nothingness, with the inexplicable; in short, with
ideas of the enigmatic and threatening which are conventionally
projected onto women by puzzled or fearful men.
Mary Ann Doane analyses the negation of the female gaze via a still
photograph by Robert Doisneau, in which we see a man looking and
the picture (of a naked woman) at which he is looking, so that we are
invited to share his gaze. This gaze crosses that of the woman standing
by his side, who is looking with great interest at a picture which
has its back to us, so that:
not only is the object of her look concealed from the spectator, her
gaze is encased by the two poles defining the masculine axis of
vision. Fascinated by nothing visible – a blankness or void for the
spectator – ... the female gaze is left free-floating, vulnerable to
subjection. The faint reflection in the shop window of only the
frame of the picture at which she is looking serves merely to rearticulate,
en ab^yme, the emptiness of her gaze, the absence of her desire
in representation. 10
Heyst’s sense of an abyss within Lena would seem to express his need for
her dependence, his need for her to remain the object of his desiring