Conrad and Masculinity

6
Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth:
The Secret Agent, Under Western
Eyes, Chance
The gendered circulation of knowledge, which I have described in
‘Heart of Darkness’, reappears in several of Conrad’s later works,
notably The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes and Chance, but in each
it is disrupted or questioned to a greater degree. The basic paradigm
is one in which knowledge, both literal knowledge of particular facts
and events and existential knowledge, is sought, shared, competed
for and otherwise circulated among groups of men, including the
implied author, male narrators (such as Marlow or the languageteacher
in Under Western Eyes), male narratees and implied male
readers. This circulation involves and is facilitated by the exclusion
of women from such knowledge, combined with a tendency to identify
them symbolically with it. The women represent the truth,
particularly ungraspable metaphysical truth, but they do not possess
it. Another way of putting this would be to say that the exclusion of
women from the space within which men’s knowledge circulates
encourages the identification of the truth ‘beyond’, ultimate or unattainable
truth, with the feminine. Jacques Derrida, summing up both
the paradox and the logic of Nietzsche’s gendered epistemology, has
commented on this incompatibility between representing and
possessing truth:
How is it possible that woman, who herself is truth, does not
believe in truth? And yet, how is it possible to be truth and still
believe in it? 1
One might gloss this with the observation that no one (at least no one
sane) regards themselves as a symbol of ultimate truth or unattainable
wisdom. Such a role is a projection of someone else’s fantasies and
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