Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 87
that interiority and fluidity are threatening to the normative representation
of the male body. Stevie’s insides are literally turned out,
while the Assistant Commissioner, his detective instincts aroused by
his suspicion that Heat is concealing something, thinks with pleasure
‘I’ll turn him inside out like an old glove’ (119).
Stevie is the key figure for a consideration of masculinity and the
body in The Secret Agent, but Stevie’s body, its meaning and its recalcitrance
to meaning are best approached through the body of his mother
(significantly unnamed in the text). The mother’s first appearance in
the text is as a grotesque body whose physical attributes, socioeconomic
status and topographical location are closely connected:
Winnie’s mother was a stout, wheezy woman, with a large brown
face. She wore a black wig under a white cap. Her swollen legs
rendered her inactive. She considered herself to be of French
descent, which might have been true; and after a good many years
of married life with a licensed victualler of the more common sort,
she provided for the years of widowhood by letting furnished apartments
for gentlemen near Vauxhall Bridge Road in a square once of
some splendour and still included in the district of Belgravia. This
topographical fact was of some advantage in advertising her rooms.
(6)
Verloc visits her ‘downstairs where she had her motionless being’ (7),
and when he marries Winnie ‘the married couple took her over with
the furniture’ (8). The move ‘from the Belgravian square to the narrow
street in Soho affected her legs adversely. They became of an enormous
size. On the other hand, she experienced a complete relief from
material cares’ (8). The location of the mother’s legs in space (space
inscribed with social meaning: Belgravia vs. Soho) is grotesquely
mapped by their internal transformations. Her body is described in
terms which accord with those of grotesque realism, which ‘images
the human body as multiple, bulging, over- or under-sized, protuberant
and incomplete’ (PPT, 9), but the tone is black humour rather
than carnivalesque laughter. Rather than functioning as a resistance
to, or subversion of, the capitalist order, the grotesque mother’s body
marks her place within systems of economic exchange and constraint.
In a Bakhtinian transcoding between the body and the social sphere,
her legs get wider as her place of residence becomes more constrained,
and with her daughter’s marriage of convenience she is both rendered
a mere object or chattel (like the furniture) and dematerialized (her