Conrad and Masculinity

82 Conrad and Masculinity
disappearance of the sexual self – unless of course MacWhirr carries
his unfurled umbrella to Far Eastern brothels (which is the sort of
information Conrad tends not to give us) or finds objects of desire on
board his ship. Hawthorn argues that ‘a significant change has taken
place in MacWhirr during the typhoon’, in that he is ‘able to imagine’
the situation of the Chinese men below decks (NT, 230–1). In this
empathy, however limited, with the physical trauma of the ‘low’,
Other, exoticized/denigrated body within the body of his own ship,
MacWhirr has, then, acquired some ability to think through his own
body. This is perhaps one reason for that emphasis on the bodily
throughout the story from the opening description to all those gropings
during the storm.
The reading of The Secret Agent which follows will explore the
meaning (and resistance to meaning) of the body of Stevie in the
terms which have been outlined: the grotesque, the hysterical, the
abject. Showing how the status and ultimate fate of Stevie’s ambivalently
masculine body and identity is interwoven with Conrad’s moral
and political critique of urban Western society, it will suggest that this
critique can be read through the body to reveal the importance of
masculinity as a part of that social structure, implicated with class,
economic exchange, law and crime, domination and struggle.
Stallybrass and White identify and analyse the construction of the
‘low’ urban Other, involving ideas of the body and the social formation,
in nineteenth-century discourses, including ‘the parliamentary
report, the texts of social reform, the hysterical symptom of the
psychoanalyst’s patient ... the poet’s journal and the novel’ (PPT,
125). The urban low is prominent in The Secret Agent from the start.
The Dickensian scene-setting of the early pages includes description of
Verloc’s house as ‘one of those grimy brick houses which existed in
large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned’ (3), of visitors
to his shop with ‘traces of mud on the bottom of their nether
garments’ (4, emphasis added) and of Verloc himself, with his ‘air of
having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed’ (4). Thus
early links are established between the slums of late nineteenthcentury
London, the lower bodies of the anarchists and Verloc’s own
complex disreputableness (lacking a respectable occupation, but
having several of the other sort). Verloc’s association with an ‘unmade
bed’ hints at sexual decadence. The association of slums with darkness
is present (‘before ... reconstruction dawned’), even if tinged with
irony; so too, later in Chapter 1, is the rhetoric which reshapes the
causal link between poverty and disease into a metaphorical identity