Conrad and Masculinity

92 Conrad and Masculinity
His feelings were habitually manifested by the agitation of his limbs’
(176). Even Winnie is not fully competent at reading her brother’s
bodily signs. The narrator informs us that Stevie’s ‘immoderate
compassion’ is always succeeded by ‘innocent but pitiless rage’ (169),
and the latter is harnessed by Mr Verloc to set Stevie on his fatal anarchistic
mission. However, the unreadability of Stevie’s body is again
manifest, since ‘those two states expressing themselves outwardly by
the same signs of futile bodily agitation, his sister Winnie soothed his
excitement without ever fathoming its twofold character’ (169). Like
the signs of ‘degeneracy’, the hysterical effect is shared in muted form
by his sister, significantly in response to the depersonalized male gaze
of her husband: ‘At the sound of his wife’s voice he stopped and stared
at her with a somnambulistic, expressionless gaze so long that Mrs.
Verloc moved her limbs slightly under the bedclothes’ (177). Yet Mr
Verloc himself can also respond in this way, in the face of the bullying
sarcasm of Mr Vladimir: ‘This perfectly gratuitous suggestion
caused Mr. Verloc to shuffle his feet slightly’ (35). Like the grotesque
body, the hysterical body is associated with the feminine or with
dubious masculinity, but this dubiety extends more widely than first
appears.
Another way of understanding the status of Stevie’s remains would
be in terms of Kristeva’s concept of the abject. The macabre or gothic
black humour with which Conrad treats Stevie’s fate links the dead
body with repulsive ideas of eating. Kristeva cites food loathing as
‘perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection’,
going on to associate this with the more absolute abject quality of a
corpse. In rejecting or expelling food ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out,
I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to
establish myself.’ Yet a corpse, which ‘show[s] me what I permanently
thrust aside in order to live’, is ‘the most sickening of wastes ... a
border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who
expel, “I” is expelled ... The corpse, seen without God and outside of
science, is the utmost of abjection.’ 54 Since neither God nor science is
treated with much faith in The Secret Agent, the abject quality of
Stevie’s remains is perhaps appropriate: they are described as ‘that
heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in shambles
and rag shops’ (87), and as ‘an accumulation of raw material for
a cannibal feast’ (86). They are inspected by Heat with ‘the slightly
anxious attention of an indigent customer bending over what may be
called the by-products of a butcher’s shop with a view to an inexpensive
Sunday dinner’ (88). Furthermore, the park keeper ‘was as sick as