As a detective novel Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret strives
for visual authority; as a sensation novel it tries to create authority over
the senses of the reader. Inherent in reading is a tacit agreement, much like
that of between subject and authority in Stephen Greenblatt’s essay, “Invisible
Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” that
the reader will experience these sensations, that he seeks out these sensations
for the very reason that they are upsetting in such a way that marks the text
as a socially-determined fiction. Similarly, participation in this “agreement”
is participation with social norms—as a popular novel, Lady Audley’s
Secret was read by a large cross-section of
the literate population, marking the reader as sharing in the large-scale
consumption of this type of fiction. The delivery of this work in periodical
form over many months required in the reader a suspended attention and
continual engagement in the text. In effect, reproducing the illusion of
voluntary containment Greenblatt exposes in Shakespearean theatre, as well as
the expectation of spectacle therein. The spectacle of sensational
behavior—bigamy, arson, attempted murder, black-mail—instills in the reader/viewer
a feeling of shock and awe that serves to uphold repugnance to that behavior
and reinforces an investment in societal norms that uphold legal and ethical
authority. Nonetheless, when Lady Audley and her subversive behavior are
finally banished to a Belgian asylum, Braddon leaves the Victorian reader with
a comforting scene that undermines societal authority by whispering
subversively to the 21st-century reader, out of the space and time
of the production of this novel. Braddon's happy ending is strange ménage a
trios: the homo-social relationship between Lady Audley’s first husband, George
Talboys, and her nephew and relentless pursuer, Robert, is crowned by moving
into a “fairy cottage” together with George’s sister/doppelganger, Clara, whom
Robert then marries (Braddon 444).
The narrative that brings the
reader this comforting, yet discomforting ending is fraught with Lady Audley’s
determination to maintain power through visual mastery. Lady Audley, a former
governess, and Sir Michael Audley’s second wife, is a master of creating visual
spectacle-but unlike Greenblatt’s Queen Elizabeth, she seeks to identify her
body with truth in a way that will undermine societal welfare. Lady Audley’s
position creates order, but only in her life—it gives her position and identity
in her own life that is denied to her in her role as governess, and as
abandoned wife. Hers is a selfish rather than social order. Lady Audley deploys
strategies that echo Queen Elizabeth’s consolidation of power “constituted in
theatrical celebrations of royal glory and theatrical violence visited upon the
enemies of that glory” (Greenblatt 44). However, Lady Audley’s spectacle is too
Technicolor and the contrast with her strangely identical, but exceptionally
pale maid, Phoebe, reveals the artificiality of the illusion.
Lady Audley is vigilant and
continually feels and is threatened, but rather than empowering her this is her
shortcoming. Greenblatt’s Henry V attempts to contain and create barriers to
threats, while Lucy tries to destroy threats—an impossibility since subversion
is always already inherent in effective authority. For example, Shakespeare’s
“touch of Harry in the night” is intensified into a touch of arson in the night
intended by Lady Audley, like Henry V, to solidify her authority and safety
through the sacrifice of life (involuntary in one case, and voluntary in the
other). Lady Audley moves through the text without exposure to public censure
and seems to embody the presence of subversion and the threat of betrayal in
Braddon’s narrative as she attempts to patch up the cracks in her self-made
narrative of respectability. As the cycle of Shakespeare’s Henry plays progress
Prince Hal shuffles off his low-class followers who could expose his “juggling”
and “hypocrisy” so that his authority appears unblemished, but Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s anti-heroine, Lady Audley, can’t seem to shake the pursuit if her
relentless, quasi-detective nephew, Robert, in her quest for social authority.
Hal is a conniving “juggler and his power too lies in “usurpation and theft” of
identity and authority—but there is no detection and no detective to expose
this, and the audience wants no exposure of this actuality.
Lady Audley’s secret is madness, an
undefined crime, much like Thomas Harriot’s heresy—that which is “almost always
thinkable as the though of another” and a label that is comfortably contains
questionable behavior (Greenblatt 19). She is not convicted of any crimes
(although she is guilty of several), instead based on Robert Audley’s observation
of her behavior she is diagnosed as insane and packed off to a mental
institution. Her subversive behavior and her record of success in this behavior
must be explained and contained so it can no longer threaten authority. Lady
Audley is the central authority in the text at the same time as it subverts
that authority, as a record of an “othered” voice in the larger discourse of
patriarchal power. Hers is not the cleansing suffering of the great, but the
suffering of she who has become greater than she should. And therefore, hers is
a narrative that subverts false authority to spectacularly uphold the societal
norms of “real” authority provided by the reader himself.
Like Harroit’s colonists, Lady
Audley’s survival lays in creating and coercing belief in her spectacle, so
that her position as respectable lady is not threatened. Hal masters crude
“opaque” language; Lady Audley masters the language of looking—Hal can speak
what he is not and Lucy can look it. The stakes appear different in
Greenblatt’s text, but Lady Audley’s position is not radically different from
Harriot’s or Hal’s, rather, the difference lies in the fact that the
reader/viewer is taught to relish the detection of the illusion that is Lady
Audley’s authority. Unlike Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience and Harroit’s
Algonkians, the Victorian reader is allowed to relish the spectacle while
understanding its mechanics, to both speak to the Wizard and see the man behind
the curtain. Braddon’s novel ends with Lady Audley’s death from “maladie de langueur”
soon after she is committed: her theatrics and vigilance have literally
fatigued her to death (Braddon 446). The reader is left with an empty vision of
Lady’s Audley’s vacant but untouched boudoir housing an imposing
curtain-covered portrait of her and a collection of artwork becoming
undecipherable because of mysterious “blue mould” (Braddon 446). As Lady
Audley’s instruments of “force and fraud” decay before the reader’s eyes,
Greenblatt seems to raise the question: who wants us to see this evidence of
subversion yet takes the trouble to cover the portrait that is “so like and yet
so unlike” Braddon’s heroine?
Hi Jennifer! I found your argument about Lady Audley's complex relationship to power really engaging. As I read the beginning of your piece I couldn't help but think of the Brodhead article we're reading for this week, which is also about how readers participate in the consumption of popular forms, and one of the points Brodhead makes that it might be interesting to consider in future weeks is that literature is produced and consumed within the context of interacting social groups and forces. Of course you would have gotten waaayy off-track if you'd tried to include that in this post, but it seems to me that if you're thinking of working on this argument in the future it's worth considering "the reader" as something more complicated than a homogeneous wall of consumers who all have the same relationship to social norms and power. Basically, I'm wondering what would happen if you asked the questions Brodhead asks, like who read Lady Audley's Secret? Why did they read it? How was it popularized? etc.
ReplyDeleteHi Jennifer! It's really interesting that you first note the reader's "voluntary containment" as enforced by the serialized narrative, and then Lady Audley's triple containment through the asylum, death, and the curtain that obscures her picture. Why, I wonder, is it necessary to contain her so thoroughly? If Lady Audley is a record of an othered voice, as you aptly suggest, it is alarming how that voice is expunged from the text. It seems to cast Lady Audley more as one of the masterless men in Henry IV who are coerced into becoming defenders of established order than the monarch who ultimately succeeds in containing subversion. Is the reader meant to sympathize with or condemn Lady Audley, and how is this complicated by an understanding of the "mechanics," as you say?
ReplyDeleteHey Jennifer! What a compelling argument this is. I find your shifting source of "power" intriguing; Lady Audley's power, though illusory, still buys her some "safe space" through that of lunacy--she ultimately "gets away" from the men of her past, though not escaping to true freedom. The power of the reader is also interesting...she both upholds societal norms, as you mention, playing the role of the subjugated member of society, but then she also has the power to penetrate the false authority presented in the novel. However, I wonder how fleeting, too, the power of the reader is. The novel becomes an object for the reader to manipulate and recreate...but what about those bodily responses to the novel--the sensation part of the sensation novel? Can we ignore those as possible coercive forces to subjugate the reader more fully? What does this say about the process of reading and its relationship to subversion and power?
ReplyDeleteOf the many connections you observe between Lady Audley’s Secret and Invisible Bullets, my favorite is the strange birdseye view that Braddon’s readers have to watch the kind of spectacle that Greenblatt describes. What makes this perspective so fascinating is the way in which readers, although spectators of the novel, never truly separate from the game of power that the book creates. Its power to engage readers over a period of months seems to offer a great example of what Greenblatt calls “recording.” In this case, we have documented consumption of a definitive temporal unit that testifies to the power of the text’s contained subversiveness.
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