Feminine Allegiance and Fidelity in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Abstract

This study analyzes Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent from the feminist point of view. Women serve family and society by even sacrificing their personal ambitions and resources. The research explores the reasons behind the valorization of a female character, Mrs. Winnie Verloc, who persevere the human values through her character; feminine allegiance and fidelity. Conrad’s main motive is to represent the genuine level of allegiance and fidelity of a woman to protect family values and familial bonding. Nancy Chodorow’s ideas have been taken as methodological tool to interpret. She proposes that it is a woman’s mothering process that gives way to a gendered identity. Additionally she puts forward the ideas that a mother is naturally able to relate to her daughter, and this bond or connection between mother and daughter helps in the development of the feminine identity is clearly portrays in the novel. The research finds that it is essential to preserve feminine fidelity and allegiance in order to uphold family peace and social solidarity in every human society. The project argues that Conrad’s this novel has contributed on representation of patriarchal oppression in British society through the diverse and extreme level of suffering faced by women character. Women characters in the novel are dramatized in stereotypical, traditional and pathetic way. But Conrad’s main motive is to represent the extreme level of patriarchal domination and insensitive patriarchy through women’s suffering which operated in the British society.