The Secret Agent: A Woman's Image

Melodi Ozdemir

English 170

Pro. Lehman

19 May 2016

Essay Id3: A Woman’s Image

For years Ms. Sauvage was abused by her husband. Her hopeless attempt at suicide which displayed a significant amount of her cry for help, turned out to be unsuccessful therefore, as an end result, she shot him. Every year numbers of women are physically or psychologically abused by their partners and as a consequence are so damaged mentally, that killing seems like their only possible solution. Everyone in feminist circles and in the justice system were not at ease with this case. Although, when you are a victim of physical and verbal abuse and you kill your abuser, you become like him in a way — you choose violence. In The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad,

Verloc who as a character is very repulsive. Famous for his sea stories, Conrad uses boating allusions to make Winnie's sacrifice more vivid to the reader. When Winnie meets Comrade Ossipon on her way to commit suicide, she cries about her sacrificial marriage, "Seven years - seven years a good wife to him, the kind, the good, the generous, the - And he loved me. Oh, yes. He loved me till I sometimes wished myself - Seven years" (226). Her sacrifice is, pathetically, ironically, unnoticed by her family. The reason to why conrad depicted Winnie's character to be viewed this way, somewhat like a woman without a say or voice, might have something to do with “Conrad's creation of female figures….” “...of an exalted virtue has already been mentioned. Some of them are of such remarkable purity that one wants to exclaim admiringly with Turveydrop...To elevate women to pedestals is also, of course, to debase them; it makes them weaker than they are, it limits the range of their humanity, It assumes that it is for men, not for them.” (Burkhart

Although she’s a heroically tragic heroine of The Secret Agent, Women have every right to feel or speak their minds just like men. They should be able to make their own individual choices undisturbed regardless of what role or profession in society they are in. Men need to embrace and/or respect this ideology on life, to not cling and drag ancient societies' double standards of women. Therefore, characters such as Winnie, portray a significant amount of moral lessons that should be learned from. Her silence and passive personality is somewhat why Stevie died and why she murdered her husband. The message Conrad might be displaying is for females to use her as an outcome if some sort of order does not take