In Lady Audley's Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0748641157
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres: the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel. Using Braddon's bestselling sensation fiction Lady Audley's Secret as a paradigmatic novel and as a 'haunting' textual presence across her literary career, this study provides a fertile critical reading of a wide range of Braddon's novels and short stories.
Through an analysis of Braddon's negotiations with Victorian narrative, ideological and cultural issues, this monograph offers readers a refreshing view of gender, female identity and subjectivity, the treatment of insanity, questions related to technology and progress, the impact of evolutionism and Darwinism, the intersemiotic dialogue between pictorial art and novel-writing, the role of the (female) writer in the new literary market and the changing notion of capital in an increasingly fluid social context.
Braddon's manipulation of Victorian literary codes and conventions proves that she was something more than a mere sensation writer and that her primary role in the nineteenth-century literary scene has to be reaffirmed. Drawing on a wide range of textual materials and literary sources, the book foregrounds Braddon's constant and sometimes ambivalent dialogue with her times, and with ours as well.
Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Early Modern Literature in History)
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
and her beauty allow her to ascend the social scale and to turn from governess into lady. As a matter of fact, Victorians considered governesses as strange creatures moving halfway between irreconcilable realities: outer world and family life, paternal rules and maternal tenderness, the economic independence usually attributed to men and the educational (rather than domestic) duties they performed in families which were not theirs. This fact explains the fascination Victorian writers such as
second wife and Mary’s stepmother, wasting her unrequited love for Edward in the suffocating atmosphere of Marchmont Towers. The final impression is that in John Marchmont’s Legacy Braddon attempts to offer her readers a phenomenology of crime that looks more convincing than Lady Audley’s, although some of its premises are the same. Like Lady Audley, Olivia will overcome her induced physical and moral paralysis, moving from the ‘passive’ condition of a Mariana-like woman (epitomised by Mary
sixty-year-old medical practitioner named Hale Thompson, who started asking her strange questions. He was accompanied by two people: a black-haired ‘Patagonian woman of six feet high’ aged sixty; and a mysterious gentleman, who were both waiting in the adjacent room. The ‘Patagonian’ woman was a keeper from the Brentford Madhouse of Inverness Lodge, at Fairwater. Victorian newspapers and Rosina’s biographical notes related that they were all residing at the nearby Castle Hotel. After his
physical impairment becomes an advantage to him.32 People, including Jabez North, tend to speak without restraint in his presence because they erroneously think that he is both deaf and dumb. Moreover, his use of sign language and finger spelling (his ‘dumb alphabet’) helps him to communicate with those people who understand his code, without being intercepted. It is also to be noticed that in her characterisation of a disabled detective Braddon does not avoid using stereotypes, and in portraying
imitated and even plagiarised on some occasions. Although Braddon’s French masters Balzac and Flaubert (later joined by Zola) depicted nineteenth-century bourgeois society from a cynical and amoral perspective that Braddon partially despised, she took them as models of novel-writing. On the TOMAIUOLO PAGINATION.indd 138 18/08/2010 15:29 Letters and Portraits in Lady Audley’s Secret 139 other hand, the traditional mid-Victorian realistic novel (which included a heterogeneous group of writers
