Detecting the Diseased Brain in Lady Audley's Secret

In the introduction to her book, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, Catherine Malabou suggests that “neuronal functioning and social functioning interdetermine each other and mutually give each other form (here again is the power of plasticity), to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish them” (9). Her title itself implies a collective brain and it is this version of the brain that operates in Lady Audley’s Secret. The tension between “the preservation of constancy” in the socially-authored self and “the exposure of this constancy to accidents, to the outside, to otherness in general” in the accidentalized, individual self is the paradox in which both Braddon’s text and Malabou’s brain as work exist (71).

Plasticity is threatening to a brain that is aware of its own functioning because it suggests impermanence and, more disturbingly, because it suggests destruction of itself. Lady Audley as a character becomes the threat of plastique to the stasis around her. The country manor Audley Court quietly decays inspiring “a yearining to have done with life, and to stay there forever,” Robert Audley’s comfortable laziness defies movement and Alicia Audley insistently remains in the home in which she has “reigned supreme since her earliest childhood” (Braddon 44,46). The Talboys' mansion takes the idea of rigidity even further and both the characters and the building itself are edifices of stone and marble (Braddon 222). This stonework is the product of the envisioned social brain, a reproduction of belief in the ‘rigidity’ of an entirely genetically determined brain” (4). But the illusion of stability and structure is a work and they do not want to know it.

Ironically, within the novel it is only the threat to stasis and rigidity that causes movement in an effort to restore Malabou’s “homeostasis.” The environment of this novel seeks to deny the plasticity of Malabou’s brain with its capacity to receive form and the capacity to give form, as well as to “annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create” (5). This plasticity is a threat because it “offers an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (6). Although identity is important, inherent in the desire for localized knowledge, it is the inclusive identity not exclusive individuation that is its goal.

Lady Audley takes on the impression of these social models even as she refuses to conform to them. Her actions are motivated by a desire to work within the system that she lives in, not to escape it. Like Malabou’s reader, Lady Audley mistakes flexibility for plasticity, a mistake promulgated by the social world of the novel. She is denied “the resource to giving form, the power to create, to invent or even erase an impression, the power to style” (12). She believes “every clue to identity buried and forgotten,” but instead she is haunted by residues, echoes, relics that make erasure and newness impossible (Braddon 53).

Lady Audley seems to participate in the creation of new identity through the self-fashioning that is “at once the elaboration of a form, a face, a figure, and the effacement of another form another figure, which precede them ore are contemporaneous with them” (71). However, since fashioning is an insistence on form, the polymorphism that is “open to all forms, capable of donning all masks, adopting all postures, all attitudes,” that “engenders the undoing of identity” is denied to Lady Audley by detection (71-2). Narratively enacting the dichotomy of the neuronal desire for both development and retention, the social environment becomes the nervous system, desiring to “preserve itself from destruction” by keeping “itself in the same state” of stable identity (74). While Lady Audley becomes the brain itself: the site of tension that both acts and is acted upon to make identity. Thus if Lady Audley’s agency, her disguises and her change of identity, are undetected by the social nerve center within the body politic the larger social brain will cease to function.

In thinking about cerebral functioning Malabou examines “the transition from the biological to the cultural, from the strictly natural base of the mind to its historical—and thus also, necessarily, its political and social—dimension” (56). In contrast, Lady Audley’s Secret moves from the cultural to the biological by blaming the brain of Lady Audley for her plastic sense of ethics and identity. Her plasticity allows her to form misleading impressions and refashion impressions in disruptive ways. These “energetic discharges” and  “creative bursts that progressively transform nature into freedom” momentarily overwhelm the extended social consciousness, ignoring conscience and the narrative affirmation of stability (74). The plasticity of Malabous’s brain is relocated into the biological disease of dementia that is the result of “extreme mental pressure” (Braddon 385). Lady Audley suffers from “latent insanity,” a version of the “autodestruction” that is inherent to all identity and that all identity struggles against (71). Entitled “At Peace,” the final chapter of Braddon’s novel suggests the end of cerebral struggle, imagining both the stabilized brain at rest and the death of the entire body, sharing with the brain a final destructive moment.