Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity and the Body 93
a dog’ (87) when he heard the policeman collecting up the bits, and
Heat is unable to eat for the rest of the day.
Stevie’s fate is, then, is some ways a culmination of the alwaysabject
state of his partial masculinity. Two of the conditions which
Katherine Judith Goodnow notes as tending to provoke horror of the
abject apply here: the ‘feminization’ of the male body and an association
with the pre-symbolic authority of the maternal. 55 Stevie lives
under the authority of his mother and sister, until he is taken off by
Verloc to take up, as Winnie hopes, his place in the patriarchal
symbolic order. When she succeeds in persuading Verloc to take
Stevie out with him, she proudly reflects that they ‘might be father
and son’ (187), and congratulates herself on the sacrifices she has
made to bring this about (specifically, by implication, her toleration
of Verloc as a sexual partner in pragmatic preference to the butcher
whom she loved). Stevie’s ultimate inability to become a ‘man’ is
signalled in his fate: his body cannot escape from its abject gender
ambiguity and dependence on the maternal, and so the contact with
the father figure only leads to it being flung into the more extreme
abjection of violent death.
If Stevie is the abject of the capitalist social order, then the anarchists
and revolutionaries (with the exception of the Professor) are its
object, using the term ‘object’ as Kristeva does in distinguishing it
from the abject: ‘If the object ... through its opposition, settles me
within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter
of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is
abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and
draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.’ 56 The social
order, which the novel portrays as largely destructive, defines itself in
contradistinction to the forces of supposed disorder represented by
the anarchists. Conrad’s fierce contempt for the anarchists allows him
to present as symmetrical and mutually supportive the relationship
between them and the social order which they claim to oppose, and
which claims to stand against them. As already noted, the Professor
sees Revolutionaries and Police as part of the same system (69) and
Heat sees burglar and policeman as recognizing the same conventions
(92). Only Stevie, with his ungovernable body, and the Professor, with
his grotesque body, are presented as radical, unassimilable threats to
that system. Both are associated with the violent dispersal of the body:
this is Stevie’s fate, and this is the threat which gives the Professor his
special status and ability to unsettle Heat.