Abstract
This chapter engages in a reparative reading of Joseph Conrad’s late novels, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, to argue that the central female characters represent the possibility of hope. Sedgwick’s famous critique of paranoid reading enables a new understanding of how Winnie Verloc and Natalia Haldin preserve a queer space of ethics within their otherwise pessimistic novels. By contrast, Chance features an explicit disavowal of feminist or queer alternatives to the status quo, and therefore does not sustain the other novels’ association of women and hope. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that Conrad’s domestic women explore ethical alternatives that are unavailable to the late century “New Women.”
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Notes
- 1.
I am thinking particularly of the death of Lyndall in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, along with similarly pessimistic representations by Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand, and others.
- 2.
Prior to this collection, most Conrad criticism has not engaged with the “reading wars.” One important exception is Joyce Wexler, “Under Western Eyes and Terrorism Today,” Conradiana 49, no. 1 (2017): 53–74, https://doi.org/10.1353/cnd.2017.0003, who makes a strong case for a hopeful, rather than a skeptical, reading of Under Western Eyes . Two other instances, less related to my argument, are: Hong–Shu Teng, “Conspiracy Reading as Surface Reading: A Case Study of Conrad’s Fiction,” Midwest Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2019): 187–208, https://search-proquest.com, who claims a surface reading of conspiracy in The Secret Agent, and Cannon Schmitt, “Tidal Conrad (Literally),” Victorian Studies 55, no. 1 (2012): 7–29, https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.55.1.7, who employs a variation of surface reading to argue for the significance of the details of ships and sailing in Conrad’s fiction.
- 3.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 146.
- 4.
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London, UK: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1923), 376–77.
- 5.
See Rachel Hollander, “Thinking Otherwise: Ethics and Politics in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes,” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 3 (2015): 14–15.
- 6.
Rochelle L. Rives, “Face Values: Optics as Ethics in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent ,” Criticism 56, no. 1 (2014): 89–117, https://muse.jhu.edu, shares my interest in Winnie, Stevie, and ethics. Focusing on the concept of the face in Emmanuel Levinas, she analyzes Winnie’s murder of her husband as an “anti-narrative” action and then (in contrast to my argument) suggests that Ossipon achieves an ethical recognition of otherness at the end of the novel.
- 7.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 137.
- 8.
The Assistant Commissioner famously suggests that the central events of the plot might be considered a “domestic drama,” Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London, UK: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1923), 222, and several critics have productively emphasized the Verloc home in their readings of the novel. Wendy Moffat, “Domestic Violence: The Simple Tale within The Secret Agent,” ELT 37, no. 4 (1994): 465–89, https://search.ebscohost.com, was one of the first feminist critics to highlight the domestic violence in the Verloc marriage as a subversive element in the novel. Rishona Zimring, “Conrad’s Pornography Shop,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 (1997): 331, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.1997.0055, builds on this understanding of Winnie’s rebellion and connects her position to those of the spies in the novel, calling them the “nation’s housewi[ves].” Brian W. Shaffer, “Domestic Ironies: Housekeeping as Mankeeping in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, ” in Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays, ed. Vanessa D. Dickerson (New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1995), 313–29, focuses on Winnie’s role as “housekeeper” and claims that Conrad is extremely critical of both Victorian domesticity and the alternatives to it represented by the New Woman. Bev Soane, “The Colony at the Heart of Empire: Domestic Space in ‘The Secret Agent,’” The Conradian 30, no. 1 (2005): 46–58, compares the domestic home to the colonies, while Stephen Bernstein, “Politics, Modernity, and Domesticity: The Gothicism of Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Clio 32, no. 3 (2003): 285–301, https://search-proquest.com, and Ellen Burton Harrington, “The Anarchist’s Wife: Joseph Conrad’s Debt to Sensation Fiction in The Secret Agent,” Conradiana 36, nos. 1–2 (2004): 51–63, https://search-proquest.com, focus on the generic conventions of the domestic plot (comparing The Secret Agent to the gothic novel and the sensation novel, respectively). And finally, Christina Matthews, “‘The Manner of Exploding’: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Men at Home,” Conradiana 42, no. 3 (2010): 17–44, https://doi.org/10.1353/cnd.2010.0018, suggests that the turn to domestic drama is a necessary shift for a “post-imperialist” London.
- 9.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 177.
- 10.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 5.
- 11.
Soane, “The Colony,” The Conradian, 52 similarly reads Winnie’s “indifference” as a form of political resistance to her marriage and Verloc’s power.
- 12.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 58. Stephanie J. Brown, “Female Citizenship, Independence, and Consent in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Women’s Studies 45, nos. 1–4 (2016): 46, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2015.1111838, reads this passage to suggest the fragmentation of Winnie’s identity, as it implies discontinuity between her unmarried and married selves.
- 13.
See Rachel Hollander, “Indifference as Resistance: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Ethics in Three Guineas,” Feminist Modernist Studies 2, no. 1 (2019): 81–103.
- 14.
Pointing out the overlap between spheres symbolized by the co-existence of the home and the pornography shop, Zimring, “Pornography Shop,” Modern Fiction Studies, 329 claims that Winnie cannot play the role of angel of the house.
- 15.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 170–71.
- 16.
Zimring, “Pornography Shop,” Modern Fiction Studies, 325, and Rives, “Face Values,” Criticism, 106, have read the significance of Stevie’s ethics similarly, with Zimring comparing his “poor, poor” and “bad, bad” to other meaningful Conradian pronouncements, including “the horror, the horror.” She notes that Zdzisław Najder argues that Stevie does not escape Conrad’s irony (n. 11).
- 17.
See Carola Kaplan, “No Refuge: the Duplicity of Domestic Safety in Conrad’s Fiction,” The Conradian 22, nos. 1–2 (1997): 146, for a bleak Lacanian analysis of the novel’s domestic sphere, including the “emotional incest” between Winnie and Stevie.
- 18.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 251.
- 19.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 251.
- 20.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 251.
- 21.
Several other critics discuss the significance of Winnie’s “freedom .” Bernstein, “Politics,” Clio, 292, and Harrington, “Anarchist’s Wife,” Conradiana, 60–61, both read it as a false promise, one that does not carry the optimistic implications of the gothic or sensation genres from which the scene derives. Brown, “Female Citizenship,” Women’s Studies, 50–51, also reads it negatively, as a critique of women’s increasing calls for freedom . By contrast, Pei-Wen Clio Kao, “The Flaneur/Flaneuse and the Benjaminian Law of ‘Dialectic at a Standstill’ in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Conradiana 45, no. 2 (2013): 141, https://muse.jhu.edu, suggests that the murder of her husband grants Winnie the freedom to become a Flaneuse.
- 22.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 262.
- 23.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 263–64.
- 24.
Brown, “Female Citizenship,” Women’s Studies, 51 suggests that Winnie is described in the language of the New Woman in order to undermine it, while Moffat, “Domestic Violence,” ELT, 479–80, argues that the clichéd language of the end of the novel represents the limits of Conrad’s imagination, rather than Winnie’s.
- 25.
Conrad, The Secret Agent, 307.
- 26.
In a recent article, Jay Parker, “Divine Violence, Ironic Silence and Poetic Justice in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” Law and Literature (2020): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1800313 makes a similar point about the end of the novel.
- 27.
Joseph Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether: Three Stories (London, UK: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1923), 59.
- 28.
See in particular Phyllis Toy, “Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes: The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language” in Joseph Conrad: East European, Polish, and Worldwide, ed. Wieslaw Krajka (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1999), 41–59, and Carola Kaplan, “Conrad’s Narrative Occupation of/by Russia in Under Western Eyes,” Conradiana 27 (1995): 97–114.
- 29.
See Keith Carabine, The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), 128–73, for an analysis of the evolution of Natalia’s character in revision. He argues that she is defined in contrast to the other revolutionary characters.
- 30.
See Gail Fraser, “Mediating Between the Sexes: Conrad’s Chance,” The Review of English Studies, 43, no. 169 (1992): 81–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLIII.169.81; Jay Parker, “Rortyian Contingency and Ethnocentrism in Chance,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 39, no. 1 (2014): 17–35, https://search.ebscohost.com; Yumiko Iwashimizu, “Chance: Conrad’s Portrait of a Feminist,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 39, no. 1 (2014): 147–58, https://search.ebscohost.com; and Pei-Wen Clio Kao, “From Incapable ‘Angel in the House’ to Invincible ‘New Woman’ in Marlovian Narratives: Representing Womanhood in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Chance,” The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 39, no. 1 (2014): 116–129, https://search.ebscohost.com.
- 31.
Joseph Conrad, Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (London, UK: Dent and Sons Ltd., 1923), 261–62.
- 32.
Conrad, Chance, 335.
- 33.
Conrad, Chance, 336.
- 34.
Conrad, Chance, 443.
- 35.
Conrad, Chance, 347–48.
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Hollander, R. (2021). “The new sun is rising”: Conrad, Women, and Hope. In: Parker, J., Wexler, J. (eds) Joseph Conrad and Postcritique. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72499-3_3
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