Indeed, many of Conrad's female characters are to some degree implicated in the imagery of this painting, for the image of a blinded, light-bearing woman also appears in Lord jim, The Rescue, and "The Return." Jewel in Lord jim and Edith Travers in The Rescue mimic the pose of the figure in Kurtz's "small sketch in oils"; as I will show, both women are portrayed bearing torches which they hold high, and both are quite literally unable to see by the light they carry. In "The Return," Alvan Hervey possesses a functional neoclassical statue of a "sightless woman of marble ... draped to the chin, thrusting blindly ... a cluster oflights" (162); Hervey's wife also duplicates the pose as she stands, wearing a veil, in the "blinding fierceness" of "a harsh and violent light" (129). More subtle allusions to a relation between a blinded femininity and light recur in An Outcast of the Islands, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, and Suspense.