Conrad and Masculinity

196 Conrad and Masculinity
gaze, rather than the subject of her own desire. Like the woman in the
photograph, Lena does (sometimes) look firmly in a way that might
make manifest her desire. But the narrative of the novel finally endorses
Heyst’s desire by setting her up as an iconic sexual object and by ending
in her death and the effacement of her subjectivity. The negation of the
female gaze in art, cinema and literature is often achieved through the
death of the woman. Doane cites Claire Johnston’s view of death as the
‘location of all impossible signs’, and reads three mainstream films of the
1940s as demonstrating that ‘the woman as subject of the gaze is clearly
an impossible sign’. 11 Irigaray argues that the effacement of women’s
desire is a condition for the working out, by men, of the death drive, in
that women are taken to represent the death drive and serve as a mirror
to support the male ego in the process of building itself up and warding
off death (S, 54–5). In fulfilling this function, woman is inscribed in a
specular economy of the same:
Now, if this [male] ego is to be valuable, some ‘mirror’ is needed to
reassure it and re-insure it of its value. Woman will be the foundation
for this specular duplication, giving man back ‘his’ image and
repeating it as the ‘same’.
(S, 54) 12
In accordance with this economy Heyst, talking to Lena, is talking to
himself and, faced with her look, can read it only as the seductive veil
over absence, death, castration, the abyss. Though Heyst also dies, it
is Lena’s death that is presented as a symbolic sacrifice, made in order
to rescue Heyst from his alienation and disengagement. After her
death he is able belatedly to acknowledge to Davidson the importance
of hope, love and trust in life (410). Lena has taken on the role of
representing the death drive: this is one meaning of that death-bed
scene. Irigaray writes that ‘in order to trans-form his death drives and
the whole instinctual dualism, in order to use his life to ward off death
for as long as it takes to choose a death, man will have to work on
building up his ego’ (S, 54). Lena frees Heyst from the legacy of
deathly detachment that his father forced upon him, enabling Heyst
to take up an identity and to choose a death.
Irigaray’s use of an economic model in her reinterpretation of Freudian
theory can elucidate the gender relations in Victory, since it is within an
economy of masculinity that Lena’s role is worked out. 13 The tableau of
her death is presented, not just to Heyst, but to Davidson and to the
reader, while her relationship with Heyst is preceded and shadowed by