Images of The Uncanny in "The Secret Agent"
... Winnie is described as, “massive and shapeless like a recumbent statue in the rough […] she was mysterious with the mysteriousness of living beings” (113). This quotation could mean that Winnie is indeed lifeless but that she has an uncanny lifelike quality, or conversely, it could mean that, although she is very much alive, she’s inanimate to the point of suggesting lifelessness. Each possibility strikes me as equally grotesque. After she learns of Stevie’s death, Winnie sits “rigidly she became very rigid, to the point “that she was not able to turn her head” (131). She sits rigidly, “the perfect immobility of her pose expressing the agitation of rage and despair” (134) until finally “quiet[ing] down to a complete, unreadable stillness” (148). Mr. Verloc became frustrated with the way she was hiding her face in her hands because he couldn’t tell if her was “talking to a dummy or a live woman” (162). When he tried to pull her out of her pose, she reacted like a rag-doll, “sway[ing] forth bodily to his tug, [… and] he was startled to feel her so helplessly limp” (148). Winnie’s stony stillness and rigidity is occasionally interspersed with mechanical and jerky movements, reminiscent of a “puppet, marionette, [or] automat[on]” (Kayser 183). According to Kayser, “suddenness and surprise are essential elements of the grotesque” and Winnie’s “brusque movements” have a distinctly grotesque quality because they seem like such a departure from her habitual state of stillness. When Chief Inspector Heat presents her with the nametag from Stevie’s jacket, she “[takes] it mechanically in both her hands” (131). As Verloc and Heat moved into the other room to discuss Stevie’s demise, “Mrs. Verloc sprang up suddenly from her chair and ran to [the door] as if to fling it open but instead fell on her knees with her ear to the keyhole” (131). This passage reveals that she doesn’t seem to be in complete control of her movements. Her movements are again described as mechanical when she rises to her feet “as if raised by a spring” with the realization that she can leave the house and her husband behind (159). After killing Mr. Verloc, she looks up “mechanically” at the clock on her way to throw herself over the bridge (169). Mrs. Verloc’s behaviour strikes me as truly grotesque and uncanny because, Freud says, there is a “doubt [in my mind concerning whether Winnie,] an apparently animate being, is really alive (Freud 226). Kayser believes that the mask is an effective image of the grotesque in that, “the mask, instead of covering a living and breathing face, had taken over the role of the face itself. If one were to tear the mask off, the grinning image of the bare skull would come to light” (184). Winnie Verloc exemplifies the uncanny use of the mask, especially after Stevie’s death, when she transforms into some sort of automaton or wax creature and hides behind a mask, (or veil). Her eyes are described as “two black holes” which suggest the appearance of a mask (132). She sits at her post behind the shop counter and assumes her grieving posture, with “the tips of her fingers contracted against forehead, as though the skin had been as mask which she was ready to tear off violently” (134). Even as her husband tried comforting her and in turn berating her for her sulkiness, “she persisted in hiding her face” (146) When at last she uncovered her face, her features were set into “a frozen, contemplative immobility” (153). Verloc tried to appease her by appealing to her sense of fate, saying that “what’s done can’t be undone” but although she “gave a slight start, [not] a muscle of her white face moved in the least” (152). Mr. Verloc isn’t comforted when Winnie raises her head since “something peculiar in the blackness of his wife’s eyes disturbed his optimism” (159). She wears a blank look on her face and an “inappropriate stare […] concentrated on some point beyond Mr. Verloc’s person” to the blank wall behind him (151) and her attention was eerily focused. Her blank facial expression coincides with her eventual conclusion that she is ultimately not the one to blame for her brother’s demise and instead, convinces herself that her own husband had every intent of murdering him. With this new conviction, she goes upstairs, dresses for mourning and upon her return to the living room she looks “like a masked and mysterious visitor of impenetrable intentions” behind her black veil (162). The notion of the mask strikes me as grotesque for a different reason than Kayser. To me, masks can conceal a person’s identity to the point where you can’t be sure whom you’re dealing with. Masks also serve to hide a person’s facial expressions and therefore their intentions and thought processes. They give their wearer an aura of uncertainty and ambiguity, which strikes me as distinctly uncanny or grotesque, often leaving only the eyes exposed. Winnie’s eyes are also characterized in a grotesque manner. Although this paper doesn’t have space for the two pages of notes I have on Winnie’s eyes alone, I intend to argue that her eyes are her most grotesque feature. I disagree with Bakhtin’s argument that “eyes have no part in [grotesque] images; [because] they express an individual, so to speak, self-sufficient human life, which is not essential to the grotesque” (316). To coin the old saying, the eyes are the windows of the soul, and I think that there is a often a discrepancy between the image an individual presents to the world and the inner workings of their soul. Such is the case with Winnie Verloc, she “preserve[s] an air of unfathomable indifference” (2) but inside she may have gone completely mad with rage. Even before she learns of Stevie’s death, her eyes serve to simultaneously hide and reveal her emotions. I believe the blankness of her gaze serves to mask her resentment that she had to marry Verloc in order to protect and care for Stevie. Justifiably, she could go about angrily glaring at her husband and brother for forcing her into the marriage, but instead “her big dark eyes stared wide open, inert and dark” masking her bitterness (112). Supporting my theory, the dullness of her eyes is at its peak when she is avoiding marital relations with her husband. Instead of showing him the disgust she must feel, “her eyes fix in a dreamy, quiet stare” concealing her true emotions (113). Similarly, to hide her embarrassment of working in a disreputable store she has a “customer stare” which she only softens “to mere indifference” (127) for Adolf’s friends and Chief Inspector Heat. Her eyes become even more grotesque after Stevie dies. They become more than merely “incurious” (125, 127) they are now “crazed” (133). When she could bring herself to look at her husband her “dilated pupils lots their far-off fixity [and] followed her husbands movements with the effect of black care and impenetrable attention” (158). When they made eye contact, her “enlarged pupils […] received his stare into their unfathomable depths”(157) and the intensity of her eyes gave a “new and startling expression” to her generally placid face (165). The peculiarity in the blackness of her stare could be an indicator of the murdering rage building in her. The experience of uncanny feelings is easily associated “to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. [Freud believes that this] fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him” ( Freud 242). Freud reminds us that the living can also be seen as uncanny, especially “when we ascribe evil intentions to [them]” (243). As Winnie stalks up on her husband, knife in hand ready to kill him, she almost transforms into Stevie, “the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes” (165). Mrs. Verloc had either gone murdering mad or was taken over by a puppeteer, perhaps even Stevie was guiding her from the grave. It is in this grotesque state, she avenges her brother and kills her husband. Since it remains unclear whether Winnie had presence of mind at the time of the murder, we find it hard to ascribe blame for the crime. This is hi...