Winnie's Freedom in Joseph Conrad's the Secret Agent

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On consideration of Joseph Conrad’s three major novels “Lord Jim”, “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Agent” it is noticeable that the protagonists are of male gender. Nevertheless, it is crucial to allow for the importance in the role of female characters. As they generally serve to make up the background story of Conrad’s novels, they might sometimes be assigned a minor role in the course of the action. However, they are by no means designed as flat characters. Conrad precisely created the female characters of his works on providing them with features and characteristics worth a deeper analysis. The following dissertation will investigate the role of Winnie in “The Secret Agent”. In this connection, her personal freedom will be of particular importance. If we imagine the set-up of characters in “The Secret Agent” as a sort of network, we discover that the latter is formed by three groups which interact in the course of the story and which have a certain structure and form of organisation. While the group of anarchists is rather vdisordered and has no particular leader, the Embassy and the Police are set up strictly hierarchical. Adolf Verloc, Winnie’s husband, is in the broadest sense part of each group. He is not only bound to them as member, employee and spy but interlinks the three groups. Within these groups, the associates are either bound to discreetness or disclosure and their positions are marked by titles. Furthermore, they do not have the freedom of speech or action. Consequently, their freedom is limited by the hierarchical system they belong to. They are commonly dependent on the decisions of their superiors. Winnie’s position in this network of characters, however, is relatively unbound. She is certainly linked by her marriage to Verloc, as well as to her mother and her brother Stevie, but within the family ties, she is in fact not bound to a
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