Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth 139
the groups of men in Conrad’s work are maintained by a circulation
of knowledge homologous with the circulation of women themselves
and corresponding to a double ignorance: an ignorance attributed
(with some historical and social plausibility, but also in excess of such
plausibility) to women; an ignorance about women, their experience
and their understanding, on the part of men. One of the main questions
for us as readers and critics of Conrad seems to me to be in what
way this gendered economy of knowledge functions in the exchange
of knowledge and uncertainty which is the act of reading and interpreting,
the question of our own place in this economy. In this
chapter I shall briefly examine the dynamics of knowledge circulation
in The Secret Agent before looking in more detail at Under Western Eyes
and Chance.
The world of The Secret Agent, one of police, anarchists and agents
provocateurs, is, in an obvious way, one in which knowledge is a valued
commodity. Yet the woman whose story is, according to Conrad’s
‘Author’s Note’, central to the novel is excluded from knowledge of
this world, both by her husband’s protective caution and habitual
secretiveness, and by her own incuriousness. Verloc tells his wife
approvingly that she had ‘no business to know’ about his work and its
risks (238), while Winnie, described as a woman of ‘philosophical,
almost disdainful incuriosity’ (237), takes an attitude to his work
which seems to resemble her general attitude to life: ‘Without “troubling
her head about it,” she was aware that it “did not stand looking
into very much”’ (241). This exclusion of the woman from knowledge
does not appear, in The Secret Agent, as the direct fulfilment of a
fantasy of male power as it does in ‘Heart of Darkness’. This is in part
because, in The Secret Agent, the exclusion is subjected to the critical
force of Conrad’s coruscating irony and is used to satirical purpose.
The habitual secrecy and restraint of the Verlocs’ marriage – which in
a sense kills them both – is clearly a parody of the secrecy and restraint
of the corrupt and suffocating bourgeois society of which Verloc is a
servant. But a further and important difference between the two texts
is that the revelation of truth to the woman – an abyss which Marlow,
loading his language with images of the deathly, approaches but never
reaches in ‘Heart of Darkness’ – actually takes place in The Secret Agent,
bringing death in its train. The figurative and descriptive language
surrounding this revelation invests the situation with symbolic resonances.
In the long and skilful build up from the moment when
Winnie learns of Stevie’s death to the moment when she stabs her
husband, she is described in terms which associate her with a sphinx-