Lady Audley’s Secret – Mary Elizabeth Braddon
In keeping with shifting patterns of both diagnosis and description of mental illness in the nineteenth century, an evocation of the term ‘mania’ could be taken to mean bouts of erratic or agitated behaviour, delusion, hysteria, in fact anything outside the boundaries of rational conduct. In many ways the term was used as a ‘catch all’. Interestingly, Pritchard (1837:20) in his Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Afflicting the Mind defined mania as
Madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any disorder or deficit or interest or knowing reason, without insane illusion or hallucination.
There are several points to take away from Pritchard’s definition. Firstly, the fact that mania does not involve ‘insane illusions’ or hallucinations. This contradicts other contemporary accounts where the presence of delusional experiences was a clear symptom of manic behaviour but also the use of ‘natural impulses’ and ‘moral dispositions’. Whatever the vagaries of the medical approach to mental illness in this period, to allude to underlying moral deficiencies was common. There are examples of ‘moral insanity’ being an actual diagnosis. While there is a need to be careful in the understanding of the term ‘moral’ which at this time was often used to mean ‘affective’ there is no doubt that astigma could be attached to sufferers, illness perceived as the result of some kind of emotional failing or weakness. This was particularly true for women who did not conform to gender expectations – a case in point being the terrible anguish experienced by Florence Nightingale.
The use of ‘natural’ is also significant as the century progressed, and the pace of economic and technological innovation accelerated. Lawler (2012:106) points out.
New technologies also meant new metaphors for the exhaustion of the vital energy or nerve force. The dominant metaphor for nervous breakdown was economic, with much talk of overspending over spending one’s finite reserves of energy or nerve force, potential bankruptcy brought on by a profligate (or too dedicated) lifestyle.
Here the body is seen as an economic machine, the component parts of which are susceptible to breakdown. These allusions and the blurring of boundaries not only between different manifestations of mental illness but also between rational and irrational behaviour were utilised by writers such as Trollope, Dickens, and Braddon as narrative devices but also to connect with pre-existing fears and anxieties of the part of their readers, to traffic serious concerns under cover of comic or sensationalist writing. A case in point is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). This is a novel of secrets and revelation. The central character, Lady Audley fulfils Pritchard’s definition of mania as madness masked by calculation, her actionsare hidden and often ambiguous. The interface between sanity and insanity is openly discussed by the protagonists, these are the boundaries, the questions readers are asked to consider. But the secrets are a product of constraint. In order to survive Lady Audley operates, albeit to extremes, against the social and economic parameters placed upon her. The novel too is, riven with fear, a dread of madness lurking within the individual psyche, an all too attainable possibility as articulated by Lady Audley herself.
‘Who has not been, or is not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?’(P.302) That anxieties struck a chord accounted in some part to the huge success of the novel.
The plot is centred on the character of Lady Audley, a perpetrator of among other crimes of bigamy and murder and her step nephew Robert Audley attempts to expose her identity and her wrongdoing. There are layers of secrets gradually prised loose, until as the novel draws to a conclusion Lady Audley confesses to madness, a condition inherited she claims from her mother. All four motifs weave through the narrative, the dread of hereditary insanity, fear that mental illness could afflict anyone, as with the earlier texts the pressure of constraint and confinement and the impact this has upon the thought processes and actions of the characters involved. Showalter (2004:167) makes her views clear.
Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and her condition of being constrained by Victorian mores that foreclose a woman’s desire to shape her own destiny and identity is ‘representative’ of the plight of the woman in Victorian society.
The dilemma posed – to what extent is Lady Audley mad or bad? Is she victim or arch manipulator?
The plot is structured around these motifs causing the reader to question the degree to which Lady Audley is responsible for her actions, even wondering if her crimes areactually possible. The ebb and flow of sympathy and condemnation is controlled or loosened in the searchfortruth. If there are secrets, there are questions, and the stage on which these deliberations take place is the cultural environment in which she situated. As a woman of substance, she is on display but also a target.
As to the central question,is she feigning the condition?Braddon imbues Lady Audley with a calm ambiguity, allowing socially contentious issues to be inserted almost in disguise. As Showalter (2004:409) articulates.
I suggest that choosing to believe Lady Audley’s claims about her madness and reading her as mad opens up a range of interpretive possibilities that can illuminate new facets of her character and social world.
Braddon signposts her intentions throughout the novel, not always with the greatest subtlety. It is significant when she uses the voice of the narrator to raise the issue of insanity.
Madhouses are large and only too numerous; yet surely it is strange they are not larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat their brains against the hopeless positioning of the outward world, as compared with the storms and tempest, the riot and confusion within – when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad today and sane tomorrow, mad yesterday and sane today. (P. 163)
Braddon manages to roll themes of fear, constraint, and boundaries in a single statement. Yet it is unclear if she attributes this state of mind to social environment or what would be termed today, genetic factors. On the one hand she emphasises circumstance.
I have grown up in an atmosphere of suppression’, she said quietly, ‘I have stifled and dwarfed my natural feelings of the heart, until they have become unnatural in their intensity.’ (P. 159)
The emotional impact of social confinement is important and the reaction against it recognised byTomaiullo (2010:7) indicates.
female characters reacted, even violently against their own pre inscribed fate through changes of identity, subtle machinations, seductive practices, and the use of illicit means to survive the struggle for life.
This implies a measure of justification, or at least mitigation for Lady Audley’s behaviour and swerves the debate towards a kind of empathy or understanding. In the novel this comes to the fore with Dr Mosgrove’s analysis.
‘Because there is no evidence of madness in anything she has done. She ran away from home, because her home was not a pleasant one, and she left it in the home of finding a better. There is no madness in that. She committed the crime of bigamy, because by that crime she obtained fortune and position. There is no madness there.’ (P.299).
Dr Mosgrove clearly believes there is no illness but calculation. Yet Lady Audley
confesses.
‘Yes, a madwoman. When you say that I killed George Talboys, you say the truth. When you say I murdered him treacherously and foully you lie. I killed him because I AM MAD! Because my intellect is a little way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary line between sanity and insanity’. (P. 274)
Whether this was a genuine acknowledgement of illness or an attempt to avoid justice is the conundrum readers are asked to consider. This outburst is a performance of real drama, perhaps inspired by a window of self- awareness, delusion or cynical calculation is left open. Gilbert (1996:225) certainly has no doubt. ‘Lady Audley’s secret, of course, is not her prior marriage, alcoholic father, hidden child or even her series of attempted murders, it is her madness that she so carefully conceals.’ Lady Audley lays claim to insanity on the basis of heredity when talking about her mother. ‘Her madness was an hereditary disease transmitted to her from her mother, who had died mad.’ (P.278)
Whatever the decision Braddon uses a series of veils and masks to drive the plot forward, intimating at the very beginning that both characterisation and narrative would be disjointed, transectedby revelation, with debates about the nature and causes of madness planted strategically throughout. The scene is set on the very first page.
At the end of this avenue there was an old arch and a clock tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock which has only one hand; and which jumped straight from one hour to the next and was therefore always in extremes. (P.3)
The bewildering clock jumping from one hour to the next is a precursor of the shocks to
come but also a physical exemplification of the leaps between past, present, and future within the novel, designed to both explain and deflect the actions of the characters who can be viewed as hunters and hunted. While the opening passage begins with an emphasis on time, time for Lady Audley is frozen with admittance to the sanitorium in Belgium. Once certified she can be safely despatched to oblivion. While a place here is an alternative to prison, or even worse there is still ambivalence for the translation of Villebrumeuse is ‘foggy town.’
In Charles Dickens Little Dorrit (1857) mania is explored in very different ways. The novel parades a slideshow of neurotics, a pantomime of psychological misfits unsuited to the pressures of mid Victorian life but unable to control reality or escape, whether it is Mr Dorrit imprisoned in Marshalsea prison for debt or Mrs Clennam’s self- imposed and resentful immobility. The motifs of fear, boundaries, of heredity and constraint are present but in more complicated ways than first appears. Dickens uses heredity for example, in William Dorrit’s in heritance, Arthur’s parentage as a device to drive the narrative but also as a cause of Mrs Clennam’s psychosomatic illness.As in Lady Audley’s Secret there are riddles too to be unravelled. Little Dorrit is a novel of imprisonment, both literal and psychological. This is most starkly illustrated in the characters of Mr Dorrit and Mrs Clennam.
As the novel begins Mr Dorrit is incarcerated in a debtor’s prison. ‘Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that kept him in, kept numbers of his trouble out.’ (P.103). He adapted to his position, the walls and bars providing security and a refuge from the pressures of life outside. This reverses the meaning of constraint. Such was his adaptation that he became known as ‘The Father of Marshalsea’ so much that ‘he grew to be proud of his title. If any imposter had arisen to claim it, he would have shed tears in resentment of the attempt to deprive him of his rights.’ There is an irony to the perception of boundaries and constraint for when William Dorrit is released a wealthy man and moves to Italy, he cross the boundary and becomes insane, it was only the walls of the prison which kept him mentally healthy. This decline is charted by Penvoize (2018:412).
He became increasingly suspicious and sensitive to imagined slights, culminating in his final mental collapse, in which he becomes deluded and disorientated. In his deranged state he achieves an honesty about himself which he has hitherto been at pains to conceal.
Dorrit’s conceit, ingratitude and paranoia, the anxieties wrought by social convention create, in a sense, a self- imposed constraint inducing mania, the consequences of which mirror those of Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right. The symptoms of mania, suspicion and restlessness are used by Dickens to draw a picture of William Dorrit as a psychologically insecure man defeated by the world. It is as sympathetic portrayal but there is still a hint of moral judgment, mental illness depicted as resulting from circumstance but also moral weakness.
At another level as Matsuoka (2013: 229) argues.
Madness is frequently used by Dickens as a metaphor for the distorted mental structures of those wielding power, those who foster and facilitate their frantic society’s oppression of humanity.
In the case of Little Dorrit these figures are represented by those imposing draconian penalties on debtors, and the guardians of the Circumlocution Office bereft of empathy or understanding, the unscrupulous world of business and commerce.
An altogether different victim of this world can be found in the depiction of Mrs Clennam. The treatment of this character contrasts sharply with that of Mr Dorrit in that appeals to sympathy are muted and accusations of manipulation come to the fore. As Wood (2001:16) notes.
Dickens takes an altogether more censorious view of the female invalid, and suggestively portrays states of health or infirmity in terms of the individuals willingness to subscribe to the cultural prescriptions of womanhood, and of the extent of resistance to them.
Mrs Clennam’s cold will, a self-enforced reclusive, wheel chain bound life,spits resentment and bitterness, a model of feminine deportment guaranteed to strike fear and distaste in the mind of the readers. At first glance there are minimal insights into the psychological gymnastics of Mrs Clennam’s inner self. That the illness is psychosomatic constructs a framework of transgression, either moral or sexual to the characters actions. The reader is left to glean whatever intuitions they can through the interpretation of these actions. As was often the case, for women, the medical focus was more on the body than with men, and unlike with Mr Dorrit there is no direction to observe suffering or despair. Yet the motifs of constraint, boundaries, and fear of what could happen (if you allowed it) are obvious. Mrs Clennam’s home is still a prison.
Wood (2001:22) develops this theme.
She embodies, in her immobility, the extreme end of this ‘close confinement’. Her house is made a place of correction and quarantine where in her role as moral agent, she seeks to eliminate the taunt of Arthur’s illegitimate birth into the world beyond the house walls.
This is the fear of social stricture taken to extremes, yet it also illustrates the sense of being crushed or overwhelmed that is such a feature of mental illness. An internalisation of repression so punishing that Mrs Clennam commits a kind of suicide of the soul. She distorts the Victorian ideal of the home as sanctuary, subverting submissionand endurance into an arena of inhospitality and defiance.
The atmosphere in the room is exemplified by Dicken’s description.
The varying light of fire and candle in Mrs Clennam’s room made the greatest change that ever broke the dead monotony of that spot. In her two narrow windows, the fire shone sullenly all day, and sullenly all night. On rare occasions it flashed up passionately, as she did; but for the most part it was suppressed, like her and preyed upon itself evenly and slowly. (P.220)
There is a stress on narrowness, on internal and external gloom, where boundaries are merely emphasised by the flickering of flame. There are echoes of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, but in contrast to Lady Audley’s Secret time is not seen as in disturbance, but in stasis.
Boundaries exist in other ways beyond the physical. The extent to which Mrs Clennam’s psychosomatic illness is controlled, the ingress of mental illness into her decision to retreat to immobility and create a dark theatre of the hearth is open to question. Tavela (2017: iv) has examined psychosomatic illness as a device.
Rather than domestic work, maternal work, or professional work, the psychosomatic heroine demonstrates that the most important work a woman does is as herself; she must find a way to manage her mind-body relations to present the necessary image that allows her to navigate the world.
It is arguable that Mrs Clennam is not a heroine in the traditional sense, but the choice of immobility allows the exercise of control in a world where such control for a woman was difficult to achieve.
Wood (2001:16) links Mrs Clennam’s predicament back to Dicken’s views on the female invalid, and suggests her reaction is almost an expectation.
Mrs Clennamis a reflection of the ways in which invalid narratives work with and against the ideological framework in which they are constructed. Each is informed by Mid-Victorian medical representations of female psychosomatic illness as a function of social, moral, or sexual – political transgression.
The emphasis is on transgression and the medical framework widely held view that the feminine mind is dominated by the emotions and irrationality in contrast to the domination of the intellect in men. The depiction of mental illness as a moral weakness a vibrant undercurrent of contemporary medical thought. This example serves to illustrate the blurring of boundaries between psychological reactions to social constructs, mental illness, and calculation. In this case psychosomatic illness is used as a narrative device, as a tool of characterisation but also acknowledges that this was the only power a woman had over her body. Immobility in this case is an expression of mania, physical atrophy a symptom offrantic psychological activity. Mrs Clennam seated in her wheelchair exists at the tipping point of extreme self-control and self-destruction, an image which serves to exemplify her precarious situation. The fear of going against expected norms, of otherness led to this place, compounded by disappointed expectations, resentfulness, and a preoccupation with the past. This aspect of dwelling upon painful memories was considered very unhealthy by the medical authorities and the cause of mental disturbance. Dickens reflects this not only in Mrs Clennam but also as a driver of William Dorrit’s neurosis.