Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth: The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance

Abstract

The gendered circulation of knowledge, which I have described in ‘Heart of Darkness’, reappears in several of Conrad’s later works, notably The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes and Chance, but in each it is disrupted or questioned to a greater degree. The basic paradigm is one in which knowledge, both literal knowledge of particular facts and events and existential knowledge, is sought, shared, competed for and otherwise circulated among groups of men, including the implied author, male narrators (such as Marlow or the language-teacher in Under Western Eyes), male narratees and implied male readers. This circulation involves and is facilitated by the exclusion of women from such knowledge, combined with a tendency to identify them symbolically with it. The women represent the truth, particularly ungraspable metaphysical truth, but they do not possess it. Another way of putting this would be to say that the exclusion of women from the space within which men’s knowledge circulates encourages the identification of the truth ‘beyond’, ultimate or unattainable truth, with the feminine. Jacques Derrida, summing up both the paradox and the logic of Nietzsche’s gendered epistemology, has commented on this incompatibility between representing and possessing truth:

How is it possible that woman, who herself is truth, does not believe in truth? And yet, how is it possible to be truth and still believe in it?¹