Conrad and Masculinity

88 Conrad and Masculinity
enormous legs are contrasted with her relief from material cares, as if
her legs were immaterial). Those material cares are, of course, her children,
whose bodily needs (food, warmth, shelter, etc.) are a source of
anxiety, because one of them is a woman, the other limited in his
mental powers and thus ‘a terrible encumbrance’ (8), so that both are
destined in this society for forms of dependence. The simultaneous
existence of the body as recalcitrant physical object and as discursive
sign is at issue here, emphasizing the ways in which the constraints
and needs of the body are inscribed in social discourse and social practice.
In The Secret Agent the extent and sharpness of Conrad’s satire on
the institutions of European society reveal a radicalism which also
impinges on his representation of gender relations. While it would
seem unlikely that Conrad started out with any intention of making a
critique of gender oppression, his understanding of the effects of
poverty, vulnerability and need on the individual leads him to write a
novel in which a woman and an unmanly man are poignantly shown
as the actual and symbolic victims of a corrupt and deadening system.
These two victims are Winnie Verloc (who is identified in Conrad’s
‘Author’s Note’ as central to the novel) and her brother Stevie.
A problematic of the masculine body is developed in this novel
through the figure of Stevie, who begins and remains in a condition
of dependence, dependent on a woman who is herself dependent on
a man. This situation is emphasized in the very first sentences of the
novel: ‘Mr. Verloc ... left his shop nominally in charge of his brotherin-law.
It could be done, because there was very little business ... And,
moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law’ (3). Stevie thus
occupies when Karen Klein calls ‘the feminine predicament’ (‘the
sense of the body as not under one’s own control, but subject to the
force and will of others’) (FP, 104). This condition is acted out in his
lack of bodily control as such: ‘A brusque question caused him to
stutter to the point of suffocation. When startled ... he used to squint
horribly’ (9). Stevie’s lack of bodily autonomy culminates, of course,
in the tragic and repellent radical fragmentation of his body. The early
pages of the novel contain many examples of Conrad’s proleptic irony
in the form of allusions to Stevie’s later fate. His mother’s reflection
that ‘he was difficult to dispose of, that boy’ (8) prompts her satisfaction
in disposing of him along with the furniture, a link which then
serves to contrast disposal with confinement, implying that these are
two alternative fates of the subjected body:
Mr. Verloc was ready to take [Stevie] over together with his wife’s