The Power of a Woman's Love: Lena in Victory

I answer… that the Victory of the title is related directly to Lena’s feeling of Victory – the triumphant state of mind in which she dies…

A woman had intervened! A woman, a girl, who apparently possessed the power to awaken men’s disgusting folly.

Upon reading Conrad’s Victory, one may perhaps view Lena’s devotion to Heyst as a self-sacrifice of her identity such that she is another Chekhovian Olenka, as seen in the short story “The Darling.” In this story, Olenka cannot “exist without loving” (Chekhov, “The Darling, and Other Short Stories,” 4) and her opinions are only the repeated opinions of the men in her life; without a man – even a schoolboy – she cannot form any of her own opinions and has no identity (Chekhov, 16). Although Tolstoy points out that Chekhov “means to mock at the pitiful creature” at first, “the poet blessed what he had come to curse” and, against his will, displayed “the soul of The Darling, with her faculty of devoting herself with her whole being to any one she loves, [which] is not absurd but marvellous and holy” (Chekhov, 24-5). Tolstoy further states, “That love, whether devoted to a Kukin or to Christ, is the chief, grand, unique strength of woman” (Chekhov, 27). It is this “strength of woman” which Mr. Jones recognizes (albeit one-sidedly) – and is disgusted with -- in Victory, and, in that sense, Lena and Olenka are the similar, as devoted women to their men.

Although both women are similar in their devotion, Olenka’s “power” (to use Mr. Jones’ term) is starkly parasitic – she is nothing without a man, and any man will do, whether he is a good man or a bad man, worthy of her or not worthy of her. Theatre manager Kukin, timber merchant Pustovalov, veterinary surgeon Smirnin, the schoolboy Sasha – in a series of loves, she dotes and does not see anything wrong when her current mimicked opinions contradicts her previous mimicked opinions (Chekhov, 11). Olenka has no past, no concrete tie to history, not even personal history, and, thus, her womanly strength of devotion seems inhuman and disembodied, like a devoted succubus desperately searching for her next person to embody her. Perhaps it is this type of womanly devotion which disgusts Mr. Jones.

In contrast, Lena’s power to love is grounded in history, grounded in the world of relationships past (her father) and present (Heyst), while, at the same time, having her own opinions of who or who is not worthy of her devotion, as seen in her instinctive rejection of Schomberg. Although scholar Robert Hampson, in the Introduction to Victory, states that “the terms of Lena’s life are those of romantic melodrama” and that “[t]his romantic perspective lies behind her flight with Heyst, and it lies behind her readiness to sacrifice herself to win Heyst’s love” (Conrad, Victory, 16), he does not take into account that Lena’s devotion is discriminatory, that she could and would distinguish between a Kukin and a Christ, unlike Olenka’s blind, parasitic devotion. Thus, her flight with and self-sacrifice for Heyst is weighted by her choice of Heyst as worthy of her grand power because, as one will see, he acknowledges the mystery of her power and, at the same time, most needs her devotion as much as she needs Heyst’s love. Her statement, “I can only be what you think I am,” is not an Olenkan simplicity of personal non-identity but a human complexity of a sameness yet difference in a concrete, human relationship, held together with the power of love.

Unlike Olenka, who seeks men to give her being, Lena does not seek the men who approach her. Replying to Heyst in the hotel courtyard, Lena reminds him, “It wasn’t I who spoke to you first, was it?” (Conrad, 120). A notable exception, of course, is her father, but she only speaks of her father after meeting Heyst. One can categorize the men in Lena’s life in two groups: unworthy of her devotion – Schomberg and Ricardo, and worthy of her devotion – her father and Heyst.

Both Schomberg and Ricardo are unworthy of Lena’s devotion because they misinterpret Lena’s being as Olenkan simplicity, i.e., mirroring their own simple senses of self. For Schomberg,

[H]e had little doubt of his personal fascination, and still less of his power to get hold of the girl, who seemed too ignorant to know how to help herself…. The aversion she showed him as far as she dared… Schomberg pardoned on the score of feminine conventional silliness…. Her shrinking form, her downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at the end of an empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the overpowering force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations. For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end. (Conrad, 131)

Since he is incapable of seeing his own weaknesses, his own faults, Schomberg is incapable of seeing a human being as a human being, an individual with separate opinions. He sees Lena as a thing, an accessory, a pet, who readily submits to his will while her arms are “flung around his neck” as inspiration – actually, reassurance – of his manliness.[1] He doesn’t want a woman; he wants a trophy and a self-esteem coach, and he believes that his own his wife is “no fit companion for a man of his ability and ‘in the prime of life’” (Conrad, 151). Actually, Schomberg is no fit companion for anyone, and Mrs. Schomberg’s devotion to him is nothing short of miraculous, to use Tolstoy’s term. Lena cannot give her devotion to “[t]hat brute,” “[t]hat beast,” “that horrible red-faced beast,” (Conrad, 124-25, 220).

Similarly, Ricardo misinterprets Lena words, silences, and actions as mirroring himself, an immoral, proud predator, after the failed rape. He says with admiration after she has fought him back, “ ‘You have fingers like steel. Jimminy! You have muscle like a giant!’” (Conrad, 289). But she has also won his admiration because she remains “calm and unabashed” (Conrad, 290) after the attack:

He felt flattered. And she didn’t seem afraid of him either. He already felt almost tender towards the girl – that plucky, fine girl who had not tried to run screaming from him. …. Out of the unfaded impression of past violence there was growing the sort of sentiment which prevents a man from being indifferent to a woman he has once held in his arms – if even against her will – and still more so if she has pardoned the outrage. It becomes then a sort of bond. He felt positively the need to confide in her. (Conrad, 291, 292)

Convinced that Lena has pardoned him, he quickly assumes that she is exactly like him, with the same motivations and opinions. “ ‘Born alike, bred alike, I guess. You are not tame. Same here! You have been chucked out into this rotten world of ‘yporcrits. Same here!’” Ricardo insists (Conrad, 293). But she is not like him, not an "immoral predator," but a woman whose “wits were sharpened by the very terror of the glimpsed menace” (Conrad, 293). Lena is more moral than anything that Ricardo can imagine, and thus he does not see her duplicity,

the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed, too! Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence and a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity. It seemed to her that the man sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which had attended all her life. He was the embodied evil of the world. She was not ashamed of her duplicity. With a woman’s frank courage, as soon as she saw that opening she threw herself into it without reserve, with only one doubt – that of her own strength. (Conrad, 294)

In her devotion to protect Heyst, Lena becomes duplicitous: pretends to be Ricardo’s bandit woman in order to disarm him and give the weapon to Heyst. But, unlike Olenka, her devotion to Heyst never sways; Lena does not change.

In contrast, in Lena’s not-quite-twenty years of her life, only two men are worthy of her devotion: her father and Axel Heyst. Lena does not speak of her past and of her father until she meets Heyst (and it is also noteworthy that Heyst does not speak of his past and of his father until he meets Lena). Lena’s revelations of her childhood past and her father are short but important indicators of where Lena’s sense of worth and devotion originates. At Schomberg’s hotel, Lena reveals that

[h]er father was a musician in the orchestras of small theatres. Her mother ran away from him while she was little…. It was her father who taught her to play the violin. It seemed that he used to get drunk sometimes, but without pleasure, and only because he was unable to forget his fugitive wife…[H]e had a paralytic stroke…[and] was now in a home for incurables. (Conrad 118-19).

Also, she states “ ‘I know I’m not much account; but I know how to stand by a man. I stood by father ever since I could understand. He wasn’t a bad chap’” (Conrad, 127). Moreover, she tellingly relates:

“Sunday school…. I went regularly from the time I was eight till I was thirteen. We lodged north of London, off Kingsland Road. It wasn’t a bad time. Father was earning good money then. The woman of the house used to pack me off in the afternoon with her own girls. She was a good woman. Her husband was in the post-office. ….Then one day they had a row, and broke up the home. I remember I cried when we had to pack up all of a sudden and go into other lodgings.” (Conrad, 209)

As learned from her childhood and from her father, human relationships define and empower people; one cannot be a full human being except in relation to other people. The power of love – devotion – is good for both sides of the relationship: Lena’s father has a reason to get up and work, i.e., his daughter, and Lena learns how to play the violin, can go to Sunday school, and has access to a larger world of relationships – the friendship and devotion of the post officer’s wife and daughters.

But the paradox of the good human relationship is that it is transitory precisely because it is human, and so there is always seeds of suffering sown within relationships: Lena’s father turns to alcohol after her mother leaves him. Lena loses her father to a home for incurables. The house on Kingsland Road is broken because of a domestic row. Thus Lena also learns that one is fullest human within a devoted relationship, but such a relationship can never last in the world, lending a bittersweetness to the whole human condition, which Lena has experienced and thus knows but which Heyst -- out of his paradoxical devotion to his dead father, whose “distinguished face” he holds “in affectionate memory” (Conrad, 129) -- is afraid to acknowledge, even as he senses “an immense sadness” in hearing Lena’s story of her father. With this paradox of human relationship – good but not eternal, one can understand Lena’s mixed emotions in regards to her simple love of Heyst: “She felt this elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate pride – and with a peculiar sinking of the heart” (Conrad, 228).

As seen above, Lena’s father was a sad, good man, and Lena sees that Heyst is also a good man with some sort of sadness over him, a man who is “temperamentally sympathetic” (Conrad, 113) and yet, because of his devotion to his father, has “made up his mind to retire from the world hermit fashion” (Conrad, 110). Lena knows that Heyst is different from the various unworthy men that have intruded in her life between her father and Heyst, “for she now perceived how different he was from the other men in the room” (Conrad, 115). He is a good man, but he has stunted his sympathy for humanity, and it is Lena’s own devotion which reawakens this stunted devotion, Lena who looks at the world on top of the mountain and replies to Heyst’s question of who she would be sorry for if the world to end, “ ‘I should be sorry for the happy people in it,’ she said simply” (Conrad, 209). Lena sees that Heyst is “a strange being without needs” – i.e., he is strange precisely because he has no needs, i.e., he has refused to acknowledge that all human beings have needs if they are to be fully alive. Thus Lena, learning her lessons from her childhood and father, realizes that only “by some act of absolute sacrifice” (Conrad, 216) – a devotion so extreme it may surpass the boundary of ordinary morality – can this good man become human, not only to her but also to himself.

Moreover, Heyst is a worthy man because he does not presume to understand Lena and the power that she has. Unlike Schomberg and Ricardo, who forges Lena into their own image, Heyst leaves Lena’s identity inviolate:

The girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious: like any writing to the illiterate. …His mental attitude was that of a man looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to decipher, but which may be big with some revelation. (Conrad, 233)

Although the above quotation seems as if Heyst has objectified Lena, by turning her into a book, and thus is only a more “gentlemanly” version of Schomberg and Ricardo, one must be aware of Heyst’s reverence for books. After all, it was his father’s books which influenced Heyst’s beliefs as a youth, for “Heyst said that his father had written a lot of books. He was a philosopher” (Conrad, 81). Lena is like a book, but she is a book separate from his father’s books, a book “big with some revelation” and he is “the illiterate” who desires to know this mystery. In his relationship with Lena, Heyst has begun to turn from his father’s books of nihilism to Lena’s “book” of human relationships. Although both Lena and Heyst cannot fully know each other, they can come together in a middle ground, i.e., they are able to converse with each other and come away with some form of understanding of each other, even if that understanding is partial and incomplete. Below is an example:

“Later he [Elder Heyst] discovered – how am I to explain it to you? Suppose the world were a factory and all mankind workmen in it. Well, he discovered that the wages were not good enough. That they were paid in counterfeit money.”

Heyst, in explaining his father’s nihilism, uses a metaphor such that Lena will understand – he has accommodated his discourse for his listener. Lena’s reply "I see!” shows that she does, indeed, understand. But Lena’s experience of human relationships also allows her to see the underlying, stunted emotional development in Heyst’s metaphor and, thus, in Heyst himself. It is this deeper understanding of Heyst’s insufficiency which Lena also sees – the second meaning of “I see!” – but which Heyst does not obviously see. As seen, however, in his awareness that he is illiterate to her book, Heyst is open to the fact this he has weaknesses, an openness not found in either Schomberg or Ricardo.

In his author’s note, Conrad states that Heyst’s main weakness is his inability to assert himself, a weakness which Lena’s power of love must compensate and cure. Says Conrad:

…Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting himself. I don’t mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and for the matter of that, even in love. (Conrad, 48)

Heyst himself emphasizes this lost habit of self-assertion, saying to Davidson, “ ‘I shall never lift a finger again’” (Conrad, 98). Heyst once had this habit of self-assertion but he has purposely lost it, i.e., purposely denied his humanity. Lena, however has not lost this habit, which becomes vital in light of the arrival of Pedro, Mr. Jones, and Ricardo:

She had jumped to her feet to react against the numbness, to discover whether her body would obey her will. It did. She could stand up, and she could move her arms freely. Though no physiologist, she concluded that all that sudden numbness was in her head, not in her limbs. (Conrad, 343)

Lena has not lost the ability to assert her will, a will that is not thinking or logic or planning but a drive to act for some perceived good. This will is intricately linked with her power of devotion, and it becomes fully actualized within a relationship with a worthy man. Says Lena to Heyst,

“Why, I could face him [Schomberg] myself now that I know you care for me. A girl can always put up a fight. You believe me? Only it isn’t easy to stand up for yourself when you feel there’s nothing and nobody at your back. There’s nothing so lonely in the world as a girl who has got to look after herself.” (Conrad, 124)

Lena has always had this power of devotion, but it takes a man like Heyst to bring it out.

Fully aware of Heyst’s inability to assert himself, Lena realizes that her power of devotion must be strong enough for the both of them:

Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace, there was born in her a woman’s innate mistrust of masculinity, of that seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from the recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never frightened a woman worthy of the name. [….] She abandoned all her weight to that encircling and protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her at the sudden thought that it was she who would have to protect him, to be a defender of a man who was strong enough to lift her bodily, as he was doing even then in his two arms. (Conrad, 301-2)

Lena’s motivation to act is two-fold: to protect Heyst from the three criminal interlopers and to prove to Heyst that their love is not one of the “counterfeit wages” of his father’s philosophy. Her self-sacrifice is not so much a lack of self-respect – although she is aware of her poor childhood, she is not an empty Olenka or a shrinking Mrs. Schomberg – but a drive to prove to Heyst that he is a human being, loved by another human being. She must replace Heyst’s father’s philosophy of inaction and of distrust of goodness in the world with a palpable demonstration of action based on love, of trust in another human being’s love. This “re-education” of Heyst – to make Heyst see what Lena sees -- is the essence of Lena’s victory.

As seen in the quotation from Conrad’s letter which prefaces this essay, Lena’s victory is a real victory. Heyst’s act of trying to hide Lena, of worrying about Lena, gives indications that he has learned to love, has learned what reality is. “[T]hat human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life” (Conrad, 215). Heyst also admits, “ ‘And only three months ago I would not have cared. ….But now I have you! You stole into my life’” (Conrad, 317). The power of Lena’s devotion gives Heyst the incipient recognition that “ ‘Something in me thinks – something foreign to my nature” (Conrad, 336); Heyst has rediscovered his nature as a human being, involved in a very human relationship. Consequently, the ending – their deaths -- is not nihilistic but poignant and tragic because Heyst is experiencing in three short months what Lena has already learned from her nearly twenty years of living – that love is glorious, and it cannot last. Thus, when Lena gives the knife – the symbol of her victory – to Heyst and says “ ‘ Kill nobody,’” Heyst says, “ ‘No’” (Conrad, 380) Early in their relationship, Heyst has said, “ ‘No, I’ve never killed a man or loved a woman – not even in my thoughts, not even in my dreams” which are “ ‘the greatest enterprises of life upon a man’” (Conrad, 224-25). By the end of the novel, Heyst has done just these things: he has loved Lena, and he has killed a man – himself. It is true that he does commit suicide out of grief over Lena’s death, but it is not out of his loss of Lena’s love:

“No one in the world,” he answered her in a murmur of unconcealed despair. (Conrad, 381)

Lena has brought Heyst to the profound joy and suffering of human relationships; if Lena had failed, Heyst would have drifted from this episode of action, “never lift[ing] a little finger again” and “look[ing] on – mak[ing] no sound” (Conrad, 98, 194). Heyst, however, does act – he commits suicide, a crime of despair and failure in the eyes of common morality. But, as Conrad states in his Author’s Note, “the readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and for the matter of that, even in love” is the mark of a man who can assert himself, who is truly human. Also, the fact that Davidson relays Heyst and Lena’s story to His Excellency after their deaths continues their existence and their relationship in narrative form, further problematizing anyone who would view their deaths as simply nihilistic and who would view Lena’s victory as simply delusional.

Thus, Lena’s devotion is not based on an Olenkan simplicity of personal non-identity but on the complexity of concrete, human relationships. Also unlike Olenka, who always forgets each past relationship, her past has given Lena the measure of who is worthy and unworthy of such a devotion as seen in Schomberg, Ricardo, and Heyst. Although the ending of Lena and Heyst’s relationship ends in death, their deaths do not negate the victory of Lena’s winning Heyst to the real happiness (and, conversely, the real sorrow) of human relationships. Says Conrad in his Author’s Note:

[W]hen the moment came for [Lena] meeting Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the risky and uncertain future. I was so convinced of it that I let her go with Heyst, I won’t say without a pang but certainly without misgivings. And in view of her triumphant end what more could I have done for her rehabilitation and her happiness? (Conrad, 53)

Chekhov, Anton. The Darling and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: The Ecco Press, 1982.

Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 5, 1912-1916. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996.

Conrad, Joseph. Victory: An Island Tale. Ed. Robert Hampson. New York: Penguin, 1989.

[1] Conrad seems to compare the Schombergs with Lena and Heyst’s relationship. Both Mrs. Schomberg and Lena say “Be careful” to their respective men (Conrad, 151, 309). Also, Mr. Schomberg, in rejecting his wife, desires a woman to put her arms around his neck (Conrad, 152); in contrast, Lena puts her arms around Heyst’s neck (Conrad, 234).