Exactly, and "fixing" in this sense means "nailing to the spot", or "fastening upon, halt, stop moving, be immobile like a fixed point or fixed price".
What it means. The most annoying about that quote is that it is a correct sentence, with one single trivial meaning. Easy right? Your favorite type of sentence. Well guess what, in the text it stands for a totally different thing (without any particular reason or benefit).
I much prefer GP's broken sentence. It is syntactically broken, but it has all the words, much better than if it was syntactically correct with an entirely different meaning than the intended one.
I legitimately would have to guess what they meant. The obvious reading to me is that she is magically repairing it by looking at it, though I would know that's not what they meant, which leaves brute force guessing.
You can say that someone is 'fixed on' something, which means to look doggedly, but 'fixing something' is totally different, who says that?
Subjective of course, but I just think it's a bad sentence.
Fixing one's gaze on something is a standard English expression, it's just the active form of to be fixed on, which is passive. It means, literally, that one's line of sight is 'fixed upon' something. One's mind can also be fixed upon something. The verb is to fix or to affix. 'Fixed to' simply means 'attached to', but 'fixed on' usually implies something lighter attached to a weightier, possibly vertical surface, or something attached by glue or paste. You can also say that a postage stamp is fixed on an envelope.
It's a great sentence if you understand the different things it is communicating compactly and efficiently.
People who watch US TV shows about the American South. Having lived there for awhile and still travel there for work today, I can say with some certainty that the folksy dialect that media gives to people of that region is either largely embellished or made-up. If we stay on the word "fix," I mostly hear it in context of someone making a meal ("Fixing breakfast," etc). The Appalachian regions are must more creative and cant-like with the language historically, but even that is being lost as the generations are exposed to more modern settings, I think. In my experience, the idioms used usually come down to the individual, which has more to do with how their sense of identity was cultivated, a concept that runs quite deep in the American South, but that is a much longer and more complex thread for another day, I reckon.
"("Fixing breakfast," etc)."
Yes, this makes sense, you can fix ('make', off the top of my head, only used in this sense for cooking really) breakfast, but surely the author doesn't mean the woman was materializing/cooking a shrine as a dish with her eyes either.
No, it’s “fix” in the sense of “fix in place” - to pin something to one spot. “I can’t move the table, it’s fixed in place.”
Her gaze is fixed upon - her gaze is fixing. Within her field of view, her deliberate staring at the shrine has fixed it in place. Her eyes are fixed in place, focused on the shrine.
Collins is a counterpoint, right? Well it is, as it doesn't know this phrase.
Thefreedictionary I don't now what that is. I'd be much more convinced if it cited examples from actual usage from books, articles, subtitles. Looks more machine generated to me than human work.
It has ~3 results. 1 talks about making something immovable with your gaze with a spell in a fantasy setting. The other 2 are in blogspam articles of German companies, one of them is also available in several other languages, presumably machine translated.
It's a poetic expression.