In Lady Audley's Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres

233 Pages·2012·1.084 MB·English

by  Saverio Tomaiuolo

I
n

L
a
d
y

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture A Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
u
d
Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys l
e
y
This series provides timely revisions of the nineteenth-century’s literature, culture, history and
identity. Drawing on the most provocative and thoughtful research, volumes in the series urge ’s

readers to think differently about both Victorian and nineteenth-century studies. S
h
a
d
In Lady Audley’s Shadow
o
w
Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres In Lady Audley’s Shadow
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
‘In this ground-breaking study Saverio Tomaiuolo offers a highly perceptive and wide-ranging guide
to the “slippery” genre of Victorian Sensation Fiction, as exemplified by its most (in)famous practitioner,
and Victorian Literary Genres
Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In Lady Audley’s Shadow skilfully traces both the literary origins of sensation
in Gothic literature and its brilliantly creative employment of the new technologies of the period.’
— Roger Ebbatson, Lancaster University
‘This suggestive book vividly reminds its readers of the cross-fertilization among forms of literature Saverio Tomaiuolo
and the importance of culture in creating an “entangled bank” of ideas and types of fiction.’
— Ann C. Colley, SUNY Distinguished Professor, SUNY College at Buffalo
This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s complex relationship with the three main Victorian S
a
literary genres: the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel. Using Braddon’s bestselling sensation fiction
v
Lady Audley’s Secret as a paradigmatic model and as a ‘haunting’ textual presence across her literary career, e
r
this study provides a fertile critical reading of a wide range of Braddon’s novels and short stories. io

T
Braddon’s manipulation of Victorian literary codes and conventions proves that she was something more o
than a mere sensation writer and that her primary role in the nineteenth-century literary scene has to m
be reaffirmed. Drawing on a wide range of textual materials and literary sources, the book foregrounds a
i
Braddon’s constant and sometimes ambivalent dialogue with her times, and with ours as well. u
o
l
o
Saverio Tomaiuolo is Lecturer in English Literature and Language at Cassino University, Italy.
ISBN 978 0 7486 4115 4 E
d
Jacket design by Cathy Sprent i
n
Edinburgh University Press b
22 George Square u
r
Edinburgh EH8 9LF g
www.euppublishing.com h
In Lady Audley’s Shadow
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd ii 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys
Volumes available in the series:
In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian
Literary Genres
Saverio Tomaiuolo
978 0 7486 4115 4 Hbk
Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of
Modernism
Deaglán Ó Donghaile
978 0 7486 4067 6 Hbk
William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and
Propaganda, 1880–1914
Anna Vaninskaya
978 0 7486 4149 9 Hbk
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd iiii 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
In Lady Audley’s Shadow
Mary Elizabeth Braddon and
Victorian Literary Genres
Saverio Tomaiuolo
Edinburgh University Press
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd iiiiii 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
© Saverio Tomaiuolo, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4115 4 (hardback)
The right of Saverio Tomaiuolo
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd iivv 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: the Lady Audley Paradigm 1
Part I Gothic Mutations
1 Displacing the Gothic in Lady Audley’s Secret 23
2 John Marchmont’s Legacy and the Topologies of
Dispossession 41
3 Reading between the (Blood)lines of Victorian Vampires:
‘Good Lady Ducayne’ 60
Part II Darwinian Detections
4 From Geology to Genealogy: Detectives and Counter-
detectives in Lady Audley’s Secret and Henry Dunbar 79
5 Perception, Abduction, Disability: Eleanor’s Victory and
The Trail of the Serpent 97
6 John Faunce’s Normalising Investigations in Rough Justice
and His Darling Sin 119
Part III Victorian Realisms
7 ‘So Like and Yet So Unlike’: Reality Effects, Sensational
Letters and Pre-Raphaelite Portraits in Lady Audley’s
Secret 137
8 Reading Sensation/Writing Realism: Photographic Strategies
in The Doctor’s Wife 156
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd vv 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
vi In Lady Audley’s Shadow
9 ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air’: Phantom Fortune and the
Ghosts of Capitalism 175
Bibliography 194
Index 214
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd vvii 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
Series Editor’s Preface
‘Victorian’ is a term at once indicative of a strongly determined concept
and, simultaneously, an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all
meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist
about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s
Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word
for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought,
belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in
nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional
inception questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits
of the nominal defi nition, and have sought to question the very grounds
on which the unrefl ective perception of the so-called Victorian has been
built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century
studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of
interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-
minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and
inquisitiveness of their subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars
and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century
society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of
‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical,
scientifi c, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns;
indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to
the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclu-
sive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches.
A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most
part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists,
pursued with as much fervour as the affi rmative exploration between
different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the
service of reading the nineteenth century.
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up
both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd vviiii 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
viii In Lady Audley’s Shadow
convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for
the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the
most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose
is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary
approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely
revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the
same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed
or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present
a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations.
Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the
series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing,
principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated
close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nine-
teenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that
is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange.
Working from original sources, primary documents and recent inter-
disciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian
Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the
nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and
provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders.
Julian Wolfreys
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd vviiiiii 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank Francesco Marroni, for his great
support, for his perceptive, sharp and sometimes ‘implacable’ com-
ments, and for having followed this book from the very beginning with
his contagious enthusiasm. To him goes my deepest gratitude. Many
sections of the original manuscript have profi ted from the readings and
suggestions of the following scholars, who have generously bestowed
their professional gifts and profound knowledge on it: Maurizio Ascari,
Mariaconcetta Costantini, Allan Christensen, Roger Ebbatson, George
Levine, Andrew Mangham and the anonymous readers at Edinburgh
University Press. Of course, I am the only one who is to blame for
eventual idiosyncracies, mistakes or errors included in the book. I am
also grateful to Ann Heilmann for her kindness in sending me precious
materials related to the fi gure of Victorian female vampires. A great
thank-you also to Mary Patricia Kane, for her careful reading of the
manuscript and for her constant availability.
I am deeply thankful to Giovanni Capelli, Dean at the Faculty of
Health and Sport Sciences in Cassino, for his professional and human
understanding, and for his ‘friendly dinners’. My gratitude to Prof.
Paolo Russo, Head of the Department of Health and Sport Sciences, for
his attentive promptness in solving problems. My thanks also to all the
people I have the pleasure of working with at Cassino University, for
their sincere support and for their invaluable presence in my brightest
and darkest hours.
Sections of this book have been published, sometimes in a very dif-
ferent form and structure, in the following books and journals, whose
publishers and editors I thank for their kind permission to use them:
‘Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Quest for Realism: Photographic Paradigms
in The Doctor’s Wife’, Englishes, 22, 8, 2004, pp. 79–104; ‘Towers
and Trains: Topologies of Dispossession in M. E. Braddon’s John
Marchmont’s Legacy’, in La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto:
TTOOMMAAIIUUOOLLOO PPAAGGIINNAATTIIOONN..iinndddd iixx 1188//0088//22001100 1155::2299