Trevor Howell
ENGL – 041 – 02
Professor Fisher
Can You Keep a Secret?
The Role of Madness
in Lady Audley’s Secret
The
19th century is one of history’s most extreme periods of change. As
facets of the modern world were shaped and reshaped, the dimensions and content
of social expression similarly altered. As the scope of social change broadened,
literature similarly paralleled this era of transformation as it reflected its events
and captured its effects. One novel in particular, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, correspondingly
portrays the social revolutions then taking place. Specifically, Vicki Pallo notes
that the novel “serves as a noteworthy illustration of the many changes
occurring…in nineteenth-century
Within the novel, Lady Audley’s position as the locus of the novel’s discussion of madness exposes both its extensive social dimensions and the pervasive rise of disciplinary power. Over the course of the story, Lady Audley transforms under the eyes of the reader from an object worthy of praise and admiration into an object of contempt and shame to be disciplined and controlled. It is here, at her fall, that the characters within the novel blame madness for her error and it is here that we come to understand the social view of madness and its consequent role in social control and the constitution of the self. It is thus appropriate to begin with an analysis of its social production.
In one respect, the use of madness within the text exemplifies its role as a method of covering up and masking over society’s inherent flaws and tragic conditions, particularly in relation to class. Lady Audley originally comes from an extremely poor background, thus signifying an impoverished, low-class individual. And it is because of her abhorrent living conditions and her uncontainable hatred of her social position that she opts to flee from her roots and work toward establishing herself within the upper class. Her tragic fate, however, complicates this conception of her motivations as the novel portrays how madness is deployed to cover up her thoughts and selectively delete the content of her past. It is her particular identity as a low-class individual that exposes one of the strategic components of madness as a categorical social label. Although her reasoning for leaving her home may appear sound enough, it is this very appearance of legitimacy that the label of madness must tirelessly work to destroy. For to allow the population to discover how its own conditions, namely that of poverty, can produce an individual willing to murder to escape “the old life, the old, hard, cruel, wretched life—the life of poverty, and humiliation, and vexation, and discontent” would entirely undo its project of progress and order (Braddon 328). Therefore, madness becomes a powerful means of social erasure, both within the novel and historical reality, as it delegitimizes Lady Audley’s plight and lays the blame not on her social conditions but her individual instability. The category of madness gives society the space to say “we are not the problem; she is,” thereby glossing over underlying structural problems and avoiding wide-scale social crisis. Indeed, that madness is often inappropriately inserted as the reason behind an ostensibly rational act to denaturalize and discredit it is markedly elucidated as Dr. Mosgrave admits that although “she ran away from her home, because her home was not a pleasant one…there is no madness in that,” divulging the notion that her soon to be diagnosed madness is nothing but an unsubstantiated, in at least a strictly medical sense, and unwarranted assessment (383). Even after Dr. Mosgrave becomes aware of her violent acts towards George Talboys and the fire at the Castle Inn, his words stand unchanged: “the lady is not mad” (385). Although Dr. Mosgrave openly admits that she is not mad in the biological sense, or at least is to a very mild degree as she is latently insane, he immediately prescribes her removal from society to an asylum (385). We therefore come to realize that she is not being removed because she is mad but instead because “she is dangerous” (385). His rhetoric thus signals an important distinction between madness defined biologically and madness defined socially and the overshadowing dominance of the latter. It is important to note, however, that the doctor’s words can be read to express not only worry that she is dangerous in a violent sense but also dangerous to the veil of order and stability so necessary to society and its proper functioning. Therefore, Lady Audley’s placement in a madhouse is not actually done for her own good (though the experts cite it as the case) but for the population’s as it serves as a means to combat the exposure of society’s true faults by hiding her real reasons for acting the way she did under the guise of madness. Her exclusion from society becomes a means for the doctor to help fulfill his “dream of a healthy society, a society freed of sickness, freed of abnormality, and bursting with moral vitality” (Cooper 37). Her fate illustrates how “this presumption of intrapsychic as opposed to sociopolitical causation of disturbance is the source of therapy’s ideological power,” thus exemplifying the fact that “therapy subverts potential opposition to the social order by blaming sufferers for their own sociopolitical victimization…and by encouraging people to adjust to life as it is rather than attempt to change the structure of society” (Cloud 10). As a result, her relegation to the margins of society, her condemnation, and her isolation reveal the production of madness as a societal act of categorization, ordering and control. The role of medicine in “the administration of society and thus in the machinery of power” (Cooper 117) is particularly exposed as Dr. Mosgrave, “who knew what health was, was the key advisor to the legislator,” Robert, thereby extending medicine’s disciplinary reaches (37). The novel thus makes known madness’s role as a corrective social tool to define and extract the “ill” and “defective” elements with which society fails to cope.
Secondly, the novel’s portrayal of madness reveals the flawed underpinnings of society’s values themselves, namely those of reason and rationality. Ever-present in the language, thoughts and deeds of English society in particular, reason stood as a crucial ingredient in both the rise of modern capitalism, with its theoretical basis on rational self-interest, and British colonial expansionism, with its reliance on civilizing and enlightening logic as a justification for intervention. To allow madness, reason’s socially defined opposite, to run through the veins of society was an intolerable scenario to be stopped at all costs. In short, “the mad constituted…the greatest threat to the sovereignty of reason,” its structures and its institutions (May 19). As such, English society had a deep-seated and vested interest in reason’s continued espousal and propagation as an untainted and glorified idea. Madness as a social tool was particularly useful as a means of covering up reason’s inherent contradictions and flaws by diametrically opposing the two and subsuming reason’s flaws within the concept of madness itself. It was by “pronouncing it to be nothing” that “reason…dealt with the threat of madness” (19). Within the novel, Lady Audley is both directly labeled as behaving irrationally and indirectly as she is opposed to Robert Audley, her justice-seeking, law-imposing, virtuous foil, thus hoisting rationality further upon its pristine pedestal of truth. Although within the asylum, “Madame will have all her wishes obeyed,” it is with the implicit understanding that only “her reasonable wishes” will be obeyed; “but that goes without saying” (Braddon 395). The very fact that such an implicit understanding is possible highlights to what an extent reason has permeated the ideological environment of English society. The focus on reason not only cements its privileged place in people’s minds but it also further isolates madness as irrational and, more importantly in the eyes of the citizenry, just plain wrong.
In addition to its role as a documentation and analysis of madness in its social role, the novel also serves as a critical attack on madness as a categorical mechanism of societal control. By illustrating madness as reason’s dark underside, rather than a distinct entity, and consequently conflating the two, the novel elucidates their irreconcilable entanglement. The discussion of the possibility of Robert being mad between Lady Audley and her husband underscores the infinitesimal distance between reason and madness. Sir Michael’s comment that Robert does not “[have] brains enough for madness” contains the seeds of reason’s own undoing as an impregnable concept for he paradoxically affirms the idea that one must be competently rational to be mad (300). This consequent implication reveals how it is only through reason that madness may arise, thus confirming the inextricable link between the two and “[making] madness, too, a form of reason” (Cooper 19). The novel’s portrayal of the relationship between madness and reason locates “the danger and suspicion of madness at the heart of reason” (19). Therefore, the novel critiques the view of reason as both easily defined and distinct from madness by upsetting their separation.
Additionally, the text itself rather blatantly suggests that madness and its depiction within society are falsely constructed to reinforce the norms of society as it continually excludes that which would disrupt its semblance of stability. At various points, in fact, the novel makes reference to the prevalence of madness within society. By rhetorically asking “who has not been, or is not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life?” the novel, in a sense, banalizes madness as a commonplace and almost inevitable human trait, thus disempowering it as a means of social stigmatization by attempting to naturalize its place within life (Braddon 408). Hence, the novel challenges the generally established conception of madness at the time. Also, the narrator’s view of people as “mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-day” strikingly upsets the view of madness as a mistake in one’s humanity (227). By insisting on the fluctuating nature of madness, as something that may fleetingly come and go, the text strips “madness” of its role as an unquestionable label deserving of complete legitimacy. The narrator’s observation of “how many helpless wretches must beat their brains against this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion within” further postulates that the veil of order and control cloaked around society is fragile, porous and, in the end, illusory as it is forever impossible to realize (227). It is through these particular fragments within the text that the novel continues to disturb the traditional conception of madness as an indisputable label with the power to exclude without question and condemn without doubt.
Finally, viewed from a broader perspective, the novel’s characterization of madness points out the overall societal shift taking place in the exercise of power itself. The novel’s description of madness as a subtle tool of production and formulation rather than outward violence and overt domination signals a more general shift within the field of power from the heavy-handed oppression of the past executed by the Hobbesian sovereign to a far more inconspicuous and insidious form in which power manipulates subjectivity and society to fit the norms of the time. This movement away from power as something executable only by those vested with it places society at the fore by relocating power from the hands of the few to the hands of all. Society therefore simultaneously becomes the disciplined and the disciplining, the self-regulating enforcer. The novel’s continual repetition of judgment and guilt as mechanisms of control over Lady Audley illustrates the new social dynamic of power as society deems what acts are shameful and wrong. Moreover, such a conception of power exemplifies the notion that “the keeper intervenes, without weapons, without instruments of constraint, with observation and language only” (Foucault 251). As Pallo notes, the very fact that Robert, the unexpected individual who stands outside of the old, violently punitive notion of law by virtue of his isolation from traditional legal practice itself, becomes Lady Audley’s pursuer reflects this new development of power as exercised by ideological rather than purely physical punishment. The novel, therefore, through its focus on madness, and its consequent focus on the social body, simultaneously chronicles the transformation of power into a pervasively free-flowing and far more influential social form.
Lady Audley’s Secret is a prime illustration of the social and ideological roles that madness may play in society. And in being such, the novel discloses the power of madness as a disciplinary effort to segregate and expel that which endangers the mainstream hegemonic fabric of society. Despite madness’s certain biological roots, both its vagueness as an illness and the broadness of its application reveal it to be an oft-constructed threat employed by society to cleanse itself of its “ill,” and often threatening, components. The novel’s underlying criticism of this role of madness calls into question both its characterization and the fallaciousness of its application. By locating madness within the webs of social power, the novel exposes the role madness plays as a disciplinary tactic. Therefore, the text stands not only as an archival representation of the beginnings of nineteenth-century disciplinary social power but also as a site of potential challenge to its applications, definitions, and implications. The novel can thus be read as a far-reaching critique of not only the use of madness but of social practices in general. It is critical to note that the criticism of madness has much wider implications for the “politico-medical grip…[dealt] not just with illness but with general forms of existence and behavior (eating and drinking, sexuality and fecundity, ways of dressing, the kinds of homes people should live in, and so forth)” (Cooper 117). Therefore, the novel’s critique of the social use of madness indicts not only this particular implementation of power but the entire array of social reconfigurations occurring at the time.
Works Cited
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady
Audley’s Secret. Broadview Press:
Cloud, Dana. Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetoric of
Therapy.
Sage
Publications:
Cooper, Barry. Michel Foucault: An Introduction to the Study of his Thought. Edwin Mellen
Press:
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Random
House Vintage Books:
May, Todd. Between
Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics and Knowledge in the
Thought
of Michel Foucault.
Pallo, Vicki A. “From Do-Nothing to Detective: The
Transformation of Robert Audley in Lady
Audley’s
Secret.” The Journal of Popular
Culture 39.3 (2006): 466-478.