Reading Braddon Beyond Sensation

In her essay, “New Fields, Conventional Habits, and the Legacy of Atlantic Double-Cross,” Amanda Claybaugh argues that the traditional categorization of literature limits the possibilities for interpretation of it.  She focuses on “the unthinking resort to the nation as the organizing principle for both our scholarship and our teaching” and marks Robert Weisbuch’s Atlantic Double-Cross as “authorizing” the writing of more inclusive trans-Atlantic criticism and marking trans-Alanticism as “a legitimate field” (443, 442). Similarly, in order to mark Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret as a legitimate text and lay down the parameters for the interpretation of it, nineteenth-century critics of the novel were quick to pigeonhole it in the niche of sensation—a popular, low-brow location. This categorization of the novel seems to insist that the narrative be read in a certain way, with certain expectations. The urge to strong-arm the text into a clearly-defined space with clearly-defined meanings appears in the guise of Robert Audley, the text’s detective of sensational behavior. Throughout the narrative his character points the reader towards meaning, discovering and deciphering significance to curb unintended interpretation. Robert insistently directs reading of the novel in a palpable way that suggests that Braddon may have had concerns that her narrative was bleeding into unplanned social territory so that the novel itself was becoming less and less easy to categorize.

This concern may have been a monetary one—Braddon was a professional writer and it was important that her novels were easily marketed and sold well. Controlling narrative also became a concern because the novel was published serially, and as is the case in many of Charles Dickens’ serialized novels, inconsistencies became more likely the longer a text was worked on. However, I would suggest that this novel’s insistence on categorization and conscious direction of reading exposes a discomfort with the efficacy of the possible approaches to this text.

The possibility of the textual movement between genres is suggested by the narrator’s suggestively ambivalent description of subversive and acceptable behavior. Braddon’s narrator relishes transgression and delights in the lurid details of Lady Audley’s fiendish pre-Raphaelite portrait, her seductive and ornate appearance, and her preternatural coolness as she commits necessary crimes with the “cunning of madness” and the “prudence of intelligence” (Braddon 385). Furthermore, Lady Audley becomes more sympathetic because her crimes are rendered as victimless (she unsuccessfully tries to murder people, she commits bigamy inadvertently, she abandons her son by leaving him with family) and clearly motivated by unfair social practices. In contrast, the narrator’s rendering of Robert, while suggesting that he is the hero of the text, is luke-warm in its description of this “lazy, care-for-nothing fellow” whose scientific gathering of clues is merely the antidote to his transient but transgressive “unqualified admiration” of his new aunt (Braddon 71, 121).

This text does not combine “new approaches with new objects of study” since there is nothing really new in the events of the novel, its innovation lies in the way events are written about and the resulting multiplicity of potential readings. Like Claybaugh’s trans-Atlanticism, Lady Audley’s Secret reorganizes “our existing objects of study in new ways” by challenging categorization through an ambiguous narratorial voice and the sympathetic depiction of socially deviant behavior (Claybaugh 445). Though the category and plot of the text directs the reader to hope for the exposure of unacceptable behavior, the tone of the narrator suggests a slippage between the meaning and execution of the text that is suggestively open to and inclusive of meaning. The sensation of this novel becomes one of discomfort in the lack of a fixed approach to interpreting the text, rather than a reaction to the events of the text itself. The construction of Braddon’s novel both resists and suggests Claybaugh’s larger argument that category’s artificiality ignores the fluidity of influence and the interdisciplinary reality in which all texts are both engineered and understood.