Conrad and Masculinity

140 Conrad and Masculinity
like figure, a veiled image of inscrutable truth: ‘as though the skin had
been a mask’ (212); ‘sorrow with a veiled face’ (232). When she dresses
to go out, her metaphorical veil becomes a literal one – her husband
tears it off, but only reveals ‘a still unreadable face’ (256). 2 Here, as in
‘Heart of Darkness’, it is the descriptive excess which may alert us to
the intensity of desire and fear focused on the idea of a woman
gaining knowledge: the obsessive repetition of words (such as ‘immobility’),
and the need to heighten and emphasize qualities of the
dramatic: ‘prolonged immobility’ (232); ‘a frozen, contemplative
immobility’ (241); ‘her immobility amazing’ (246); ‘The perfect immobility
of her pose expressed the agitation of rage and despair, all the
potential violence of tragic passions, better than any shallow display
of shrieks, with the beating of a distracted head against the walls,
could have done’ (212). 3 The descriptive evocation of Mrs Verloc as
terrifying sphinx, as angel of destructive passion, after she has overheard
Verloc’s confession to Heat, is matched by an earlier evocation
of her as ideal angel of the domestic sphere, statuesque embodiment
of a private realm from which secret knowledge of the male world
must be excluded. This evocation is prompted by an impulse on
Verloc’s part to confess everything to her. This impulse is, however,
forestalled by the threat which it poses, in his mind, to this ideological
construction of her as pure domestic woman:
At that moment he was within a hair’s breadth of making a clean
breast of it all to his wife. The moment seemed propitious. Looking
out of the corners of his eyes, he saw her ample shoulders draped
in white, the back of her head, with the hair done for the night in
three plaits tied up with black tapes at the ends. And he forbore.
Mr. Verloc loved his wife as a wife should be loved—that is, maritally,
with the regard one has for one’s chief possession. This head
arranged for the night, those ample shoulders, had an aspect of
familiar sacredness—the sacredness of domestic peace. She moved
not, massive and shapeless like a recumbent statue in the rough; he
remembered her wide-open eyes looking into the empty room. She
was mysterious, with the mysteriousness of living beings. The farfamed
Secret Agent . . . was not the man to break into such
mysteries.
(179–80)
This amounts to a powerful ironic statement of the close connection
between the idealization of woman as mysterious and sacred and her