Feminist Perspective In Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent

Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ is not a novel one would generally think to associate with feminism. It is politically heavy and generally isolates Winnie, its only female character, into the ‘private’ sphere. Annette Kolodny discusses three different interpretations of a feminist reading, but I will employ only the second; criticism by a woman which ‘treats that book from a… “feminist” perspective’ , allowing the readers to expose the patriarchy. In the case of this essay, unless otherwise specified, a liberal feminist viewpoint has been taken. This focuses primarily on the differences between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres and aims to achieve equal access, for everyone, to both. Ultimately, it will become clear that Winnie’s ability to overcome

Harrington is certainly correct to argue that Winnie receives sympathy because she is the victim of her circumstance, but the sympathy Winnie receives is more akin to that a domestic abuse victim would receive than merely a victim of the patriarchy. Winnie recognises this, and her decision to kill Verloc, therefore, may not be one that stems solely from Stevie’s death, as the novel seems to suggest (the ‘resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew with every step’; she appears to almost become Stevie in order to kill her husband (pp. 192)), but one that also originates with her own self-hatred of a wasted life. Harrington also argues Conrad’s heroines’ suicides are ‘[remedies] to the impossible liberation provided by the crime’ (Harrington, pp. 51), but this is doubtful. Winnie is described as ‘Mrs Verloc the free woman’ (pp. 191) before she kills her husband. Admittedly, Winnie does mention a ‘perfection of freedom’ (pp. 193) after killing Verloc, but this can be dismissed; her murderous rage, and therefore Verloc’s death, are merely a repercussion of her new-found identity as ‘Mrs Verloc the free woman’. Harrington essentially argues that Winnie’s role in ‘The Secret Agent’ is defined by her relationship with her husband, that, in order to understand her character, we must first examine how her husband has impacted it. ‘Women’, as Simone de Beauvoir states, ‘are made, they are not born’, but Winnie is not ‘made’ when she kills Verloc, as Harrington appears to suggest; it is her entire lifetime of choices that makes her a woman. Winnie’s suicide is not a remedy, as will be discussed in the next paragraph, to the liberation she feels, but merely a continuation of it. Winnie’s actions of defiance, taking Verloc’s money, and ‘plunging’ (pp. 193) the knife into his chest, ultimately make