The Victorian era bound societal ideals of femininity with motherhood, subservience and docility. Women were expected to assume inferiority by devoting themselves to familial upkeep and household chores, while their husbands were seen as the de facto breadwinners and held effectively complete control over their lives. Should a woman have attempted any departure from these ideals, she was often labeled as “mad” and either institutionalized or imprisoned; in either case, there was little she could do to protest or disprove her purported madness. Despite these rigid social constraints, however, women’s resistance to this system was not quelled: It instead began to appear, subtly and safely, in the form of literature. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret was among the most successful of these resistance-works, I argue, because of her implementation of the novel’s female characters as satirical critiques of the conventional “good woman” archetype: Braddon first introduces them as perfectly compliant, thus winning her male reader’s trust and establishing these women to be representative of the collective female experience, before conducting an elaborate reveal of the immediate physical and mental danger that they pose to the men around them and thereby suggesting the Victorian patriarchy to inevitably result in female violence. 

In order to lodge this accusation of Victorian societal failure, Braddon understands that she must first establish Lady Audley, the titular character and subsequent primary component of her argument, as the perfectly conventional woman, thereby defusing her power as the “main character” in the novel and instead presenting her as merely illustrative of the average woman’s condition. She achieves this characterization by deliberately painting Lady Audley as easygoing and inoffensive—her “amiable and gentle nature,” Braddon writes, causes her “always to be light-hearted, happy and contented under any circumstances” (47). The specific detail of her contentment under “any” circumstances here introduces the possibility of negative circumstances, assuring the reader that Lady Audley would remain obedient and nonaggressive even in such conditions and reinforcing her role as the innocent and harmless wife. 

Braddon also takes care to describe Lady Audley’s physical appearance, informing the male reader that her looks, too, align with their expectations of innocence and docility. She puts forth these descriptions via direct references to the male gaze, writing of the “soft and melting blue eyes” and “graceful beauty of that slender throat and drooping head, with its wealth of showering flaxen curls” that leave her husband, Sir Michael, unable to resist Lady Audley’s “tender fascination” (48). Through her word choice, namely the descriptors “soft,” “graceful,” “slender” and “tender,” Braddon reminds the reader that Lady Audley is beautiful on particular account of her fragility—again appearing as the ideal “good woman.” 

She then continues to strengthen this description of Lady Audley’s innocence with a distinctly opposite description of Sir Michael—a “big man, tall and stout, with a deep, sonorous voice, handsome black eyes, and a white beard” who oversees “a noble place” in the Audley Court (46, 44). Sir Michael’s character here appears masculine both in physical figure and in economic status, while Lady Audley has already been disclosed as a gentle woman, presumably coming from poor economic circumstances on account of her now having made an “advantageous match” with her new husband (Braddon, 46). Hence, Braddon’s male reader comes to recognize Sir Michael as dominative over Lady Audley, and therefore a prime example of Victorian gender ideals. Because he echoes their own perspectives, the male reader is inclined to trust that he will keep Lady Audley at bay even in the negative circumstances earlier alluded to. 

A similar juxtaposition to that of Lady Audley and Sir Michael can be found between Phoebe Marks (Lady Audley’s chosen maid) and Luke Marks (Phoebe’s husband). Before even introducing her by name, Braddon remarks that “her figure was slim and fragile, and in spite of her humble dress, she had something of the grace and carriage of a gentlewoman” (65). She then introduces Luke as “big, broad-shouldered… and bull-necked,” and “not unlike one of the stout oxen” (65-66). Here, again, we see Braddon’s trademark organization by which she makes the male reader see the novel’s female characters as objects under scrutiny of the male gaze, despite being penned by a female author. Phoebe is written as a delicate and elegant woman, and her personality is left unaccounted for in favor of a description of her body—another characteristically male authorial choice. Her husband, in turn, is inversely brutish and graceless; Braddon repeatedly compares his presence to that of a strong farm animal. The stark contrast of their physical conditions makes it immediately evident that Phoebe would be unable to defend herself against Luke, and Braddon wins a degree of credibility with the male reader for her willingness to portray the couple in this way. 

Phoebe’s conformity to conventional Victorian femininity is then heightened through her body language and dialogue with Luke. Still within her introductory scene, Braddon describes how Phoebe “bit her lip as her lover spoke, and looked away” (66), painting her as too timid even to meet the eye of her “lover” while simultaneously invoking the distinctly seductive connotations of lip-biting to mark her as an object of sexual value. Braddon then continues by revealing the purpose of Luke’s speech to be a reassurance of their financial security, and a promise to her that “all you’ve got to do” is “take care of yourself” (67). Luke, in this interaction, functions as an embodiment of traditional male directives for women, telling Phoebe that she need not work for money because he will provide financially for both of them. Subsequently, Braddon furthers the male reader’s trust in her portrayal of femininity, as she has now demonstrated another satisfactory example of the conventional male-female marital relationship. 

It is on great account of this trust that the male reader begins to see femininity as a wholly nonconcerning element of Lady Audley’s Secret. Braddon’s repeated examples of subservient female characters in the early pages, and their appropriately masculine counterparts, assure them that she intends not to produce a particularly transgressive piece in this novel. Her usage of the male gaze also situates the male reader in a place of familiarity, where the main female characters align perfectly with their pre-existing expectations and own anecdotal experiences. For these reasons, by the time that Braddon reveals Lady Audley’s secret, the male reader has already accepted her role as a stand-in for the real-world experiences of women in Victorian society; thus they are forced to consider the reality that if a normal, “good woman” like Lady Audley could become so devilish to the men in her life, so could, logically, any of the equally “good” women in their own life. 

Of course, in forcing this consideration that female disruption—as I term it—is the eventual endpoint of any “good woman,” Braddon must (and does) take the risk of actually disrupting the stability of her male characters. She orchestrates this disruption to occur at various different sociocultural levels in order to maximize its personal effect upon every male reader: Sir Michael, a wealthy and relatively powerful man, is so deeply affected by Lady Audley’s betrayal that he leaves the country in grief; George is almost killed, losing his wife and nearly his son as well; even little Georgey, George and Lady Audley’s young son, suffers the permanent loss of his mother and years-long absence of his father. 

By allowing Lady Audley to affect each of these male characters so profoundly, Braddon makes her disruption so effective that it strips away a large portion of their autonomy. I suggest that this was a deliberate choice, wherein she recognized the inevitability of male anger over her reveal and attempted to subvert it away from herself by openly acknowledging it. She leans into it entirely, in fact, interjecting a narrative tirade on the “strong man”—here meaning Sir Michael—and his “tender weakness for the woman he loves,” then professing that “the wife’s worst remorse when she stands without the threshold of the home she may never enter more is not equal to the agony of the husband who closes the portal on that familiar and entreating face,” and that “the anguish of the mother who may never look again upon her children is less than the torment of the father who has to say to those little ones, ‘My darlings, you are henceforth motherless’” (299). By putting forth this sympathy via her own narration, Braddon explicitly tells the male reader that she—and therefore, the book—commiserates with them, and wants to find a solution to the recurring problem of female disruption. 

The easiest solution, Braddon seems to have predicted her male reader to assume, would be to further persecute women into submission. She employs a working example via Robert Audley of why, exactly, this would fall short. As Heidi Hansson and Cathrine Norberg write in their joint article “Lady Audley’s Secret, Gender and the Representation of Emotions,” Robert “uncovers her crimes, and his role as detective expands to include a number of positions… [including] persecutor, the avenger of her first husband and eventually her executioner, by means of sending her abroad to die in a madhouse” (4). Hence, Robert has undertaken the all-encompassing role of reclaiming autonomy and masculinity for every male character that Lady Audley has wronged. He tracks her down—proving his own masculinity—forces her to confess—reclaiming that of George—and briefly assumes something of a parental role over little Georgey—allowing the boy to grow up in relative stability. 

Altogether, Robert undergoes a transformation not far removed from that of Lady Audley herself. He shifts from a passive character into a consciously violent one, arriving at the “savage” conclusion that he “hate[s] women… bold, brazen, abominable creatures, invented for the annoyance and destruction of their superiors” (Braddon, 229). Though his efforts in pursuit of this hatred don’t result in his own death, they do directly jeopardize it and ultimately lead to Lady Audley’s accidental burning of Luke, and his eventual death. Thus, the champion effect of his transformation is Lady Audley’s anger, and the results of this anger are overwhelmingly violent. It is these results and this violence that demonstrate the invariable failure of Robert’s transformation, which I extrapolate into an invariable failure of any other man’s attempt to persecute women for their refusal to submit to Victorian gender ideals. 

Hansson and Norberg take a similar perspective on this dynamic, writing that “women’s anger is a sign of disruption and transgression in the text, and its depiction contributes to the characterization of Lady Audley as an emblem of deviant femininity, as does her refusal to exhibit signs of shame” (6). In turn, the absence of women’s anger (and subsequent deviance) to the story would have led to an entirely different continuation of several lives: Sir Michael and Lady Audley would have lived in peace, Luke would not have died, Robert and George would not have so nearly died and little Georgey would have remained with his grandfather. Aside from the final effect, to which Braddon and her characters alike generally pay little attention, everyone else would presumably have lived a better life had Robert not attempted to persecute Lady Audley for her bigamy. 

When considering the roles of female anger and its resultant deviancy, however, it is again crucial to extend our analysis past the titular character and explore the lingering, less-apparent instances within subcharacters. To this end, I turn to Elizabeth Steere’s chapter “I Thought you was an Evil Spirit” for her analysis on Braddon’s depiction of anger in Phoebe. “The maid,” Steere writes, can be seen as “a demonic figure who masterminds the death of her husband Luke, the ruin of Lady Audley, and the attempted undoing of Robert Audley,” acting “deceptively humble and compliant” (1). This is largely the same structure that Braddon employs in Lady Audley’s own character as a driving force for the entire story—a deceptively compliant woman who, when examined more closely, is revealed as the “mastermind” to which Braddon herself subverts male anger. 

The undertone of Steere’s suggestion is a power reversal between the two women. Phoebe assumes the autonomous role, able to “blackmail her and to control her by power of suggestion, affecting subservience while planting seeds of destruction for those close to her” (Steere, 1), while Lady Audley sinks below her into the role of genuine, if still unconscious, subservience. Operating under this interpretation, we see Lady Audley’s character lose her double nature for the first time: Superficially, she is the “good woman,” and underneath, she is still the “good woman,” though now operating under the discrete-but-pervasive influence of her “ghoulish doppelganger” (Steere, 1). 

I contend, considering Steere’s reversal, that Phoebe and Lady Audley’s relationship can be seen as an inter-story equivalent to the relationship between Braddon and her male reader. Braddon allows them to believe that she has conformed to the societal expectations of her writing, just as Phoebe allows Lady Audley to believe that she has conformed to her and Sir Michael’s expectations for her behaviors. Braddon’s setup for her eventual reveal of Lady Audley’s true character to the male reader also mirrors Steere’s contention of Phoebe being an “evil spectre” by drawing on the same “occult and supernatural elements” (Steere, 1). Specifically, Braddon offers a description of a painting of Lady Audley—at once immortalizing the image yet making it not entirely credible as a commentary on her actual character—writing that “her crimson dress… hung about her in folds that looked like flames, her fair head peeping out of the lurid mass of color as if out of a raging furnace” (107). From this haunting description of Lady Audley’s character, and adjacent ones of Phoebe’s, the male reader gradually comes to see both women as occupying a liminal space between the “good woman” and the implied, though not yet explicitly revealed, supernatural anger and violence that they intend to unleash on male characters.  

Redirecting Steere’s argument from the act of “proving” Phoebe and Lady Audley’s occult characteristics, it can also be applied to Hansson and Norberg’s earlier inspection of gender-emotion politics as an evaluation of the emotional effects upon the male reader of female anger—and thus, female deviancy—surpassing even that which is expected of men, and reaching a godlike level. Both Phoebe and Lady Audley exhibit such supernatural anger, thereby elevating their own respective statuses to those of a supernatural/divine figure. In doing so, both women also disrupt the core of Victorian society by shifting the “God, then man, then woman” social hierarchy into “God and woman, then man.” Moreover, both women then direct this anger toward the men in their lives, drawing a separation between man and God. 

Hansson and Norberg explore this separation through Braddon’s differing authorial approaches to male and female anger, writing that “a woman’s anger is a defining characteristic of her self that makes her dangerous and deviant” because “a connection with evil is frequently present, in a continuation of the ancient and medieval tradition of personifying anger as female devil,” whereas “masculine anger is… constructed as healthy and normative in the text and, since it is directed outward, the connection between self and emotionality remains weak” (8). By demonstrating masculine anger to be healthy while feminine anger is indicative of the “female devil,” Braddon again elevates Phoebe and Lady Audley’s emotional conditions above those of the novel’s male characters. Through this elevation, she then convinces the male reader—who is, in any likelihood, deeply religious (Clark, 20)—that their trusted male characters have come under supernatural siege by the likes of Phoebe and Lady Audley. 

While the godly element of their anger makes this siege especially threatening, the average male reader is likely more concerned for their own life than for those of Braddon’s fictional characters at this point. Already having recognized Luke, Sir Michael and the other men of the novel to bare significant resemblance to themselves, and the original characterizations of Phoebe and Lady Audley to effectively mirror the behaviors of most women in their lives, it appears entirely plausible for them to end up in the same circumstances—that is, having a seemingly harmless woman around them suddenly reveal herself to be the very antithesis of such. On account of this threat, the male reader knows that something must change in order for them to be safe. Braddon’s earlier demonstration of Robert’s failure to quash female deviancy, however, has already proven a male interjection not to be a functional solution; this shortcoming is made all the more evident by the end of the book, where the male reader unequivocally recognizes that Phoebe and Lady Audley are, to some degree, operating under the assistance or influence of God. Hence, the male reader is left with a singular rational choice for their blame: the social conditions which caused Phoebe and Lady Audley to rebel in the first place. 

Having constructed her entire novel in careful anticipation of this realization, Braddon has already made these conditions easy enough for the male reader to locate once arriving at this choice. Returning to the early pages, for example, Lady Audley pleas to Sir Michael that he try to understand—though she doubts that he truly could—the degree to which poor women suffer in Victorian society, writing, “From my very babyhood I have never seen anything but poverty… trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations. You cannot tell; you, who are among those for whom life is so smooth and easy, you can never guess what is endured by such as we” (52). This pitiful recollection of the hardships she has endured forces the male reader to hear her plea alongside their male companion, Sir Michael, putting them in a position of compassionate affection for her. 

Still, Braddon is cautious to put forth accounts such as this only as fleeting moments, thrown out in passing and quickly extinguished, rather than a continuous stream of narrative direction. In another instance, for example, she asks the reader to “imagine all the women of England elevated to the high level of masculine intellectuality… above taking the pains to be pretty; above tea-tables and that cruelly scandalous and rather satirical gossip which even strong men delight in” (243), then quickly returns to an innocent dialogue between Robert and Lady Audley. In her hypothetical, however brief of a thought she disguises it as, women are no longer bound to the conventions of beauty and servitude that constitute the Victorian gender hierarchy; they are instead allowed the same autonomy as men, and thus, presumably, freed from the persecution that originally drew Lady Audley to enact such treacherous violence against her male peers. 

In launching a complete rejection of her society’s rules for women—rules created by men—while understanding a large portion of her audience to be men themselves, Braddon must enact this brevity, disguise and satire in order to subvert the initial reactions of her male readership. By presenting Phoebe and Lady Audley as traditionally “good women,” she is able to win the male reader’s trust. By then marketing their descents from this characterization as a growing inclination for anti-male acts (lying to Sir Michael, hiding from George, abandoning little Georgey, attempting to murder Robert, etc.), she leverages this trust to build anger, redirecting blame away from women and toward patriarchal, gender-essentialist Victorian society. 

Works Cited:

Braddon, M. E., and Natalie M. Houston. Lady Audley’s Secret. Broadview Press, 2003. 

Clark, Kitson G. The Making of Victorian England. Routledge, 2014.

Hansson, H. & Norberg, C. 2013. Lady Audley’s secret, gender and the representation of emotions. Women’s Writing 20:4: 441-457. 

Steere, Elizabeth Lee. ‘I Thought You Was an Evil Spirit’: The Hidden Villain of Lady Audley’s Secret. Women’s Writing 15:3 (2008): 30019 (303)