This document provides a summary and analysis of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. It discusses how the novel initially seems to construct a divide between Eastern and Western national identities, representing Russia as the Orientalized East opposed to the Western identity of Britain. However, Conrad also begins to challenge and deconstruct this binary. The Russian character Vladimir both reinforces Eastern stereotypes but also mimics the West in unsettling ways, complicating the simple East/West dichotomy. Ultimately, Conrad's novel questions fixed notions of national and regional identity by showing their instability and the ways in which Eastern and Western identities can blend together.

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Lisa Francavilla
May 20, 2012
Professor Jed Esty
20th century Trans-Atlantic Fiction
Cosmopolitan Conrad: Regional, National, and Cosmopolitan Identity in
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale offers increasingly relevant themes of
nationalism and globalization in the twenty-first century. The novel initially seems to construct a
regional divide between Eastern and Western national identity. Yet Conrad also deconstructs the
dichotomy that he sets up in the beginning of the text. Ultimately, the instability of the East/West
binary in the novel denationalizes and displaces the geographic divide in The Secret Agent.
Escaping the limitations of nationalism and regionalism allows Conrad to propose a new type of
identity. After erasing the boundaries upholding nationality and regionalism, the text creates a
cosmopolitanism that theorizes a freer, more pleasurable, and potentially dangerous society.
In Orientalism, Edward Said constructs a theory that describes the bifurcation of the East
and the West. For Said, the Orient is represented in Western discourse as the Other, always
inferior to the West. In delineating the East, Orientalism has also constructed the West as its
opposite and “contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (Said 1-2).With its emphasis on
ontology and textual discourse, Said’s theory is directly relevant to the theme and form of
Conrad’s The Secret Agent. However, while Said’s study focuses on the Middle East as the
Orient and includes Russia as an Orientalizing and colonial culture, I argue that Conrad’s novel
positions Russian identity as an Eastern construct that opposes Western values. Thus, through his

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characterization of British and Russian nationality, Conrad attempts to define East from West in
The Secret Agent. Although he eventually subverts these distinctions, Conrad’s novel initially
seems to perpetuate these distinctions between regional identities.
Conrad’s The Secret Agent is a novel that depicts the events surrounding an attempted
terrorist bombing of the Greenwich astronomy laboratory. The attack is ordered by a foreign
embassy and organized by Adolf Verloc, a secret agent and anarchist leader, as he persuades his
naive brother-in-law to plant a failed bomb, and is himself murdered by his wife in retaliation.
Critics agree that the foreign embassy that employs Verloc corresponds to that of Russia,
although it is not explicitly specified in the text1. By specifying that Verloc, his wife Winnie, and
Winnie’s mother and brother are a mixture of British and French ethnicity, the text mixes British
and French nationality into a unified identity. In contrast to British and French identity, The
Secret Agent’s Vladimir is the foremost Russian character in the novel and represents the
Orientalist conception of the East. Although the narrator initially describes him in de-
nationalized terms as a generic “young man with a shaven, big face, sitting in a roomy arm-chair
before a vast mahogany writing-table,” the British characters depict him as an Oriental Other
(Conrad 50). We see this when they compare him repeatedly to a fish; he is both “rosy about the
gills” and metaphorized as a dog-fish, “a noxious, rascally-looking, altogether detestable beast,
with a sort of smooth face” (24, 163). In contrast, the Western European Verloc is repeatedly
described as a pig, “podgy” and “burly in a fat pig style” (18, 16). Critics have pointed out that
Conrad is a misogynist in the way he describes all of his characters as animals in this novel.
Nevertheless, the contrast between the nature and habitats of cold-blooded fish and warm-
blooded pigs are considerable. They represent the dissimilarities between Eastern and Western
1 For an example pleasesee Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s article“Abroad Only by a Fiction:Creation,Irony, and
Necessity in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.”

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identities as a difference in species, and accord to the de-humanization that is a consequence of
Orientalism’s conception of Eastern identity. This dehumanization is directed specifically at the
Oriental, who is both despised and exoticized as an impenetrable Other. True to Orientalist
ideology, the description of Eastern identity in Conrad is negatively inflected, as can be seen in
the words “noxious” and “detestable.” Moreover, Vladimir is accorded the status of the
dehumanized savage when he is portrayed as lacking rationalism: “The inventor of the bomb
plot, the Embassy First Secretary Vladimir, with all his suavity and veneer of civilization, is
Conrad’s representative of the essential irrationalism, or barbarism, of Russia, which is
represented by the attaché’s Oriental manners and features” (Avrom Fleishman 202). Conrad’s
work depicts the ways in which British characters use language to construct differences and deny
a common humanity in Russian identity.
This dehumanization strategy partly relies on stereotyping the East. To do this, the West
essentializes Eastern identity, characterizing it as mysterious and isolated from the West. It
disallows multiple identities or interpretations of Russia and denies any possibility of change,
instead forming a flat caricature to describe the Orient. We see this essentialization in the text
when it describes Verloc’s “intense meditation, like a sort of Chinese wall,” that “isolated him
completely from the phenomena of this world of vain effort” (Conrad 120). It is significant that
the wall is specifically Chinese, and that it being so acts as what Homay King labels an
“enigmatic signifier” (4). For King, an enigmatic signifier is that which contains indecipherable
meaning. As an enigmatic signifier, the Chinese wall cuts Verloc off from the Western world and
from his own Western identity. He is unable to bridge the dichotomy of East and West, cut off
from the Western world. This description characterizes the Orient as “isolat[ing]” and “intense,”
qualities that reflect the unknowability of the Orient as a culture that is stereotyped as both

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impenetrable and mysterious. Meditation, as a different ontology from the Western emphasis on
science, is denigrated because it cannot connect Verloc to the Occident, but instead disconnects
him from the West. The opposition of Eastern mysticism (as portrayed in the “intense
meditation”) and Western science is a factor in justifying the disparagement of the Orient.
Vladimir recognizes this Western emphasis on science when he tells Verloc that “[t]he sacro-
sanct fetish of to-day is science,” but shows his Oriental contempt for it in deriding science as
“that wooden faced panjandrum” (Conrad 28). Vladimir’s analysis of Western culture exposes
science as a method of justification for Orientalism’s denigration of the East. It is part of the
overall essentializing project of Russian nationalist identity in Conrad’s novel.
The British view of Russia is not only essentializing, but often racist. Thus Vladimir’s
language is heavily inflected with Orientalist description that defines his personal characteristics
in terms of race, especially his “central asian guttural tones” and the “Oriental phraseology” that
is “not only utterly un-English, but absolutely un-European” (Conrad 32, 171, 24). Vladimir’s
function is often as a national and Orientalist allegory: “Vladimir possesses a Slavic name and a
mode of speech whose guttural intonations would mark him as a stereotypically Russian
character within the context of Conrad’s often Slavophobic oeuvre” (Christian Haines 90). For
Haines, then, these attributes construct what he describes as “containers—albeit rather porous
ones—for traits that make individual characters represent national tendencies” (90). This
emphasis on biological characteristics as determining nationality and race reflects the problem of
essentialism which constructs the division of East and West as insoluble and ignores its common
humanity. Vladmir is therefore circumscribed and defined by his race, which as previously
shown is metaphorized as a foreign species. The text describes Vladimir as: “[d]escended from
generations victimised by the instruments of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and

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individually afraid of the police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether independent of his
judgment, of his reason, of his experience. He was born to it. But that sentiment...did not stand in
the way of his immense contempt for the English police” (Conrad 169). The text conflates
Vladimir’s individual identity with his Oriental race and nationality, thus defining him only in
terms of the West’s view of Russia. His personal characteristics are therefore racial stereotypes
of his Eastern identity. As part of its focus on race, the Orientalist view of the East features an
Russian identity that is unchanging, static, and inherited. This stereotype is combined with the
notion that Russia, as the uncivilized Orient, is racially unable to understand or reproduce
Western democracy. Unable to trust either the British model of liberal democracy or the English
police because of his “inherited weakness,” Vladimir embodies Orientalism’s notion of the
Oriental as “in a state of Oriental despotism...[and] imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism”
(Said Orientalism, 102). Thus, as a Russian character, Vladimir is defined by generations of
Orientalist notions about Eastern culture that he cannot escape. He represents the way in which
personal traits are confused with the racist reductions of the Orient.
The Orientalist relationship between dichotomies of race and notions of governmentality
are illuminated by Antonio Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci defines
hegemony as containing two “superstructural levels,” “civil society” that is “the ensemble of
organisms commonly called ‘private’” as well as “political society,” which is the state. Gramsci
describes how civil society and the state interact: “these two levels correspond on the one hand to
the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the
other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State” (12). For
Gramsci, hegemony is necessary to persuade the subaltern or under-privileged groups to consent
to their rule by the dominant group, so that the use of force is only necessary if hegemony fails.

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Thus, the state requires both hegemony and coercion to rule, two factors that are important in
The Secret Agent. The regional divide at work in The Secret Agent derives from two different
formulas for Gramscian notions of civil and political society in the state. For example, Vladimir
regards England as “absurd” for its “sentimental regard for individual liberty” (Conrad 26). He
sees England’s emphasis on cultural hegemony and civil society instead of coercion as an
international threat for counter-revolutionary forces. In many respects, the domestic British
police (ironized in Inspector Heat) agree with Vladimir. However, Heat’s boss, the Assistant
Commissioner, is determined for many reasons (some personal, some deriving from “a sudden
and alert mistrust” of the British police system) to find the guilty perpetrator instead of placing
blame on the anarchists as an excuse to crack down harder on them (82). The Assistant
Commissioner’s efforts parallel the British ideal of liberal democracy as emphasizing cultural
hegemony over force. Meanwhile, Vladimir, concerned about Britain as a haven for international
revolutionaries, arranges a terrorist attack in Britain to goad the country into adopting force
instead of hegemony. Vladimir represents the reactionary, anti-democratic stereotype of Eastern
identity that is unable to understand what the West sees as its own more enlightened system of
government. Thus, the “game” played by Vladimir, the Assistant Commissioner, and the
anarchists is that of a sliding scale between hegemony and coercion, with Britain and Russia at
opposite ends. Conrad illustrates here that the differentiation between Orient and Occident is
founded on political as well as racial prejudice. Yet in the novel the two become conflated so that
“political questions are disguised as cultural ones, and as such become insoluble” (Gramsci 149).
This is illustrated when Vladimir tells the Assistant Commissioner that he thinks that Britain is
irresponsible towards the European community in allowing anarchists freedom of expression:
“I’ve always felt that we ought to be good Europeans besides -- I mean governments and men”

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(Conrad 172). The Assistant Commissioner points out in response that Russia and Britain are at
opposite extremes in the political spectrum of force and cultural hegemony: “Yes...Only you
look at Europe from its other end” (172). Therefore, Russian nationalist identity is constructed as
the opposite of Britain’s. The difference in political belief is flattened into cultural and racial bias
in the novel, leading to a strong divide between East and West.
This split is inflected by the West’s fear of the East, despite Western belief in its own
superiority. The characterization of the dangerous Oriental by the British is seen in Verloc’s fear
of Vladimir in the novel. When Vladimir turns to Verloc and “advanced into the room with such
determination that the very ends of his quaintly old-fashioned bow-necktie seemed to bristle with
unspeakable menaces,” Verloc is terrified (Conrad 24). The threatening nature of the East is
described in the “menace” Vladimir poses, which is so strong and “unspeakable” as to strike the
usually eloquent speaker dumb. Moreover, Vladimir’s movement is described as “so swift and
fierce” that Verloc “quailed inwardly” (24). This scene of a Western European frightened by a
Russian man’s way of walking, along with the absurdity of Verloc’s fear of a bow-tie, ironizes
the heightened and absurd nature of Britain’s fear of Russia. Michael Matin investigates the
widespread fear of invasion in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, and situates The Secret
Agent within this historical context: “Conrad, in fact, employs in The Secret Agent many of the
signal devices of both espionage and invasion fiction in the process of depicting myriad ways in
which British society is imperiled by Continental miscreants” (253). The threat of Russia is
constructed against British nationalistic sentiment, so that Matin observes Great Britain’s fear of
invasion stems partly from its own isolation in foreign affairs. Historically, Britain maintained a
haughty national aloofness while other powers formed alliances in the volatile political climate
of Conrad’s time. Linking this disdain of alliances to Britain’s nationalistic fervor, Matin writes

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that: “It was during this era that the phrase ‘Splendid Isolation’ was elevated to the status of a
jingoistic slogan meant to conjure up visions of a lofty political self-sufficiency to match the
island nation’s geographical insularity” (275). Vladimir tries to exaggerate the underlying British
fear of its own vulnerability for his own purposes when he “threaten[s] society with all sorts of
horrors…apropos of this explosion in Greenwich park,” so that an upper-class British woman is
convinced that “[i]t appears we all ought to quake in our shoes at what’s coming” (Conrad 169).
Thus, the Eastern threat described by Orientalism not only defines Vladimir as a Russian but also
shapes English identity and nationality around it. It is a menace that Vladimir is aware of and
attempts to use for his own purposes. By harnessing the threatening nature of its own identity,
the East is more than simply a passive object. This complicates and subverts the simple power
dynamic that Conrad sets up in the beginning of The Secret Agent between East and West.
While Conrad first constructs an East/West cleavage in his work, he later begins to
challenge this binary relationship and one-sided power dynamic. He does this through the use of
Eastern mimicry to showcase the West’s vulnerability to the East. Therefore, part of the fear
caused by Russian nationality is that it is too similar to British identity. To counter this, the
Britain attempts to characterize Russia as a lesser identity. While Conrad’s construction of
opposing Eastern and Western identities in the novel is important, it would be reductive to argue
that Conrad simply creates a dichotomy between the two nationalities. Instead, as Lloyd
Fernando argues, “[i]t would be too easy to reduce the moral challenges Conrad's characters
faced to that of making a choice between Eastern and Western values” (82). For Fernando, doing
so would accuse Conrad of “unjustified triviality” and of writing mere “clichés, already referred
to, about the East as emblematic of primitivism or savagery, or alternatively, of untarnished
innocence” (82). Therefore it is important to consider how the characterization of Vladimir both

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reinstates and complicates this binary in a way that both engages with and challenges the
dichotomy between East and West.
One way in which the text achieves this is through Vladimir’s personification of Eastern
stereotypes at the same time that he is skilled at successfully mimicking the West. For example,
Verloc is “haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face,” precisely because this Russian face is so
assimilable to British society and contains familiar hallmarks of British identity (Conrad 180).
Vladimir’s fatness (a characteristic overwhelmingly possessed by British characters in Conrad’s
text) and his shaved face all represent an urbanity that the stereotype of an Oriental does not
possess. Moreover, his ability to speak multiple languages, including English, flawlessly without
an accent is perhaps the greatest threat to British nationality. Vladimir infiltrates British society
because of his verbal ability, symbolized in his “thin sensitive lips formed exactly for the
utterance of those delicate witticisms,” which make him successful in “the very highest” British
society as well as a member of the august Explorer’s Club in London (24). Vladimir’s power,
shown in his ability to sway the opinions of British high society and his access to them,
illustrates the vulnerability of the British state to the influence of a foreign power. Finally,
Vladimir is “contemptuous” of Verloc and of Great Britain, and his attitude threatens British
complacency and belief in its own Western superiority. Orientalists are so assured of their own
superiority that to have Vladimir deny this is a striking note of resistance. Thus, Russia is
characterized as an Other in the novel, but an Other that is disturbingly similar to Britain and that
excels at infiltrating British society. This is a quality that Russian nationality shares with other
national identities in the novel; we see this in descriptions of non-Russian foreigners, so that the
narrator tells us that “Mrs. Verloc, in her varied experience, had come to the conclusion that
some foreigners could speak better English than the natives” (150). Paul Knepper also identifies

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this anxiety in the British stereotype of dangerous, anarchic immigrant Jews in Conrad’s time.
The British unease surrounding the assimilability of foreign groups applies equally to Russians
and Jews: “It was not only the visibility of Jews in the East End that led to perception of a
problem. It was, at the same time, a matter of the invisibility of Jews in British society; Jews
became racialised because they were difficult to distinguish from English people” (Knepper
298). Similarly, Vladimir represents an Orient that is troubling to British nationality because of
its success in becoming indistinguishable from the Occident.
The strict binary of East and West that Conrad initially creates is gradually de-stabilized
by the novel, which allows for increasing Russian resistance. The East/West opposition must be
constantly reified, which also exposes its vulnerability: “[t]he construction of identity-- for
identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain…is finally a construction...involves the
construction of opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous
interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from ‘us’’ (Said, Orientalism 332). With
the need to constantly re-construct this binary of East/West and Russia/Britain, the divide is
neither static nor completely dominant. Thus, the constructed nature of regional identity presents
an opportunity for dissent which Conrad takes advantage of. The novel shows how Vladimir,
while defined by Western stereotypes surrounding Eastern identity, is in some ways able to resist
them. He accomplishes this by assimilating British identity while retaining his “condescension”
of it. The fear that this inspires in British nationalism attests to the effectiveness of Vladimir’s
strategy. The necessity of continually re-interpreting the East/West divide allows for the space to
either counteract regional binaries or to challenge them from within. The character of Vladimir
thus demonstrates this dialectic relationship between construction and resistance. He represents
the ways in which the struggle to uphold an Orientalist ideology in the West is constantly

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challenged by the East’s ability to imitate and even surpass the West by mimicking its values and
construction of difference.
Conrad first creates and then undermines the difference between East and West, and then
further deconstructs this boundary. He achieves this by exposing the fragility of not only regional
but also national boundaries. The permeability of the nation state is reflected by the contrived
nature of national and Oriental/Occidental identity. For example, as previously mentioned,
British and French identities are blended into an amorphous British/French identity instead of
separately maintained, therefore weakening their independence as separate nationalities.
Moreover, Russian national identity is often allied with German identity in the text, as reflected
in the German-sounding names of the other employees in the embassy, such as Councillor
Wurmt and Baron Stott-Wartenheim. This confusion of nationalities exposes their deconstructed
nature, as the text avoids positing a stable nationalism as the foremost determinant in the text.
The confusion of national and international is further demonstrated in the text by the fact
that the supposedly anti-national and international anarchists are not only complicit with British
society, but also exploit it. Gramsci describes a phenomenon that can be accurately applied to the
anarchists’ situation when he writes of the “so-called ‘foreigner’s party’ [that] is not really the
one which is commonly so termed, but precisely the most nationalistic party” (176). Through
their collective laziness, fatness, and dependence on British patriarchal norms, the mostly foreign
anarchists demonstrate the worst characteristics of the British middle class, the dominant social
group in the British state. Hence, the anarchists fit into Gramsci’s description of “unproductive
‘worker[s]’” who “exploit their position to take for themselves a large cut out of the national
income” (13). Gramsci continues his description of the “so-called foreigner’s party” as
“represent[ing] not so much the vital forces of its own country, as that country’s subordination…

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to the hegemonic nations or to certain of their number” (77). Given that one of the prominent
leaders of the anarchist party is a Russian secret agent, this characterization of the party’s
subordination to another nation is certainly apt. The contradiction that the anarchist “foreigner’s
party” is really nationalistic at the same time that it is indebted to a foreign power is one of the
many ways that nationalism and internationalism are amalgamated in this novel.
This disappearance of the boundaries demarcating national and international is
exemplified by Verloc, who is British/French but takes orders from the Russians and collaborates
with both the anarchists and the domestic police. Like the other anarchists, Verloc’s obesity and
his conventional marriage to Winnie mark him as a signifier of the British middle-class, and
make him an absurd secret agent (as Vladimir himself points out). As an anarchist and terrorist-
abettor whose “mission in life [is] the protection of the social mechanism, not its perfectionment
or even its criticism,” Verloc shows how the stable and separate categories of British national
values, Russian influence, and complicity/dissent are no longer viable (Conrad 17). Instead,
categories that define nationality in the text are undermined by the disappearing signifiers that
they rely upon, and become increasingly troubled. The following is a list of the varied ways in
which national characteristics are undercut by Conrad’s text, which includes:
a London effectively denationalized by malevolent foreigners, a generalized
xenophobia and specifically a visceral Germanophobia, a British populace in a
state of physical and mental decline….The menacing Vladimir can speak
English...and is, until exposed, a smashing success in English high society (Matin
261).
Taken together, all of these elements complicate the East/West divide and the idea of nationality
as a unitary and stable force. Instead, nationality and with it, regionalism, disintegrate into a
complete denationalization in the novel.
With an absence of stability, either nationally or regionally, Conrad’s text questions the
dominant forms of contemporary identity in the novel. Conrad’s novel shows how both regional

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and national identities are susceptible to deconstruction. We see this in the complete freedom
that results from the denationalization of certain characters. By interlinking nationalistic and
Oriental/Occidental identities so closely together in his work, Conrad shows how the relationship
between them is, if not inter-dependent, at least so closely related that one does not seem to exist
without the other in his text. Describing a moment in which national and regional classifications
completely dissolve, the Assistant Commissioner enters an Italian restaurant and finds that:
the patrons of the place had lost in the frequentation of fraudulent cookery all
their national and private characteristics. And this was strange, since the Italian
restaurant is such a peculiarly British institution. But those people were as
denationalized as the dishes set before them with every circumstance of
unstamped respectability. Neither was their personality stamped in any way,
professionally, socially or racially (Conrad 115).
Despite its claim to be Italian or even a “peculiarly British institution,” the restaurant is unable to
be categorized as either of these nationalities. Instead, the food is “fraudulent” because it does
not accomplish even an Italian/British hybridity. The meals are, like the people, “denationalized”
altogether, unable to attain identity or retain any characteristics at all in the mixture of
nationalities. This passage illustrates European nationalities’ failure to successfully and
completely define themselves against those that are foreign. Instead of strengthening the
differences between them, this cultural encounter between two opposing nationalities weakens
the boundaries that separate them. The result is a complete absence of any type of nationality, as
if the confrontation between two opposing cultures obliterates the difference between them. This
is the opposite of what occurs earlier in the novel between British and Russian identity. Even
though initially Vladimir and Verloc are defined personally by national stereotypes, by this time
in the text the restaurant’s patrons lose not only their nationalities but also their “private
characteristics.” This link between the personal and the national is a key part of Conrad’s text.
Anarchism alone cannot explain the novel’s de-nationalization of its characters or their un-placed

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state: “This sense of nonbelonging is a quality of most of the novel’s characters… Part of their
nonaffiliation may have to do with their associations with socialism and anarchism, political
formations that tend to favor internationalist or antistate identifications, but such affiliations still
fail to fully account for the positive force of this ambiguity” (Haines 90). Thus, lacking a nation,
the patrons also lack a differentiation “racially,” something that national and regional identity is
founded upon earlier. Even “socially” and “professionally,” the patrons are the same, which hints
at an absence of class differentiation between them. The novel seems to demonstrate that is only
in metropolitan zones like the restaurant, in which different nationalities meet and cancel each
other out, that denationalization seems possible. By narrating a place without structures based on
nation, race, or class, Conrad separates place from these identifications and in doing so imagines
a new type of society. The lack of characters’ national and Oriental/Occidental identity frees
them from the constrictive boundaries of the political and imagines a different world view.
A similar phenomenon occurs in the relationship between geography and nationality.
Geography undergirds fictions of regional identity: “All the latent and unchanging characteristics
of the Orient stood upon, were rooted in, its geography” (Said Orientalism, 216). By removing
geography from Orientalist conceptions, Conrad is able to open up new, uncharted “spaces” of
resistance. For example, the text observes that “one never met these enigmatical persons
elsewhere…And [the Assistant Commissioner] himself had become unplaced…A pleasurable
feeling of independence possessed him” (Conrad 115-116). Becoming “unplaced” frees the
people in the restaurant from the burdens of geographical identity. When the Assistant
Commissioner “seemed to lose some more of his identity” in the restaurant, he has a “feeling of
independence” as national and regional labels fall away (115). Becoming unplaced from
England offers the Assistant Commissioner a sense of freedom from not only the country but

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also its system of law and enforcement. Appropriately, the Assistant Commissioner feels his duty
as a law enforcement official fade away in the restaurant so that “it would have been impossible
for anybody to guess his occupation…there was a doubt even in his own mind” (115). Freedom
from the constraints of the state’s hegemony as well as its force gives the Assistant
Commissioner a sense of “loneliness, of evil freedom” that is also “pleasant” (115). Conrad
seems to imply that the denationalization and associated absence of Orientalism is imbued with a
sense of freedom, pleasure, and lawlessness. In the novel both Winnie and Verloc plan separately
to avoid the British legal system by escaping abroad. What is striking, however, is that they both
fantasize about places that, despite their geographical distance from each other, are
interchangeable in their thoughts. Winnie thinks to herself that the places of “Spain or
California” are only “mere names” instead of geographical place markers, so that “[t]he vast
world created for the glory of man was only a vast blank to Mrs. Verloc. She did not know which
way to turn” (203). Similarly, when Adolf Verloc considers emigrating, the text first states that it
“was not very clear whether he had in his mind France or California,” and then repeats almost
exactly the same sentence sometime later, substituting “South America” for “France”: “It was
not clear whether Mr. Verloc had in his mind Spain or South America; but at any rate somewhere
abroad” (147, 189). Located on three separate continents, the locations of South America,
France, Spain, and California are unplaced in the Verlocs’ minds so that they are “a vast blank”
that is ambiguously located “somewhere abroad.” Once they become subject to Britain’s force
instead of merely its hegemony, the Verlocs fantasize about becoming “unplaced” in these
signifiers of imaginative geography that represent freedom from the British state. National
identity, as well as the divide between East and West, recedes in the distance, and the confusion
between places that are “not clear” and only “mere names” reflects the desire to escape the

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political system that is propped up by national and regional identity completely. This is true not
only for the Verlocs but also for the Assistant Commissioner and Vladimir. The Assistant
Commissioner points out the constructed nature of nation and national boundaries when he
describes the Russian embassy in London as: “[t]heoretically only, on foreign territory; abroad
only by a fiction” (172). This unplacing of nationality from land exposes the cultural hegemonic
nature of the nation state as an idea, independent of geography and sometimes in contrast to it.
As a result, the “fiction” of nationality and its tie to place in the novel shows how “old East/West
divisions and definitions are no longer stable… Nothing is fixed; there is constant traffic between
two worlds, and ongoing cultural relocation” (Bowen 281). In the unplacing of identity, the
geographical divide between Occident and Orient is erased, along with its attendant
significations. By lifting away the veil of national and regional identity, the text exposes the
coercive apparatus of the state that lies underneath. Thus, once Comrade Ossipon and Mrs.
Verloc begin to fear British law, the “insular nature of Great Britain,” and its status as a
nationalistic and geographically isolated island “obtruded itself upon [Ossipon’s] notice in an
odious form” (Conrad 212).The presence of nationality and its restriction of space through
meaning is a “black abyss” from which “no unaided woman could hope to scramble out” (203).
It is only the law breakers and the law enforcers who are able to lay bare the fiction of national
and regional identity, and in doing so they attempt to travel outside of these meanings into a
freer, but also more dangerous, cosmopolitan2 identity. Ultimately, Comrade Ossipon, the
Verlocs, and Stevie are punished in one way or another, leaving the Assistant Commissioner and
Vladimir to theorize this new identity. As government employees and members of “The
Explorer’s Club,” both are free to create a type of cosmopolitanism that ironically unites these
2 I use “cosmopolitan”here generally,not in any specific academic context,as this paper lacks the spaceto address
cosmopolitan theory sufficiently.

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characters working for opposing ends. While both characters work to maintain the nationality
and sovereignty of their own countries, ultimately neither achieves his goal of shoring up
domestic political power (the Assistant Commissioner is unable to prove Russia’s involvement
once Verloc is dead, and Vladimir’s bomb did not create the fear against anarchists that he
desired). Instead, they signify a new kind of cosmopolitanism that the text develops in the blank
space left behind by Orientalism and nationality.
The depiction of the Assistant Commissioner and Vladimir reflects this homogenous
cosmopolitan identity. As the novel progresses, these two characters shed their national
characteristics and become increasingly similar to each other. For example, the Assistant
Commissioner, while a British subject, is “struck by his foreign appearance” when he sees his
own reflection in a mirror (Conrad 115). The text conflates the Assistant Commissioner’s
personality with his physical description, so that both determine his exotic appearance in his own
country: “the salient points of his personality, the long face, the black hair, his lankness, made
him look more foreign than ever” (164). Finally, it is significant that the Assistant
Commissioner, like Vladimir, is compared to a fish instead of being compared to the more
porcine British: “He might have been but one more of the queer foreign fish that can be seen of
an evening about there flitting round the dark corners” (114). Vladimir’s disturbingly British
foreign appearance also reflects both a difference and an assimilation into British society. For
example, he portrays a strikingly similar attitude to British national ideals and the self-
conception of the West by describing himself as civilized. In doing so, he claims that his own
Russian values and actions are the same as those of Western Europe: “’I am a civilized man. I
would never dream of directing you to organise a mere butchery,’” he tells Verloc (31).Thus,
Vladimir, who is foreign but appears to be British, and the Assistant Commissioner, who is

18. 18
British yet appears to be foreign, both complicate the distinctions between native and foreign,
citizen and alien. They grow increasingly alike and cosmopolitan despite their places of birth.
The two men are further de-naturalized not only by Conrad’s characterizations of them,
but also by their government work. Their jobs on behalf of their countries ironically force them
away from their homelands; Vladimir lives in Britain while the Assistant Commissioner has
recently returned to London after being stationed in a tropical colony. As a result, the Assistant
Commissioner displays a frustration with British bureaucracy as well as an unusual commitment
to activity in his work, so that his actions threaten the sleepy domesticity that characterizes
British nationalism. Joseph Fradin observes that “the Assistant Commissioner is oppressed by
the system, constrained by organization...A man who likes to work outside of familiar social
agencies” ( “Anarchist, Detective, and Saint” 1417). The result is threatened anarchy inside the
government as the Assistant Commissioner’s ability to operate outside the bounds of nationality
ultimately de-nationalizes him. This is very similar to Vladimir’s objections to British liberalism
and his efforts to stir Britain to activity through anarchy. Both the Assistant Commissioner and
Vladimir escape their respective nationalities and Orientalist/Occidentalist constrictions by
appearing foreign to their home lands. Their actions inspire a degree of anarchy in the British
state by circumventing its ideological hegemony and conventional use of force.
Ultimately, being unplaced as a result of their government work also leads both men to
relinquish their sense of nationality while performing their official duties. Vladimir thwarts
Orientalism’s stereotypical characterization of an Oriental mired in the past when in the end the
text records that “in his heart he was almost awed by the miraculous cleverness of the English
police. The change of his opinion on the subject was so violent that it made him for a moment
feel slightly sick” (Conrad 171). Earlier in the narrative, Vladimir “inherits” his racial, national,

19. 19
and personal fear of the police that is “independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his
experience.” However, by the end of the novel, Vladimir disproves this racial theory of
hereditary determinism through his experience with the British police, demonstrating his
capacity to shed his national and racial stereotype and accept at least part of British cultural
hegemony in his admiration of the police system. In doing so, he becomes less associated with
the East and more of an ambiguous subject devoid of nationality or race. Moreover, like the
Assistant Commissioner, Vladimir is unplaced and “lacks the indexical quality that would make
him a geopolitical signifier. This unrootedness asserts itself as an overloaded cosmopolitanism:
Vladimir, a member of the exclusive Explorer’s Club, moves about in the upper echelons of
British society, and yet he always reports to and from a vague elsewhere” (Haines 90). This
“elsewhere” is comparable to the “somewhere abroad” quoted earlier in describing the ambiguity
of unplaced geographical identity. Similarly, the Assistant Commissioner’s police work that
leads him on a trail throughout London unplaces him in terms of British nationality and Western
European identity: “The journey of the AC dissociates British nationality from itself, marking the
contingency, artificiality, and historicity of any British nationality” (Haines 91). These two
characters embody the fissures inherent in the concept of nationality, throwing light on its
instability as an imagined community during their efforts on behalf of their nations. At the same
time that this negates the constructed difference between the two characters, it erases the
East/West divide and national oppositions that the novel began with.
These boundaries further disappear when cosmopolitanism de-legitimizes the nation state
by deconstructing the national legal system from within. It is significant that those who are
charged with enforcing the law must operate outside of legal boundaries to do so. It is not only
the Assistant Commissioner and Vladimir who ignore legalities and introduce anarchy into

20. 20
government; Inspector Heat has a truce with the terrorist Professor as well as a working
relationship with anarchist and secret agent Verloc. Although Heat is well aware that both break
the law and constitute a threat to society, he resists arresting them in order to maintain the
delicate social balance that exists in the narrative. Ultimately, then, the law enforcers operate
outside of legal bounds, and leave the criminals (also outside of the law) unpunished by the
judicial system. Thus, Verloc is killed, not by a judge or jury, but as a result of private revenge.
Winnie Verloc commits suicide, escaping the hanging that the law prescribes. Even Comrade
Ossipon, despite his theft of Winnie’s money and knowledge of Verloc’s murder, is punished
only by the impotence deriving from his guilty conscience. The characters that break the law are
not disciplined by the state. Instead, only private justice or individual guilt is effective in the
novel. These social pressures negate the need for a national legal system. Moreover, the
characters who are imprisoned, most noticeably Michaelis, are characterized as either harmless
or innocent altogether. They act as scapegoats for the real perpetrators who escape unpunished.
Conrad’s text show how the legal system fails in its mission to punish criminals and succeeds
only in maintaining the present political situation. By stripping the justice system of its
legitimizing factor, the text reveals the real purpose of the law, which is to uphold national
boundaries and to retain the nation’s right to its use of force. When the Assistant Commissioner
boasts to Vladimir that “We can put our finger on every anarchist here…All that’s wanted now is
to do away with the agent provocateur to make everything safe,” the text reveals the problem
with the national law system (Conrad 172). Punishing the anarchists helps to maintain the façade
of the police’s success, but the reality is that the Assistant Commissioner cannot “do away” with
agent provocateurs because nationality is inescapably unstable. This is because the nation is
founded on its legal system, which ironically must break its own rules in order to function. The

21. 21
barriers between international and national in the novel are porous and unstable, and they cannot
prevent secret agents working for other countries from operating from within the nation. The plot
bears this out through Verloc’s death and hence his inability to testify against Vladimir. Conrad’s
text show how the legal system fails in its mission to punish criminals and succeeds only in
reinforcing the existing state of affairs. Even when it attempts to punish the true perpetrators, it
cannot do so because the legal system is ineffective in its struggle to maintain national and
regional boundaries.
By exposing national law’s impotence, the novel reinforces the existence of a lawless
cosmopolitan society that effectively resists the national state. Cosmopolitan society is peopled
by homogenized citizens who correspond to the “unstamped respectability” of the unvariegated
patrons in the denationalized restaurant. In this cosmopolitan world, “unstamped” indicates a
freedom from the mark of any identity; while “respectability,” implies that this lack of racial or
national identity does not mean that the patrons are relegated to the margins of society (as the
anarchists are). Instead, the absence of these “stamps” of nation, race, law, or society in
cosmopolitanism means that freedom from regionalism or nationality is possible for the average
citizen. The cosmopolitanism depicted in Conrad’s novel creates the possibility of a culture that
erases race and elides cultural divisions instead of reinstating them. Without the classifications of
region, race, or nation, the cultural hegemony and coercion of the state disappear into a lawless
society driven only by the social rules implied in “respectability.” However, The Secret Agent
does not hold this vision forth as a utopian solution. In fact, Conrad satirizes the anarchist
Michaelis’s biography that imagines: “Faith, Hope, Charity…the idea of a world planned out like
an immense and nice hospital” as well as the “incorruptible” terrorist Professor’s dream of
blowing up humankind so that “every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must

22. 22
meet its doom” (Conrad 225-226). Instead of advocating political or terrorist action, the
denationalization and de-Orientalization that Conrad describes are potentialities that are realized
only by re-imagining identity. Moreover, this world has negative as well as positive possibilities.
As can be seen from the Italian restaurant, a cosmopolitan world would be both “pleasant” in that
it is freed from national and regional restrictions, and yet could contain the possibility of “evil
freedom” that might lead to lawlessness, murder, and anarchy. It theorizes a cosmopolitan
society that offers the choice of either total anarchy or private law and social conventions to
replace a hypocritical and dysfunctional system of national law. The anarchic “evil freedom”
possibility is represented by Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, who both inspire either
violence or death; Vladimir orders the terrorist attack that kills Stevie, and the Assistant
Commissioner unwittingly causes Winnie to murder Verloc when he informs her of her brother’s
death. A cosmopolitan post-regional and post-national world also holds other dangers, as can be
seen in both characters’ links to imperialism. The Assistant Commissioner’s career is founded on
his role as an imperialist “tracking and breaking up certain nefarious secret societies among the
natives” in a British colony in the tropics (79-80). Meanwhile, Vladimir’s attempt to control
domestic British policy, while not part of an effort to make Britain a Russian colony,
nevertheless implies an imperialistic attitude that does not respect national sovereignty.
However, as can be seen in the “unstamped respectability” of the majority of the de-nationalized
restaurant’s patrons, these dangers remain only possibilities. Most of the patrons are
unremarkable and seem to follow certain conventional rules. The balanced view that the text
portrays includes both the pleasures and perils inherent in cosmopolitanism, but seems to
ultimately show that a post-regional and post-national world would be mostly peopled by
citizens obeying certain rules of propriety.

23. 23
The Secret Agent is remarkable for its ability to first construct, then deconstruct, national
difference. The unsettling nature of these deconstructed identities leads to a desire to stabilize
them into binaries, resulting in Orientalism and jingoism, since “no one finds it easy to live
uncomplainingly and fearlessly with the thesis that human reality is constantly being made and
unmade, and that anything like a stable essence is constantly under threat. Patriotism, extreme
xenophobic nationalism, and downright unpleasant chauvinism are all common responses to this
fear” (Said Orientalism, 333). The text demonstrates this response, but then subverts it by
showing another possible path in the Assistant Commissioner’s and Vladimir’s homogenization
and cosmopolitanism. Foreign and domestic are amalgamated underneath the fictions of regional
divide and nationality in The Secret Agent. These themes are often present in Conrad’s other,
more famous works: “What may strike us as an insignificant piece of the Conradian corpus
allows us to look anew at an important issue confronted by his more familiar works: that a
certain foreignness always dwells within the nation (Nico Israel 376). Ultimately, regionalism
and nationalism are unstable signifiers, which lead Conrad to create a cosmopolitan world in the
text. The settings in many of Conrad’s writings are crucial for depicting this type of
cosmopolitanism; Fleishman writes that “Conrad's ‘exotic’ locations were so frequently busy
contact zones, global melting pots, where old boundaries were becoming increasingly
irrelevant,” a description that equally applies to his portrayal of the teeming and eclectic
metropolis that is London in The Secret Agent (28). In doing so, Conrad creates a world in which
nationality, as well as the power of the nation state and its apparatus of ideological hegemony
and coercion, erode into a postnational, homogenous culture. More than illustrating an
imaginative possibility, Conrad is able to create this world in his text. Although it considers
cosmopolitanism’s dangers as well as its pleasures, The Secret Agent achieves in its text what

24. 24
Hugo St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk, describes as the ideal relationship to geographic
identity: “’The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every
soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a
foreign place’” (qtd. Said Culture and Imperialism, 335). In crafting a world full of unstamped
people, Conrad unites them in a common humanity that does not differentiate on the basis of
gender, class, nationality, or geography. By unplacing humanity and unstamping identities such
as nationalism and regionalism, Conrad creates the “perfect” cosmopolitan text.
.

25. 25
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