When Plague Victims and Lepers Meet: Coming to Terms with Fluctuating Normality in Braddon and Foucault

At first glance, the plot of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret closely follows Foucault’s description of the exile of lepers: Lady Audley, who is identified as physically and psychically diseased, is sent to a Maison de Sante in Belgium so that she can not longer infect others with her symptoms. Wholesome English country life is restored and Lady Audley promptly dies in confined exile. However, as it turns out Lady Audley has not been exiled, she has escaped the plague city as the scapegoat of plague victims. The plague spreads through the Audley family, like the blue mould that is rotting away the contents of Lady Audley’s chamber, disallowing the looked for return to health and suggesting that this “perfect health” may not have existed in the first place. Braddon’s normalcy looks remarkably abnormal: patriarch, Sir Michael Audley, has fled from his ancestral hall, Audley court; his daughter Alicia has married a man she does not love because the man whom she has been interested in since adolescence, Robert Audley, has moved into a cottage with his unusually close friend George Talboys and married his sister, who looks eerily identical to her brother. The construction of this text suggests not only that Foucault’s lepers may live in plague cities and be subject to exile ordered by individuals who are themselves diseased, but also that the “normalization” that is the aim of the behavior of both these groups is constantly in flux and therefore unobtainable.

            In his lecture from 15 January 1975 Foucault suggests that “that very strange notion, “perversity,” that begins to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century” can be traced back to the desire to contain abnormality in order to reify the normal functioning of society (32). The negative medieval model of exiling lepers is contrasted with the inclusive positive eighteenth-century model of the communal care and voluntary surveillance of plague victims. Lepers, like Lady Audley, are cast “into a vague, external world” in order to “purify the community” (43, 44). This attitude is revised in the plague city that encloses victims through “spatial partitioning and control (quadrillage)” and subjects them to uninterrupted surveillance that is permanently recorded (44-45). Foucault suggests that “plague is the marvelous moment when political power is exercised to the full” and “where dangerous communications, disorderly communities, forbidden contacts can no longer appear” (47). Rather than a source of popular repression, Foucault argues that this model of “discipline-normalization” is “always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative project” (50).

            However, this normative project assumes the norm is stable or at least stable enough that it can be enacted on the population in the ways that Foucault describes. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Robert Audley relies on the plague-city apparatus of “expert medico-legal opinion” to identify an “abnormal individual” in an effort to sustain the “power of normalization” (33, 42). However, Robert does not contain Lady Audley in a local hospital since her crimes are committed in a state of dementia for which she is not responsible, instead he expels her from the community to an asylum in a remote European wilderness. The society that remains does not return to a state of purity or of community—individuals splinter off in unhappy and abnormal ways that deny surveillance and record-keeping. In the space of the narrative, “normal” has changed and thus the problem of enforcing and restoring it is the project of a diseased mind. The very enclosure that creates a sense of community and control in the plague town is the condition that spreads disease and dooms the healthy to illness and death by bringing them in close contact with the infectious fluids of the sick and creating a concentration of corpses that attracts the rats that carry the plague-spreading fleas. Similarly, George Talboy’s desire for physical closeness to Robert Audley, his professed yearning for the “strong grasp” and “friendly touch” of his friend absorbs into this novel’s happy, nationalistic ending and transmits symptoms of a constantly-mutating, drug-resistant strain of undiagnosable normalcy (444).