Your Body is a Wonder-land: Transcending Alaimo’s Trans-Corporeality in Lady Audley’s Secret

The opening paragraphs of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret describe the natural space and idyllic environs that surround Audley court. Man-made edifices insinuate themselves into the landscape as the description progresses bearing not only the handprint of man but insidious foreboding. A religious vision of harmonious nuns that once prayed and worked in the court, using the very well that is now “stagnant,” “idle” and “rotten” adds to the scene (44). Tracing a connection that has been well understood in Christianity for centuries, these introductory descriptions depict the interdependent trinity of earth, body and spirit. In the Christian bible humans are essentially built from earth and will return in death to the dust of which they are formed. This linkage is stabilized and unchanging, so that this cultural belief (religion) predetermines both biology and humanity. Thus trans-corporeality is always already present and acknowledged in the inescapable religious genealogy of each birth and in the ritual actions that are couched in the natural world, such as baptism and burial in the earth. The replacement of questionable science with the certainty of spirit in this construction allows for the extension of trans-corporeality into a space of immateriality and transcendence. To ignore that crucial connective tissue is to try to build a body out of clay without the power of animating it.

            In the first chapter of Bodily Natures: Science Environment and the Material Self, Stacy Alaimo points out that “the sense of selfhood is transformed by the recognition that the very substance of the self is interconnected with vast biological, economic and industrial systems that can never be entirely mapped or understood” (23). Though apt, this assertion focuses on the necessity of connecting these fields without acknowledging the significance of how these connections are formed.  Without the groundwork of significance, the result is “confusion and contestation that occur when individuals and collectives must contend not only with the materiality of their very selves but with the often invisibly hazardous landscapes of risk society” (Alaimo 17). Braddon’s narrative is alert to show “all that scary stuff, supposedly out there, is already within” the toxic body of Lady Audley, which is the site of inherited madness (Alaimo 18). This gendered and toxic nature is passed down matrilineally and the catalyst that sparks the necessary intra-actions that cause this latent toxicity to surface are those of environment. But rather than a contested space of unstable networks, Lady Audley’s narrative takes place across a complex network of biologies that are made material, corporealities that are imbedded in landscape, animation of meaning through language.

In Braddon’s Christian depiction of the body, flesh and environment are porous, reflecting and exchanging and absorbing into each other in significant ways as in Alaimo, but consistently Braddon insists on grounding this relationship with religion. As Alaimo points out, science “offers no steady ground, as the information may be biased, incomplete, or opaque and the ostensible object of scientific enquiry” and “the material world—is extremely complex, overwrought with agencies, and ever emergent” (20); however, the Christian text posits that the antidote to these shortcomings are the stable groundworks of Christianity. Braddon’s biblical scaffolding anchors the complexity of nature and self in religion and calls attention to the diffuse animating energy that flows between and makes apparent this interconnectedness on a scale unbounded by time and space. John 1:1 explains that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and in John 1:14 that this word “became flesh” and dwelled on earth as Jesus. The revelation of the Word (Logos) that is present before creation being manifested in the flesh so that it can be understood by human minds parallels the textual manifestations of meaning in and between the body and the environment that makes trans-corporeality significant.

Without the connective understanding of the significance of Peace having “taken up her abode” and the “handiwork of that good old builder—Time” that makes the relevance of Braddon’s landscape clear and creates an alarming contrast with the “secret chambers” and dark passage of the lime tree walk, the narrative linkages between these descriptions hazes over (Braddon 44-5). The cohesiveness of Braddon’s narrative is bounded by biblical illusions that insist on the inevitability of the network of the text. The last line of the novel quotes Psalms 37:25 as a rationale for the shape of the text because evil must be punished and the good must be rewarded since God never shows “the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.” Thus Alaimo’s trans-corporeal subject finds himself not only “inextricably part of the flux and flow of the world” (17) but also in possession of the transcendent revelation and the ability to express it that make this inextricable connectivity meaningful.