Secret Sharing: Reading Conrad Psychoanalytically

Abstract

Conrad's Secret Sharer seems an ideal-indeed, almost too ideal-text on which to base an introduction to the varieties of psychoanalytic criticism. The story is told in the voice of young sea captain uneasy with his first command. His self-doubt is reinforced by the suspicions of the ship's two officers, heavily whiskered first mate and silent young second mate, both of whom are more familiar with the ship than their captain is. The story opens with the sighting of second ship, the Sephora, which is anchored nearby. During the night, the fugitive former first mate of the Sephora, man named Leggatt, swims to the narrator's ship and tells the young captain of having killed man during maneuver designed to save the ship in storm. The narrator conceals Leggatt in his own stateroom until he can bring his ship close to shore (against the better judgment of his officers) so the fugitive can swim safely away. There are thus two ships, two stories, two scenes. In the first, man is murdered; in the second, man escapes. Secret Sharer has long been staple of the classroom-what one colleague has called the New Critic's delight. Every rift is loaded with or-with the omnipresent figure of the double. Yet the double can hardly be the of the text, since it is mentioned on virtually every page: my my secret my second a double captain, says the young narrator again and again.' A more overdetermined figure has seldom appeared in literature. The reader is hardly to be congratulated for noticing its presence-we are not being any cleverer to think of it than the young narrator, for whom the mysterious stranger is clearly symbol of something. Indeed, the narrator puts forth version of just about every interpretive hypothesis: Leggatt is his double, his opposite; his projection, his fantasy, his unconscious; his shadow self, his ego

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