Domesticity as Gender Othering in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Abstract

This paper proposes to explore gender relations in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Operating from the knowledge that gender is culturally determined feminists criticize male-dominated patriarchal societies, which they argue marginalize or discount women by limiting their opportunity for self-definition and self-actualization. The question that needs to be addressed, then, is: Is gender relation in The Secret Agent constructed around stereotypical representations? Or can this work be read otherwise? Our assumption is that Conrad’s criticism of such patriarchal system is done through irony. The ‘Edenic home’ that would embody Conrad’s cherished ideals is, as we know, a home browbeaten by a political exile. We shall argue that Conrad deals narratively with his own traumatic history by displacing it onto Winnie’s otherness. This traumatic event is   ironically expressed in the falling down of the novel’s house, the house of an overweening, unquestioned patriarchy. On one hand, the fallen house symbolizes the ‘idealization’ of the Western society. On the other hand, it raises ideological issues in relation to the “Other”, the oppressed.

We shall argue that the evidence of his biography, correspondence, and the fictional work under study suggest a complex relationship between the writer, the women in his life, and the fictional female characters.  The importance of the female character, Winnie Verloc, may be explained by the fact that women played a vital role during his youth in Poland. In a letter of 1900 to Edward Garnett, Conrad himself remarked on the benefit he had received from the close bond and the extraordinary ‘sister-cult’ established amongst the Bobrowski women.