19th Century British Literature and CultureJeff Tibbetts
Lady Audley’s Desperation
In Lady Audley’s Secret Mary Elizabeth Braddon creates a complex character in Lucy Audley. She is a desperate character, a tragic woman who is cursed with bad luck and haunted by her mistakes. She learns early to feel selfish and superior, and she becomes hungry for a life beyond her means. She is driven by her greed and ambition into a position that leaves her no easy outlet. She is then cornered and threatened by first George Talboys and then Robert Audley. She cannot accept going back to the poverty that she once lived with and which nearly drove her mad, so she feels that she has no choice but to remove her pursuers by whatever means she can. She may manipulative and cunning, but she is also a pitiable figure who is not in perfect control of her life. She is, in a sense, made to be who she is and also made to do what she does.
Lady Audley is a woman who desires a life that is better then she might expect. She aspires to wealth and status above her position and she feels entitled to them by her stunning good looks. She learned early on that she could use her beauty to her benefit. She reflected in her final confession about when she discovered her gift as a child and what it meant to her: “I had learnt that which in some indefinite manner or other every school-girl learns sooner or later—I learned that my ultimate fate in life depended upon my marriage, and I concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry better than any of them.” (359). She was socialized by her school-mates and the society to believe that her only means of improving her situation was to marry well into money. This gave her the idea that in order to achieve the life that she wanted she had no choice but to obtain it through her beauty. With this intention well in mind, she searched for a suitor who would be able to elevate her status. Her first choice was George Talboys, who was “the only son of a rich country gentleman” (360), which would mean that he should inherit the estate at some point and that would place her in a fine position. What she wasn’t counting on was the fact that his marriage to her would offend the dignity of his rich father, on account of her low birth, and that it would estrange George from his father. This shattered her plans of marrying into money and thereby raising her status, because George was not able to provide a lot of money without the support of his father. This was entirely out of her control and couldn’t be expected. The situation essentially drove her mad, and she resolved after George left for Australiato try again with a new husband. Her expectation was such that she believed she simply didn’t deserve the pain of poverty and that she shouldn’t be held accountable for the mistake of choosing the wrong husband. Moreover, she believed this poverty would lead her to mental illness and ruin, as her mother was mad and she felt that she had the seed of this madness within her.The only way that she felt she could escape was to start a new life, and a false one at that.
As she built up her new identity and planned her new life Lady Audley was building a delicate framework of lies. This new life left her no quarter to retreat to, she had to strike out in the desperate hope that she just wouldn’t be found out. If she was discovered it would surely mean her ruin. She had convinced Michael Audley that she was a simple woman of no remarkable history. He trusted her implicitly and she knew this was the key to her success as his wife. Once in a position of wealth and status under a false name and by all accounts living a lie, she knew that any discovery of her subterfuge would mean a loss of all that she had worked to build, and a return to her old life that was unthinkable to her. When George Talboys, her former husband, arrived out of nowhere on her doorstep her position was seriously threatened. After him, Robert Audley made no attempt to hide the fact that he was on to her secret and he was trying to piece together her history. Both of these men have the power to take away everything from her and reduce her to her previous sad state. Because she was a woman, her options in this predicament were very limited. She was not empowered to be able to remove her pursuers through reasoning because as a woman she was not given the right to demand anything, she was expected to take what was due to her. She would be considered insane if she asserted her belief that she deserved better. She also could not get rid of them by bribery or extortion as some men may have been able to do; while she had fairly free reign of her husband’s money it must still have been disbursed in small amounts or explained and she couldn’t extort them because she didn’t wield any political or social power over them. Her only means of removing them from her way is to either murder them or destroy their credibility. With George, her need was urgent and desperate as he could simply take her to the authorities and she would be ruined immediately. In that situation, even though she herself claims the attempted murder was an accident, it was perhaps her only choice besides descending back into poverty and madness. The threat that Robert Audley posed, while just as great was not as immediate, and she exploredother options besides murder. She knew that there was a chance to ruin his credibility by claiming that he was mad, and that option may have worked if not for some effective investigative work on Robert’s part. When she initially attempts to influence her husband against Robert it seems that she might be able to pull it off and this invigorates her. In a moment of triumph she says in an interior monologue “It is coming—it is coming; I can twist him which way I like. I can put black before him, and if I say it is white, he will believe me.” (296) and later she muses “I have been afraid of you, Mr. Robert Audley, but perhaps the time may come in which you will have cause to be afraid of me.” (305). Her intended course of dealing with Robert wasto convince her husband that Robert was mad. When she learned that Robert had assembled a solid foundation of evidence linking her previous life as Helen Talboys with her new one as Lucy Audley she had to change her plans. She realized that if this information was revealed to her husband he would know that she was living a false life and would be more likely to believe any claims that Robert had to make about her. Her situation was desperate again, and her only recourse in her mind was to get rid of Robert.
When she is deciding whether or not she must do kill Robert, it is in a clear tone of desperation when she ponders:
“’Dare I defy him?’ she muttered, ‘Dare I? dare I? Will he stop now that he has once gone so far? Will he stop for fear of me? Will he stop for fear of me when the thought of what his uncle must suffer has not stopped him? Will anything stop him—but death?’” (312).
The language of her monologue shows her disturbed state of mind. Her thoughts are truncated and confused. She is repeating herself and she is convincing herself that she has no choice in the matter. She is on the edge of abject devastation, in her mind. She asks herself rhetorical questions, and she comes to just conclusion. What she isn’t thinking about at this point is giving up and confessing, for that would mean the end of her life as she knows it and she is not prepared to accept that. The repetition and the questioning reveal the narrowness of her fixation on the problem and lack of possible options. If he hasn’t yet been dissuaded she doesn’t feel that he can be. Rather than considering giving up, she decided to try to kill him. She is pressed into a corner and the only way out is through Robert. If she had other options, she may have pursued them in a more rational state of mind but the only recourse in her desperate statewas the death of Robert. Because of her inability to admit her guilt and dishonesty she is forced to go to desperate lengths.
This moment of personal questioning and confusion reveals her true face to the reader. If one saw only her cunning or vicious side the reader would not be led to sympathize with Lady Audley or feel pity for her. By revealing her vacillation and confusion, Braddon casts her as a tragic figure. She is a product of a restrictive and materialistic culture which limits women into just a few accepted means of obtaining their fortune and happiness, principally marriage. When things don’t work out well for her in her first marriage, she turns to deception and fraud to get her way, spurred on by her greed. Her ambition was built into her education and this voracity is the motivation for all of the wickedness that follows in her life. What started out as a simple plan to leave and start over ballooned into a terribly intricate web of lies that was at once enormous and delicate. Her life of poverty nearly drove her to madness, which was a serious concern for her because of her mother’s history of mental illness, and she felt that to return to it would have meant certain death or confinement in a mad-house. She was, in a sense, pressed into her position and once in it there was no choice for her but to continue as long as she was able. Circumstances turned against her again when George and Robert threatened to reveal her, and she was unable to defray the costs of her dishonesty except by becoming yet more monstrous through acts of violence. Her initial act of betrayal and selfishness, when she left George, her child, and started off on her new and false life was a crack that widened into a gulf of iniquity.
Lady Audley tries to take control of her life but it doesn’t work as well as she had planned. She is at the mercy of luck as everyone is, but she has been made to believe that she deserves something better and she has the impudence to attempt to get it. When she tries to make it as an imposter and fails, she is left with the choice to return to her life of pain and suffering or try to remove the obstacles to her happiness. Because her options are so limited, she feels that she must resort to the most serious crime to achieve George and Robert’s removal. While she sometimes seems to be in control, we find out that she is really at the mercy of fate in the end, and all of her attempts to try and advance her position come to ruin. Lady Audley is a product of desperation brought on by greed.
Works Cited
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. New York: Broadview Press, 2003.
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