Conrad and Masculinity

Notes 231
by renaming her Alma (soul)’; in fact she is already known as Alma or
Magdalen before Heyst meets her, while he renames her Lena. However, it
is the similarity and associations of the names that are significant, along
with Gubar’s point that Lena is converted from being a performer to
someone, in Heyst’s eyes, who is ‘like a script in an unknown language’ (V,
222). Susan Gubar, ‘“The Blank Page” and the Issues of Female Creativity’,
in ed. Elaine Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays of Women,
Literature and Theory (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 292–313 (p. 294).
7 ‘She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to
admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a passive butt of ferocious
misfortune’ (C, 207)
8 Gubar, pp. 293–4.
9 Gubar, p. 294. The quotations are from Victory, p. 222. The phrase ‘was
unable to decipher’ should read ‘is unable to decipher’.
10 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female
Spectator’, in The Sexual Subject, pp. 227–43 (pp. 237–8).
11 Doane, p. 237, quoting Claire Johnston, ‘Femininity and the Masquerade:
Anne of the Indies’, in Jacques Tourneur, eds Claire Johnston and Paul
Willemen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1975), pp. 36–44 (p. 40).
12 Virginia Woolf makes a similar point, writing that ‘women have served all
these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power
of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.’ A Room of One’s
Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 53.
13 See especially ‘Women on the Market’ and ‘Commodities Among
Themselves’, TS, 170–91, 192–7.
14 ‘You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There
is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable,
and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper
sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the
same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are
the same pure single element of carbon . . . ).’ D .H. Lawrence, letter to
Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, in D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism,
ed. Anthony Beal (1956; London: Mercury Books, 1961), p. 18.
15 Koestenbaum, p. 169.
16 According to the OED, the earliest recorded use of ‘queer’ (as an adjective)
meaning homosexual is 1922, in a United States government publication,
while a 1937 article in the Listener magazine alludes to it as ‘a word
imported from America’. W. H. Auden is cited as using ‘queer’ as a noun,
meaning a male homosexual, in 1932.
17 On the flâneur, see Chapter 5.
18 Robert Secor, The Rhetoric of Shifting Perspectives in Conrad’s ‘Victory’
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), p. 5.
19 The tendency of much of the philosophical tradition to negate the feminine
is considered in Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay
Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc, trans. Trista Selous (Oxford and
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991).
20 Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), p.
227.
21 For other references to eyes and looking see pp. 93, 101, 103, 119, 130.