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Bearing Her Secret: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd

KAREN E. TATUM

Were the sketch made from a man's point of view, its openness would at least be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it in England is, that it is oftenest made from the woman's side-that it is women who describe these sensuous raptures-that this intense appreciation of flesh and blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is represented as the natural sentiment of English girls.-Margaret Oliphant

HE SUBGENRE OF THE SENSATION NOVEL FREQUENTLY USES AS A PLOT

device the revelation of dreadful secrets, secrets that underwrite Victorian domestic ideology. One such secret is that Victorian domestic ideology is founded on the abjection1 of the female body by both men and women. This is the secret that Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels reveal. The male characters of Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley's Secret, Talbot Bulstrode and Robert Audley, reflect domestic ideology by constructing the female characters, Aurora and Lady Audley, as mysteriously dreadful powers of horror. This phantasy, already pro- vided by the Symbolic, allows them to establish their masculine iden- tity by mastering the female characters' secrets.

Aurora Floyd dismantles the femme fatale myth of women as powers of horror, by examining the male characters' reactions to Aurora. The fact that this dark heroine, suspected because she has dark hair and eyes, turns out to be innocent, suggests that the male characters in this novel create the myth that women possess dreadful, hidden secrets in order to secure their identity by positing Aurora as being a mysterious terror of power they can then detect. The secret they discover is that the dark

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2007 (0 2007, Copyright the Authors

Journal compilation © 2007, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

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heroine actually does not bear dreadful secrets, that the idea was simply an illusion, a fiction. Lady Audley's Secret examines this same process but concludes that Lady Audley is dangerous. By subverting conventional expectations of heroines (light versus dark), Braddon exposes feminine identity as a masculine fiction dependent on abjection of the female body.

In both novels, detection is the device by which the males establish their masculine identity as separate from feminine identity. Specific- ally, the entire point of the male's investigations of the dark heroine is to assert their unconscious convictions that Lady Audley is "unspeak- able" or "mad." This is an enforcement of the Symbolic order which is founded on the abjection of women in order to identify themselves as proper, male, speaking subjects. Women's proper identity within this Symbolic order dictates that the men abject the female body in order to become the ideal. In other words, men posit women as mysteries to be deciphered, and they do this in order to establish their masculine identity in proportion to unraveling women's "riddles" (as Freud de- scribed femininity). This analysis shows that an insecure masculine identity is always threatened by the possibility that women will not behave. In Aurora Floyd, detecting reveals that the dark heroine is in fact truly innocent, so that the terror of power is a male perception, not a reality. In Lady Audley's Secret, detecting reveals the more horrifying insight that the Angel in the House ideal is capable of murder. The terror results from the knowledge that the Angel herself is dangerous.

By comparing these two novels, we gain a fuller understanding of how Braddon subverts our expectations of the conventional light and dark heroines, but most disturbingly shows us that what we presume to be innocent is truly dangerous, and that what we presume to be dangerous is really not horrifying at all.

One of my intentions here is to show the horror the male subject experiences in the face of female deviance and criminality and how such transgression threatens his autonomy. Because sensation novels are more bent on revealing secrets and mysteries, they more clearly expose what the threat of such horrors actually is. I argue that Braddon's novels are not subversive simply because they subvert expectations of what a her- oine should be, as feminist critics have argued. Rather, Braddon's novels are subversive because they expose this process of abjection. The ab- jection of the female body, on which the Symbolic order is founded, is the secret these texts reveal, a revelation that is most threatening to a system that depends on the concealment of this process.

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Bearing Her Secret

The Critical History of Sensation Novels: An Abject Genre

Victorian critics ridiculed sensation novels because, as Elaine Showalter puts it, they placed "emphasis on secrecy as the condition of middle- class life" ("Desperate Remedies" 2). Victorian critics feared the revelation that proper bourgeois respectability was founded on the repression of dreadful secrets, heinous crimes of "forgery, burglary, bigamy, and murder" or more common to middle-class life, "sibling rivalry, alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery, abortion, illegitimacy, and insanity" (Showalter 2). Part of what scared Victorian critics was the way in which sensation novels placed illicit crime and vice inside the refuge of the domestic sphere. Not only was the infiltration of the proper by the improper horrifying, but the submersion into criminality involved in reading these novels was a disturbing experience. In Powers of Horror, psycholinguist Julia Kristeva points out that "any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility" (4).

Because sensation novels reveal abject crime within the proper do- mestic sphere, they also "heighten the display of" the fragility of the Victorian social order. Anthea Trodd points out that Newgate Novels of the 1830's (the precursors to sensation novels) like Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist made a point to separate and distinguish the criminal world of vice from the respectable middle-class domestic haven (2).

Nancy walks almost two hours in order to reach Rose Maylie (Oliver Twist 358), a geographical distance that emphasizes the class difference between the prostitute and the angel, as well as how far away abject crime and vice must be from respectable, proper middle-class morality.

By the 1860's, however, the real horror of sensation novels was the way these novels placed crime inside the doors of sacred domestic havens. This merging of boundaries was an infiltration that threatened the decimation of the Symbolic order. By merging boundaries of the pure and impure, as P. D. Edwards notes, sensation novels "might contribute to social insubordination, and to general loss of faith in the stability of the social system" (ix). Sensation novels reveal that the dark stranger is within. To use Showalter's words again, this subgenre sug- gests that "one's kindly comfortable neighbors, male and female, are in fact the Other Victorians; and worse, that we have met the Other

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Victorians and they are us" (2). The sensation novel threatens social insurrection and is itself an abjected genre.

Not only were sensation novels abject because they revealed the horror of crimes within the domestic sphere, they were also abject because their heroines, proper angels or keepers of this sphere, were the criminals committing these heinous deeds. Consider the case of the nineteenth-century scientist Cesar Lombroso: In addition to his work to discover inherited, physical causes of criminal identity, Lombroso's theories of biological determinism also established a classification sys- tem of deviant behavior that was widely accepted. Lombroso insisted that most women are not criminal, but that those who are criminal are harder to detect and more vicious. Ann Jones notes of Lombroso that

"common sense and Lombroso's own experience told him that there were only two kinds of women in the world-bad and good-but he seemed haunted by the fear that an apparently good woman might, at any unexpected moment, turn out to be bad" (6). Lynda Hart, as well, observes that "the path from 'normal' femininity to 'fallen' womanhood was a slippery slope, not two parallel lines incapable of meeting, and this could not fail to have disconcerted the keepers of a social order who relied on a stable and circumscribed image of women" (1). This was indeed what horrified Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant when she observed: "There can be no possible doubt that the wickedness of man is less ruinous, less disastrous to the world in general, than the wick- edness of woman. That is the climax of all misfortunes of the human race" (250).

Like the sensational trials of "Victorian murderesses"2 that seemed to spark the genre, critics feared that women's sympathy with criminal women would lead to their refusal to conform to ideal roles. This would indeed be "disastrous to the world" because the social order itself is based on this control of women as objects of exchange among men. If an apparent model of domesticity like Lady Audley could in truth turn out to be an attempted murderess, then how was it possible to keep boundaries between the angel and the fallen woman, or the angel and the demon, intact? Braddon's portrayal of Lady Audley confirmed fears that the paragon of domestic virtue was only human and could indeed be subject to "evil influences," a knowledge that was more threatening than the revelation of crime itself.

This merging of boundaries is precisely what causes abjection, the recognition that one's social order is anything but stable and secure.

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Bearing Her Secret

Kristeva writes: "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, composite" (Kristeva 4). Such a horrifying revelation produces abjection in those whose identity depends on distinguishing the strange as out there and not here. Sensation novels place the abject here, within our homes and worst of all, within ourselves. These novels are sensational and abject because, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, they imply that "do- mestic tranquility conceals heinous desires and deeds" (3). Domestic ideology often conceals domestic violence and abuse, and such reve- lations were threatening and thus grounds for accusations of vulgar, lower-class immorality. Pamela Gilbert draws attention to the fact that the explicit association of evil with male violence against women [is]

not as often remarked [by critics], yet Braddon repeatedly refers to [it], as when Phoebe [Lady Audley's handmaid] explains that she must marry Luke because she is afraid that he will kill her oth- erwise. (94-95)

Phoebe's subplot certainly highlights male violence against women, but Lady Audley's plot overshadows this and draws our attentions toward women's violence against men. Although George Talboys physically struggles with Lady Audley, leaving marks upon her wrist, the focus of Lady Audley's Secret is not so much on women's victim- ization by the social system as it is a depiction of the way in which the social system enacts violence against both men and women.

What seemed to make these novels even more threatening is that, as Patrick Brantlinger and several other critics of today point out, sen- sation novels do not aim to transform or subvert their society through an overall social critique. Instead, they "merely tend to exploit public interest in these issues" (6). Braddon, unlike her contemporary Wilkie Collins, even exploits the convention of happy endings and restoring order as she imposes it. The implication is that fears are not allayed as secrets are revealed. This is also ground for abjection by contemporary critics. Where Dickens's Bleak House, for example, includes sensational elements about the court of chancery, he ultimately veils these elements by superimposing a moralistic, conventional ending. As a social realist, Dickens includes in his novel a critique of the social system, rather than emphasizing the novel's sensational elements strictly for the sake of excitement or readerly entertainment. As Winifred Hughes points

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out, if Dickens had wanted to make Bleak House primarily a sensation novel, Lady Deadlock would not have died but would have "become the central character ... probably have married her original lover, committed bigamy and then patched things up with Sir Leicester" (x).

Whereas moralistic domestic realists like Dickens and George Eliot provide "moral certainty," sensationalists like Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood and Braddon provide "moral ambiguity" (Hughes ix). Sally Mitchell provides a good distinction as well: "the moralist uses crime in order to show that it does not pay, but the sensationalist has a tendency to reveal that it was not actually crime" (85).

Sensation novels in their mix of various genre elements-romance, romanticism, gothicism, domestic realism, melodrama, journalism, and so on-their revelation of skeletons in the closet of the middle class, as well as their depictions of women capable of heinous deeds, both sparked abjection in contemporary critics and resulted in their still evident abject status within the literary canon. Between 1960 and 1990, the MLA bibliography lists seven entries on Ladj' Audley's Secret and one on Aurora Floyd. In the last ten years, these numbers tripled to 24 entries on Lady Audley's Secret and three on Aurora Floyd. Judith Butler's theory of performativity and Eve Sedgewick's theory of male homosociality sparked a renewed interest in examining Lady Audley's

"parody of the ideal," as Winifred Hughes termed it in 1980.

"The Traffic in Women," the Means of Reproduction,

the Abject, and the Homosocial Triangle

Lady Audley's Secret in particular provides rich grounds for applications of Eve Sedgwick's theory of male homosociality. Robert Audley's growing hatred for his aunt parallels his growing desire to find George and learn what happened to him. Thus, critics such as Lynda Hart argue, Lady Audley's secret crimes against society threaten because they reveal "the homosocial and homoerotic bonds between men, as secret"

(6-7). Richard Nemesvari, as well, argues that "Mary Elizabeth Brad- don explicitly presents the threat posed by her central female character as a challenge to male homosocial bonds" (515). These interpretations are significant because Lady Audley is motivated by both social and economic factors resulting from her objectified status. A more fruitful question to ask, however, is whether or not these circumstances are

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severe enough to warrant Lady Audley's violent response? (I return to this question in the following section on her madness).

The addition of Kristeva to the theory of "the traffic in women"

reveals that women are relegated to objects of exchange among men because, Kristeva notes, "they carry [the child] within their bodies"

(Kristeva Interviews 118). From a Kristevan view, the Symbolic order conflates all female bodies and all women with the female body's ca- pacity to reproduce, a capacity that threatens a patrilineal system be- cause paternity cannot be as easily determined as maternity. The exchange of women within a masculine system of production is cer- tainly meant to control this capacity. Kristeva claims that "the relation to abjection is finally rooted in the combat that every human being carries on with the mother" (118), because the speaking subject strug- gles to separate from the mother in order to become an autonomous speaking subject, but he or she is always beset by a simultaneous desire to return to the mother. Because the Symbolic order conflates women with the maternal, a male subject's interactions with women can be potentially threatening to his autonomous identity. Thus, he recites various fictions of femininity already embedded in the Symbolic order to help him maintain a separate identity-the angel or the demon. The ideal object is presumedly controllable, whereas the "real" and thus demonic woman is abject. The Angel and the Demon, as Nina Auer- bach famously argued, can only be defined in relation to each other and are the split in feminine identity possibilities resulting from Victorian patriarchal culture designed to ensure male-dominated production.

Auerbach writes: "The demon is first of all the woman's familiar, the source of her ambiguous holiness, but it is also the popular-and demonic-imagination that endowed her with this holiness in defiance of three cherished Victorian institutions: the family, the patriarchal state, and God the Father" (1). The combined insights of these feminist views provide further answers to the questions of why violence against women still exists in such proportions in a presumedly post-feminist age. As Martha Reineke articulates:

"Why her?" and "Why her body?" ... Why does he invoke bodies at all? And why are women so often the recipients of the violent gestures that bruise and sometimes kill? ... Finally, why is the female body so often the body of choice in such invasions? What accounts for its privileged violation? The investment of violence in soma, or flesh, needs to be considered more closely. (2-3)

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Aurora Floyd's Secret: The Femme Fatal is Really Not Dangerous

In order to show that the female as a power of horror is a masculine- constructed fiction designed to protect male identity and solidarity, in this first section I investigate examples of mostly male characters' abjection in the face of Aurora Floyd, a dark femme fatale who turns out to be completely benign. I relate these examples of abjection to evidence of the primarily male characters' insecure identity to show how the male subject's insecure identity is threatened by the woman he abjects, so that he can establish his identity in relation to her. His construction of the feminine as a power of horror enables him to abject her, but can also cause violence in response to her presumedly threat- ening body. This vision of horror causes, in response to the female's perceived threatening body, a violence that results not from an absolute confidence in the power of the phallus, but instead a revelation of the phallus's weakness in the face of the feminine. The violence alone, in addition to abjection as its cause, reveals that the masculine order may be dominant, but it is anything but secure. Because the male speaking subject seems aware of this inherent weakness but cannot face it, he projects weakness onto women. Thus, what turns out to be the danger lurking under the surface is not the engulfing feminine, but the very slippery nature of masculine identity.

Positing Aurora's Secrets to Master Them and the Implications for the Female Reader Within and

Without the Text

Kristeva writes that Woman "does not exist with a capital 'W'. The Symbolic order has constructed 'Woman' as the 'possessor' of some mythical unity-a supreme power, on which is based the terror of power and terrorism as desire for power" ("Woman's Time" 205). Yet Aurora's function in particular is the dark, mysterious, potentially dangerous, sexual woman. Her mother, who dies after giving birth to her, was an actress who specialized in sensationalized versions of Shakespeare's tragedies, being particularly poignant in the role of Lady Macbeth, a woman who seduces her husband into murder so that she may gain power through him (Aurora Floyd 11-14). When Aurora is introduced in the second chapter, she has the trademark of "great

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Bearing Her Secret

wondering black eyes" (19), and "the taint of [her mother's] play-acting and horse-riding . .. strong in her nature" (20-21). Like her eyes, Aurora's nature is restless and wondering, "impetuous," unable to be

"governed or directed" by her father (21). As a result, she strays into temptation with her father's groom, Jim Conyers, so her father sends her away to a finishing school in Paris. Still unable to be contained, she elopes with Conyers, and returns home a year later with a secret that prompts her into snowballing trouble, leading to the novel's climax.

For a female reader, however, there's a certain masochism involved in penetrating Aurora's secrets. First of all, reading about threatening women can confirm that women are threatening. D. A. Miller observes:

"It is not just that ... we read about violated, objectified subjects, but that, in the very act of reading about them, we contribute largely to constituting them as such" (162). Second of all, if the female heroine is both sympathetic and potentially dangerous, as both Aurora and Lady Audley are, then from a psychoanalytic point of view, the female reader would intuit that she herself is a threatening mystery to be solved and thus mastered. A sympathetic yet dangerous heroine seduces a female reader into identifying with her and thus realizing that she, too, is threatening. Third, female readers, interpolated in a system that creates them as dangerous, would quickly accept the masochistic position of conquering a terrifying power that happens to reside in a body like her own. In reading a sensation novel, the female reader is placed in the somewhat dangerous position of seeing herself as a power of horror by reading the novel and trying to master another female by learning her secrets. This does not suggest, in Victorian fashion, that women should not read novels; rather, it suggests that there is a sort of masochism involved in women's reading of the power of horror myth, which the sensation novel necessitates in order to make its disclosures. Precisely because the genre necessitates positing a secret, novels titled after fe- males who possess secrets have to construct these heroines as dark and mysterious powers of horror. This construction places the female char- acters within the book and the female reader in the masochistic po- sition of supporting the power of horror myth, thereby perpetuating the ideology that imprisons her and alienates her from her own body and other women.

Lyn Pykett points out that "Braddon's narratives habitually stage the feminine as spectacle" ("Improper" Feminine 91). Sometimes she is filtered through a male gaze or through the public's gaze or she is

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presented directly to the reader's gaze with no mediation except the narrator's description. These filters of scrutiny serve to keep the heroine in flux so that her meaning can never be definitively ascertained (97)- all of which create and maintain her as a power of horror. The reader suffers from not being able to penetrate her meaning just as the char- acters in the text suffer. Thus, as Pykett says, "the reader is co-opted into the role of co-creator of the spectacle" (98). As spectacle she becomes object, unable to speculate on her own situation, penetrate her own mystery because she is not a subject.

Because Aurora is the object of mystery and thus desire, even her enemies in the novel are her enemies because they envy her position;

she possesses something they themselves do not have and desperately want, which becomes the reader's position as well, involving her in the masochistic predicament of having to solve the riddle.

Lucy Floyd, Aurora's golden-haired, blue-eyed, angelic cousin, represents a female reader within the text who is unable to master Aurora's secrets and thus remains subject to them. Aurora's "almost shuddering horror of her Parisian associations lay far beyond Lucy's simple power of penetration" (26). Lucy is never able to master Aurora's secrets, partly because Braddon represents her angelic inno- cence as dull-witted ignorance, and largely because the proper Talbot Bulstrode refuses to allow his wife to be Aurora's confidante, thus coming between their friendship. When Aurora runs away from her husband, John Mellish, in fear that he will discover her secret of big- amy, she decides to go to Talbot and "abide by [his] advice" (346).

Having run away from her husband and being alone in the middle of the night, Lucy is not allowed by Talbot to go to Aurora until he has discovered the reason and propriety of her actions. "'Be reasonable, my dear Lucy,' he answered very mildly, ... 'if Mrs. Mellish leaves her husband in Yorkshire, and comes to London without his permission- for he would never permit her to come alone--she must explain to me why she has done so before I can suffer my wife to receive her"' (349).

Because "to love and admire and pray for [her husband]-made up the sum of her heart's desire," Lucy subdues her desire to immediately go and comfort her cousin (348). Once Talbot hears Aurora's story and believes her innocent of Conyers's murder, he allows Lucy to join Aurora, but with the caveat that she not ask Aurora any questions (356). Being the obedient exemplar of domestic virtue that Lucy is,

"she did not ask the nature of the sorrow which had brought Aurora an

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unexpected and uninvited guest to that modest little dwelling-house"

(357), and continues to remain innocent of the taint of Aurora's secrets, but subject to them as well. Because Aurora is viewed as dangerous, Lucy must submit and play her angelic part.

Significantly, it is only male characters who unravel Aurora and Lady Audley's secrets, although Mrs. Powell, Aurora's spiteful gov- erness, tries. Braddon tells us that Mrs. Powell "hated her for the very benefits she received, or rather because she, Aurora, had power to bestow such benefits ... hated her as envy will forever hate prosperity"

(133). As a result of Mrs. Powell's perception of Aurora as a power of horror, she enacts terrorism, violence, and hatred against her by writing anonymous letters to Scotland Yard, claiming Conyers's murderer had to be someone within the house-in other words, implicating Aurora.

She seeks to decipher Aurora's secret in order to obtain this power over her and bring about her downfall, precisely because she believes Aurora possesses something which she herself does not. As Rene Girard defines it, envy and jealousy result from a failed effort to mimic and obtain what others desire.3 Because Mrs. Powell identifies with Aurora as a power of horror, she attempts to conquer the power she believes Aurora possesses. Mrs. Powell represents another masochistic version of femi- nine identity within the Symbolic order. Like Lucy, she identifies with a Symbolic version of feminine power, but of the vicious kind. She attacks Aurora because Aurora poses a threat to her own value in the Symbolic order.

Because Aurora is the mystery to be penetrated and solved, she never seeks to master the mystery of Mrs. Powell's apparent rivalry with her:

"the reckless girl did not seek to fathom the depth of any inimical feeling which might lurk in her dependent's breast" (133-34). She does not even take an active role in solving the murder of Conyers that implicates her, but rather is removed from the text literally and fig- uratively by spending the extent of the investigation in the innermost chambers of the house, while the action focuses on Talbot playing heroic detective. Luce Irigaray explains that "in order to reflect (one- self), to speculate (oneself), it is necessary to be a 'subject,' and that matter can serve as a support for speculation but cannot itself speculate in any way" (Irigaray 177). An object of terror, by definition, can never speculate on why it is so. Rather, an object legitimates subjectivity, allowing subjects to speculate and potentially come to terms with objects through signification. Throughout the novel, Aurora serves as 513

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this support for speculation. She does not even commit the crimes of which she is accused. Her power as an object of terror provokes ter- rorism against her by those lacking and thus envious of her position.

In different ways, Lucy and Mrs. Powell both compete with Aurora for their validation in the Symbolic order, a competition instigated by the system itself. Drawing on Gayle Rubin's and Eve Sedgewick's theories of women as objects of exchange in a masculine homosocial system, Luce Irigaray explains that in this male homosocial system of exchange, women are alienated from their own bodies and from each other, because their Symbolic value derives from their relation to other women, not as women, but as commodities. Irigaray writes:

Woman thus has value only in that she can be exchanged .... It is only her measurement against a third term that remains external to her, and that makes it possible to compare her with another woman, that permits her to have a relation to another commodity in terms of an equivalence that remains foreign to both. Woinen-as-comnodities are thus subject to a schism that divides them into categories of usefulness and exchange value; into matter-body and an envelope that is pre- cious but impenetrable, ungraspable, and not susceptible to appro- priation by women themselves; into private use and social use. (176) Both Lucy and Mrs. Powell relate to Aurora as an "impenetrable"

mystery that they as "women" cannot appropriate, a position that cre- ates rivalry among women. Lucy remains a bit jealous of Talbot's prior affections for Aurora because her identity depends on his notice of her.

In this economy, she must compete with her own cousin and best friend for her own survival. While Lucy identifies with the patriarchal version of woman as angel, Mrs. Powell identifies with the patriarchal version of the opposite of this ideal, woman as demon. Mrs. Powell envies Aurora because she has more value from the symbolic economy's perspective, and because she is pitted against Aurora in this way by this symbolic economy, she enacts violence and terrorism against Aurora by attempting to implicate her in Conyers' murder. Examining the female characters' attempts and failures to penetrate Aurora's mystery, reveals the ways in which the male-constructed fiction woman as "possessor of some mythical unity-a supreme power" creates and founds "the terror of power and terrorism as the desire for power" (Kristeva, "Women's Time"), a masochistic position for both the female characters and the

female reader.

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Masculine Fictions of Femininity: The Economic Value of Aurora's Sex Organs

Examining the male characters' response to Aurora's perceived power reveals that this fiction is a means to these males' abjection of her fascinating but threatening allure and serves as a defense for their desire for her. The third character in the novel to try and penetrate Aurora's mystery is Matthew Harrison, a vagabond, who, possessing knowledge of Aurora's improper marriage to Conyers, stops Aurora while shop- ping with Lucy and bribes her, "Anythink wallable in the old party's redicule?" he wants to know (28). In Freudian terms, a woman's reti- cule is a euphemism for her vagina. While literally he asks Aurora for money, metaphorically he wishes to penetrate the mystery of her sex, exemplified in vaginal symbols, that may yield something far more priceless than gold in this symbolic economy: possession of the means of reproduction, symbolized by Aurora's "purse." Lucy Irigaray points out that a "double system" would shatter the appropriative power of the proper, patrilinear name. "All the social regimes of 'History',"

Irigaray writes,

are based upon the exploitation of one "class" of producers, namely, women, whose reproductive use value (reproductive of children and of the labor force) and whose constitution as exchange value under- write the symbolic order as such, without any compensation in kind going to them for that "work". (173)

As woman's sexual organs have the power to reproduce, they have a position of importance, and thereby threaten to have authority, in the male capitalist system. If the male can possess these, however, he con- trols the means of reproduction, usurps the authoritative position, and renders woman harmless to the social system.

The second time Matthew Harrison comes to bribe Aurora, he "re- gard[s] the little Morocco receptacle with glistening eyes" and "caught sight of the glittering sovereigns lurking between the leaves of crimson silk," which erotically evokes vaginal imagery (84). The coins "lurk- ing" within the crimson folds suggests the value of her sexual organs rendered through erotic imagery. The folds represent the female organs as intricate, complex, dark, and mysterious. They have economic value in a male-dominated society because they are the means of reproduc- tion, which men must possess, so that she herself cannot control these

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means-this is perhaps why, as Kristeva says, humans have been more concerned "not [with] the problems of production of material goods (i.e., the domain of the economy and of the human relationships it implies, politics, etc.) but, rather, [with] those of reproduction, sur- vival of the species, life and death, the body, sex and symbol"

("Women's Time" 189). The gold coins found in the erotically charged language describing Aurora's purse reveal the symbolic value of her reproductive organs in a male economic system of exchange.

The secret revealed by this exchange with Harrison is that the male characters perceive Aurora as harboring some dark, intricate value- treasures buried within the folds of her sexual organs. P. D. Edwards notes that Aurora's "sexuality is hardly evident at all ... [but] is rendered almost entirely in terms of the excitement she arouses in men, the reflection of themselves and their desires that they think they see in her black eyes" (xviii). Braddon links sexual desire with men's perceptions of Aurora's economic value, not only in the scene with Harrison described above, but when Aurora's father, Archibald Floyd, astutely muses to himself

Had not that all-powerful wealth been rather the primary cause of his daughter's trouble, since it had cast her, young, inexperienced, and trusting, a prey into the hands of a mercenary scoundrel, who would not have cared to persecute her, but for the money that had made her such a golden prize for any adventurer who might try to win her. (367)

Archibald Floyd is correct. Conyers pursues Aurora for the fifty thou- sand pounds she is worth. Matthew Harrison pursues her for money, bribing her with knowledge of her secret. Her other enemies in the novel, Mrs. Powell and Steeven Hargraves (both servants to Aurora), wish vengeance on Aurora for the money and thus power and control they think she has over them. Steeven Hargraves murders Conyers for the two thousand pounds Aurora has given Conyers to flee the country and frames her for the crime.

As Braddon tells us, "the intricate secrets of [John Mellish's] pos- sessions were scarcely known to himself' (144), a passage that reveals the secrets of the male characters' perception of Aurora within a mas- culine economic system. One could say that Aurora does not commit criminal, treacherous acts as much as she is acted upon by signifiers beyond her control-the phallus and its economy. She is born into this

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economic system that constructs her as a dark, mysterious power of horror, and then is blamed for the males' actions towards her as a result of this system. Elaine Showalter and Mary Hartman argue that this carch-22 forces women into "desperate remedies," like bigamy and murder.4 Aurora has secrets, but not by virtue of a prescribed feminine essence. Aurora has secrets because of the Symbolic order's construction of and reaction to a pre-cultural, archaic, mythic feminine essence.

Talbot Bulstrode's response to Aurora assumes this essence as Talbot attempts to achieve his proper place in the Symbolic order. Like Har- rison, he sees Aurora as an enticing but potentially dangerous secret to be mastered. However, the contradictory nature of his views of Aur- ora-he is both enchanted and repelled by her brutal candor-shows that he ultimately fears her, precisely because his proper identity is founded on the abjection of the threatening female. Talbot posits Aurora as a power of horror so that he can abject her in defense of his proper name. When Talbot first sees Aurora, he thinks of her as the drink called "Indian bang":

a horrible spirit.., which made the man who drank it half mad; and he could not help fancying that the beauty of this woman was like the strength of that alcoholic preparation; barbarous, intoxicating, dangerous and maddening ... This imperious creature, this Cleo- patra in crinoline ... What was she but another trap set in white

muslin, and baited with artificial flowers like the rest? (33)

Because Talbot views Aurora as a "barbarous, intoxicating, dangerous and maddening" trap, he experiences abjection when she proceeds to ask him an improper question about horse racing: "Talbot Bulstrode shuddered afresh; but a feeling of pity mingled with his horror" (35).

After Talbot falls in love with Aurora, despite his protective fantasy of her, and plans to propose to her, he thinks to himself that if he were her father "there would always be a shuddering terror mingled with my love-a horrible dread that something would happen to take her away from me" (62). His perception of Aurora as powerful leads to his fear of losing her which results in his "terror mingled with [hisl love"- abjection. Even after he breaks his engagement with Aurora and mar- ries Lucy, he continues to perceive Aurora this way. In order to purge himself of such horror, he will have to prove Aurora's innocence, and he does, being the conventional detective of the novel. Talbot's detection

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not only clears Aurora, but more importantly clears his own proper identity and his name.

Despite his fear of damaging the Bulstrode name, Talbot cannot overcome his desire to penetrate the mystery which he perceives Aurora to bear. But the fact that he knows Aurora harbors a secret, a mystery to be penetrated, makes him even more desirous to fathom the mystery.

The secret projected onto Aurora increases Talbot's desire. By placing women in unattainable positions, Ren6 Girard explains, a man who perceives his own lack of security may encourage another man toward his female lover, even jeopardize her life or sexual purity, "offer his sacrifice to the god in order that he might not enjoy it. He pushes the loved woman into the mediator's arms in order to arouse his desire and then triumph over the rival desire" (50). Or he may posit her as an unknowable mystery to give himself the challenge of solving her. By obtaining her secrets, he controls her preconceived terror of power, which secures his own identity. Talbot's abjection of Aurora is the consequence of the projection designed to secure his identity. As a result of Aurora's secrets, Talbot becomes the proper bourgeois de- tective, as opposed to the inept Joseph Grimstone of Scotland Yard, and he heroically absolves his domestic circle of impurity. Solving the crime is itself a purification, an abjection.5

Yet strangely and paradoxically enough, at the same time Talbot is repelled by Aurora's taste for "horseflesh," the reader witnesses his simultaneous growing attraction to her, just as, in Lady Audley's Secret, Robert Audley is at first fascinated with his charming aunt then re- pelled by her secrets. Talbot is both horrified and fascinated with this power of horror, just as he is both horrified and fascinated with her affinities for animals. At the same time he is repelled, he also recognizes that the mutual compassion he witnesses between Aurora and animals reveals Aurora is a good person, nor a monster to be feared: "If this terrible woman, with her unfeminine tastes and mysterious propen- sities, were mean, or cowardly, or false, or impure, I do not think my thoroughbreds would let her hands caress their velvet nostrils," he says to himself (49). He realizes in this meditation that Aurora cannot be involved in "witchcraft" or privy to "evil spirits" or else "the dog would snarl, and the horses would bite" as these animals used to do when confronted by "the presence of the uncanny" (49). Braddon presents Aurora's liking for horses as natural natural instinct as opposed to the Victorian ideal of woman's natural maternal instinct and sympathy.

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Bearing Her Secret

This natural sympathy, from Braddon's point of view, both endears and horrifies Talbot because it is outside the bounds of proper femininity, so much so that Braddon herself must subdue Aurora's affection for horses in order to resolve her novel and satisfy her Victorian public.

The hieroglyphics on Aurora's robe (71) heighten her status as en- igma, like the exotic heroines Braddon continuously equates her with:

Cleopatra, Hecate, and Aurora, goddess of the dawn, all of which are the reasons she is continuously abjected. Her strange, exotic lower class origins simply serve to eroticize her even more, making her a dark object of intrigue. Talbot's fear of Aurora results from his own insecure identity as seen by incessant references to his lineage and being an heir, as if to reassure himself that he is dean and proper enough to rightfully belong to the symbolic order. Like Robert Audley, who wishes to keep Lady Audley's crimes a secret in order to avoid degrading the Audley name, Talbot cannot permit himself to marry Aurora because "the son of Sir John Walter Raleigh Bulstrode, of Bulstrode Castle, near Camelford" (36), "the name of Bulstrode ... would never be tarnished by an unworthy race, or dragged through the mire of a divorce court by a guilty woman" (33);

at two and thirty [Bulstrodel was still a bachelor, not because he had never loved, but because he had never met with a woman whose stainless purity of soul fitted her in his eyes to become the mother of a nobler race, and to rear sons who should do honour to the name of Bulstrode. (31)

"the past life of my wife must be a white unblemished page, which all the world may be free to read" (105). Because Talbot is obsessed with maintaining the purity of his lineage, he continuously experiences the

"horror" of Aurora's potential power to destroy that pure lineage with her secret. His obsession with the purity of his name reveals his frail identity in the face of woman's power to destroy it with her uncon- trollable sexuality.

By the same token, Robert Audley's sole motive in concealing Lady Audley's crimes of bigamy and attempted murder is to "save our stainless name from degradation and shame" (378) and "spare the generous old man [Sir Michael Audley, patriarch], whose fatal confi- dence in a wicked woman had brought such misery upon his declining years" (Lady Audley' Secret 379). Because his identity is insecure in the face of the threat posed to him by Lady Audley, he, too, is obsessed

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with saving his family name. As he tells Dr. Mosgrave, who has come to diagnose Lady Audley after her confession, "I assure you, my dear Sir ... that my greatest fear is the necessity of any exposure-any dis- grace" (380). And, as David Skilton says in his introduction to the novel, the "revelation of the truth will overwhelm the world of the hunter and of those he loves."

Both Robert Audley and Talbot Bulstrode's "route to masculinity is the discovery of the secrets of the family, and the simultaneous dis- covery of a vocation" (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 55). In Aurora Floyd, these secrets have first to be created through a repression of the female.

Not paradoxically, as an unfathomable mystery, Aurora threatens Tal- bot's identity-"upset[tingl even more violently," Kristeva says, "the one who confronts it [the abjectl as fragile and fallacious chance"

(Powers of Horror 3). Because Aurora is posited as a dark, mysterious woman with secrets, she is the object of everyone's gaze, everyone's scrutiny, and everyone's desire-whether for love or hate. She is the object by which Talbot can achieve and maintain identity through her continuous abjection, which allows him to objectify her and thus sig- nify his identity, a signification that depends on the process of abject- ion, objectification and then signification.

When Aurora's presumed crimes practically consume both Talbot Bulstrode and her husband, John Mellish, both resort to fantasies of glorified feminine deaths to defend themselves against the collapse of meaning and symbolization, which their own fictions of feminine hor- ror have catapulted. Their phantasmatic glorification of Aurora's death is simply another form of abjection. Because this glorification fails, they reveal a death-wish that shows their own incumbent loss of meaning. Just as Rochester wants to possess Jane's soul in order to control her and Sikes murders Nancy in order to control her, both Talbot and John Mellish reveal a latent desire to figuratively kill Aurora as a last-ditch effort to master her. This latent desire is pre- sumably hidden under their glorification of her death, a kind of beau- tification of female death which expresses the male's fear of being engulfed by the horrifying image of the feminine that he himself has projected onto her. When Talbot leaves Aurora because he fails to extract her secret, a secret that separates her from him, "he thought that he would rather have left Aurora lying rigidly beautifil in her coffin, than as he was leaving her today" (105, italics mine). Similarly, when the power of Aurora's unknown secret becomes too much for her hus-

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Bearing Her Secret

band, John Mellish, to bear, he says to her, "I would rather know you to be dead and happy than I would endure any doubt about your fate" (197, italics mine). Why would Aurora be either "beautiful" or "happy" when dead? These men imagine beauty and happiness in her death as jus- tification for their own desires to kill Aurora in order to protect them- selves from the threat of the feminine. After assuming Aurora will be

"dead and happy," John Mellish articulates his desire to kill her under the guise of presumed brotherly protection: "I would rather take you in my arms and plunge you into the pond in the wood; I would rather send a bullet into your heart, and see you murdered at my feet," he tells her (197). Kristeva explains the root of this kind of masculine logic:

I make of Her an image of Death so as not to be shattered through the hatred I bear against myself when I identify with Her... No, it is She who is death-bearing, therefore I do not kill myself in order to kill her but I attack her, harass her, represent her. (Black Sun 28) Once Talbot discovers the true source of horror in this novel, he is able to come to terms with Aurora's innocence. When the lower-class criminal men, not the proper middle-class men, confess, what they actually confess is that the power of horror really lies within. Steeven Hargraves, the actual murderer, confesses to Conyers that what he most fears is not Aurora but himself:

Shall I tell you what I'm afraid of? ... It isn't Mrs. Mellish. It's myself... I'm afraid to come a-nigh her, for fear I should spring upon her, and cut her thro-at from ear to ear. I've seen her in my dreams sometimes, with her beautiful white thro-at laid open, and streaming oceans of blood; but for all that, she's always had the broken whip in her hand, and she's always laughed at me. I've had many a dream about her; but I've never seen her dead or quiet; and I've never seen her without the whip. (191)

His confession reveals his fears of powerlessness in the face of Medusa's laugh-a Medusa of his own making. Even his knife, his ambulatory penis, is unable to kill that power of horror. Impotently, it only causes the blood and gore of that feminine power to gush out and engulf him along with its laughter.

The whip is an even more telling feature of his vision: As quoted earlier by Sally Mitchell, most pornography of the Victorian period featured women carrying a whip, a sign of masculine power that was

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both fascinating and repelling to male spectators. Here the whip func- tions as a sign of Aurora's power, which Hargraves fears because she has beaten him with it for abusing her dog. Hargraves sought to assert power over an animal because he felt powerless, but his actions only exacerbated his perceived lack, because Aurora, a woman, beat him.

Because he feels impotent against his perception of Aurora's powers of horror, he grows to hate her even more and tries to indirectly destroy her by framing her for Conyers' murder. Like Hargraves, Conyers also contains "some lurking malice, some petty spite, the key to which was hidden in his own breast" (187). This inner hatred and misery is projected onto Aurora, -whom Conyers blames for all his misery: "if it wasn't that I'm tied hand and foot, and have been plotted against and thwarted by a woman's cunning at every turn" (247). Because he ab- jects and projects this lurking malice and spite within himself onto Aurora, "he attacks her, harasses her, represents her," to use EKristeva's verbs, as "cunning," a "she-devil," the reason he's "not safe to myself when I talk of this. I'm not safe when I think how near I was to half a million of money" (247). The confessions, the revelations of horrifying secrets within Talbot's own proper self allows him to come to terms with Aurora's innocence. As he says to John Mellish, "You presupposed the guilt of the woman you loved; and you were too great a coward to investigate the evidence upon which your suspicions were founded"

(410). Because Talbot confronts this evidence, he purges both himself and the novel of Aurora's presumed guilt, leaving no dark traces behind.

Aurora Floydýs Conclusion: The Revelation of Innocence Braddon posits Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley as representative of two seemingly opposite masculine constructions of the feminine: Aurora Floyd, the presumed femme fatale (the dark heroine), and Lady Audley, the proper ideal (the light heroine). Comparing these two novels shows that Braddon's purpose is to subvert these ideals. Decoding the dark heroine's mystery reveals that Aurora is truly innocent of treachery and thus benign. Decoding the light heroine's mystery reveals that the Angel in the House ideal is the most dangerous power of horror, for both men and women. While both novels can be viewed as ultimately enforcing Victorian domestic ideology by purging the texts of their heroines' crimes, Braddon remains true to her subversion. In order to prove that Aurora is not a threatening dark feminine mystery, Braddon

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Bearing Her Secret

completely purifies both her heroine and her heroine's story. Braddon concludes Aurora Floyd with these lines:

So, we leave Aurora, a little changed, a shade less defiantly bright, per- haps, but unspeakably beautiful and tender, bending over the cradle of her first-born... I doubt if my heroine will ever again care so much for horseflesh, or take quite so keen an interest in weight-for-age races as compared to handicaps, as she has done in days that are gone. (459) Aurora is purged of her masculine and vulgar taste for horseflesh, both gambling and racing, and is restored to the domestic sphere. Feminist critics argue that this ending conforms to Victorian ideology and subverts Braddon's own subversion. Lyn Pykett states that "Aurora's story is the story of the gradual taming of the wild beast of the improper feminine"

(88). As Sally Mitchell explains, "Before a [heroine who rides horses] can reach a happy ending, she must suffer enough weakness, illness and humiliation to melt her down into chastened femininity" (75).

Braddon's conclusion may seem to support the Symbolic order.

However, it may be argued that Braddon participates in the Symbolic order's abjection of female sexuality in order to maintain her expos6 of the femme fatale as a masculine construction. Aurora is imprisoned in the domestic sphere, a sort of exile. She is even doubly exiled, as she does not return to England but instead goes to the South of France (458). Aurora also properly remarries John Mellish, and bears him a son, and the proper Talbot Bulstrode succeeds in mastering Aurora's secrets. Braddon subdues her heroine's bestial, sexual nature. But the important point is that this mastery reveals the dark heroine's inno- cence, and this revelation of innocence allows Aurora to be made properly unsymbolic, to represent only herself, allowing the female reader to make sense of the story and to realize that the feminine as a terrible power is really just a sensational fiction after all.

NOTES

1. Abjection is used in the Kristevan sense of a "certain rejection of the maternal function, a fascinated rejection" (Kristeva Interviews 118), a concept I will soon explain in more detail.

2. In 1857, Madeleine Smith, a genteel woman, was accused of poisoning her French lover, who threatened to bribe her, so that she could properly marry a respectable gentleman. Many women attended this trial in sympathy for her, which male critics objected to, fearing the camaraderie that could lead to men's loss of control, (See Mary S. Hartman's "Murder for Respectability: The Case of Madeleine Smith" and Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes.)

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3. See Deceit, Desire ansd the Nofrl, Chapter One "Triangulare Desire."

4. In "Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860's" Showalter argues that sensation novels provided middle class women with a vicarious outlet and means of escape from their rigid, mundane lives. By the same token, Mary Hartman argues that: Madeleine Smith con- structed an illicit romance out of her affair with her working class lover, Angliere. She never intended to carry out this affair. The number of women who flocked to Smith's trial and sympathized with her, Showalter and Hartman attest, reveals Victorian women's need for these vicarious outlets.

5. In The Nonel and the Police, D. A. Miller points out that the novel confines the police to a lower- class world of delinquency. Proper middle-class males like Brownlowe in OlMier Twist, Talbot and Robert Audley, take on the work ofderective (a more respectable version of the policeman) to both abject crime from the proper domestic sphere and to control the lower class policing mechanisms: "The police are felt to obstruct an alternative power of regulation ... Not to cooperate with the police, therefore, is part of a strategy of surreptitiously assuming and revising their finctions" (Miller 7).

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 1861. Lady Audleys Secret. Introduction.

David Skilton. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

. 1862. Aurora Floyd. Introduction. P. D. Edwards. New York:

Oxford UP, 1996.

Brantlinger, Patrick. "What is 'Sensational' About the 'Sensation Novel'?" Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982): 1-28.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. 1837-38. Ed. Kathleen Tillotson. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Edwards, P. D. Introduction Aurora Floyd. By Mary Elizabeth Braddon New York: Oxford UP, 1996. vii-xxii.

Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels. Cambridge: UP, 1997.

Girard, Ren6. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Freccero Yvonne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,

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Hart, Lynda. "The Victorian Villainess and the Patriarchal Uncon- scious." Literature and Psychology 40.3 (1994): 1-25.

Hartman, Mary S. "Murder for Respectability: The Case of Madeline Smith." Victorian Studies 16 (June 1973): 381-400.

Hartman, Mary S. Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes.

London: Robson, 1985.

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Bearing Her Secret

Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860's. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Porter Catherine.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Boston: Beacon, 1996.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Roudiez Leon S. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

"Women's Time." The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. NY:

Columbia UP, 1986. 187-213.

Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Roudiez Leon S.

New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

• Julia Kristeva Interviews. Ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988.

Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women!s Reading, 1835-1880. Bowling Green: UP, 1981.

Nemesvari, Richard. "Robert Audley's Secret: Male Homosocial Desire in Lady Audley's Secret." Studies in the Novel 27.4 (Winter 1995):

515-28.

Oliphant, Margaret. "Novels." Blackwoods 102 (1867): 250-80.

Pykett, Lyn. The "Improper" Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Women's Writing. New York: Routledge, 1992.

. The Sensation Novel: From The Woman in White to The Moonstone.

Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1994.

Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Showalter, Elaine. "Desperate Remedies: Sensation Novels of the 1860's." The Victorian Newsletter 49 (Spring 1976): 1-5.

Skilton, David. Introduction. Lady Audley's Secret. By Mary Elizabeth Braddon. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. vii-xxiii.

Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. New York: St.

Martin's, 1989.

Karen E. Tatum is Associate Professor of English at Collin County Community College in Piano, Texas. She received her PhD in English with specializations in the English novel and feminist theory from the University of Alabama and her BA and ýMA in English and Women's Studies from the University of Houston.

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TITLE: Bearing Her Secret: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Aurora Floyd”

SOURCE: J Pop Cult 40 no3 Je 2007

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it

is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in

violation of the copyright is prohibited.

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