First off, I want to return to a point that Alyssa raised in her one-pager, a point I don't think we discussed enough in class on Friday. Alyssa notes that, "From a
narrative perspective, Lady Audley’s
Secret is difficult to read as a detective story because the reader and the
detective are never seriously in doubt as to who committed the crime. Rather
than solving a puzzle, Robert seems to putting together what amounts to a case
for the prosecution, although one that he never plans to carry out."
Indeed, Braddon never puts any other real suspects on the stage. Unlike Holmes, who starts from a crime committed by an individuated body and untangles a thread of clues that ultimately leads to his identification of the criminal, Robert Audley starts with both end-points already known: the crime (George's disappearance) and the criminal/embodied person (Lady Audley). His detective work focuses on discovering the connection between them, going backward and forward at once, rather than following the bread-crumbs wherever they may lead.
As Alyssa notes earlier in her paper, an Armstrong-ian reading might interpret Robert's quantitative, methodological investigation as working to "tame" the sensational elements of the novel. But how does this influence our assessment of detective work, if Robert can be certain of Lady Audley's guilt long before his "chain of evidence" is complete? He senses her culpability in so many intangible ways: her smile in a painting, a tiny, momentary flicker of expression across her face. And the text leaves so little room for any other criminal--we're never in any real doubt that Lady Audley is behind whatever happened to George. So does this deemphasize the importance of Robert's cold, calculating, logical detective work (as Lady Audley describes it?) These clues don't assist with the identification of the "individuated body" that committed the crime--they just validate what Robert Audley already knows.
Another bizarre thing about this story is that the moment of the criminal's confession is not the same moment in which the "method" of the crime is revealed. In the climactic scene in which Lady Audley finally admits to the murder of George Talboys (page 294 in the Oxford edition), she identifies herself as a madwoman to Robert and then says, "When you say that I killed George Talboys, you say the truth." But it's not until Robert Audley has taken Lady Audley to the madhouse in Villebrumeuse (and another forty pages have passed) that the now-Mme. Taylor reveals the specifics of what she did to George, admitting that she pushed him into the well (335). In most detective stories, the criminal cannot just admit to the crime--his or her confession must include a specific, detailed account of how everything transpired, less, presumably, for the sake of the detective (who has already deduced it all independently), than for the benefit of the reader, who is still waiting to learn what has happened. Except here, Robert Audley doesn't know that Talboys was shoved into the well until Lady Audley tells him, and she tells him quite at her leisure, days after admitting to the murder vaguely. Is this another way this narrative de-emphasizes the quantitative aspects of Robert's investigation?
One of my (many) frustrations as I read Lady Audley's Secret was how quickly it became apparent to me what Lady Audley had done. The novel did read, as Alyssa put it in her one-pager, not like a detective story, but rather like an account of someone "putting together what amounts to a case for the prosecution."
ReplyDeleteBut that, of course, was how I read the novel - not necessarily the way a Victorian reader would have. Would the past connection between Lady Audley and George Talboys have been so easily discerned before the conventions of the detective genre had been established? Would a Victorian reader have known what to look for? Or even to look? I don't want to suggest that Victorian readers were idiots - only that familiarity with a genre teaches you how to read it, and when Lady Audley's Secret was released there wasn't even a detective genre yet. Our reading habits - as modern readers - might simply make us better detectives. As Jonathan Culler notes, "reading isn't an innocent activity." We've long ago lost our innocence when it comes to detective novels, but Victorian reader hadn't. I would be surprised if Lady Audley's Secret had been the best-seller that it was if its first readers were able to figure out Lady Audley's secret as quickly as I was.
Michael, I can't speculate as to how a Victorian reader would have experienced this story either, but I don't really see any room in this narrative for doubt as to Lady Audley's identity as the culprit, even for the most innocent of readers, given the highlighting of her mysterious past, the text's numerous, coy references to her performative gestures, etc., though your point about familiarity with a genre is well-taken. It felt to me as if the sensational elements of the novel compel us to suspect Lucy Audley long before Robert's investigation digs up any dirt on my lady--the journey of the story depends less on what information is detected by rational means than the aesthetic/sensational experiences along the way.
ReplyDeleteIt is always kind of hard to imagine this, but apparently JEKYLL AND HYDE was a total shocker to Victorian readers. We think of them as, well, Jekyll/Hyde, and so can see this coming a mile off; but not so for contemporary readers.
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit on not having lengthy, super-processed comments, I'm going to touch on two other points. While it is true that there isn't much mystery about Lady Audley having some sort of hand in the disappearance of George, I think there is quite a lot for Robert to figure out (no body which ultimately leads to tracing him to that dude with the sling at the train station, and, thus, his being alive; any context for why she did it or how she affected the grave stone thing) -- stuff that seriously impacts our evolving feelings for all the major characters.
And second, who says that "detective work," in order to be so defined, has to work through a chain of evidence before the detective figure arrives at a conclusion? There are always beginning hypothesis and a process of give-and-take between theory and data. If we consider Darwin a detective (still a live debate, I think?), this is absolutely his process.
Prof. Reitz, regarding your question - "Who says that 'detective work,' in order to be so defined, has to work through a chain of evidence before the detective figure arrives at a conclusion?" -- yes, this is what I was trying to get at. Perhaps my original comment didn't convey this, but I think the way Robert responds most strongly to the sensations of suspicion, fear, and doubt, sensations which then have to be painstakingly supported by a quantitative investigation (filling in the missing links), challenges the dominant model of the hyper-rational investigation touted by Holmes (following a chain from start to end). Robert Audley uses logic but he doesn't fetishize it. And it did seem Darwinian to me, the moment of insight/revelation, which then needs to be evidenced through a material record.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Helen that Robert Audley follows a more Darwinian process of detection than a Holmesian one. To be fair, it is entirely possible that many of Holmes's cases follow a similar model - he looks at the crime scene, forms a hypothesis, and then accumulates evidence to support his interpretation of events - we just don't see that process, because we are in Watson's head, and not his.
ReplyDeleteI want to go back a bit, though, to the question Michael raised about how Victorian readers would have responded to Lady Audley's Secret, which I think relates to some of the issues surrounding genre that I was thinking about in my 1-pager. I wonder if the fact that the tension of the story is not completely dependent on keeping the reader guessing about the solution of the mystery is precisely what makes it a sensation novel. In Ellen Wood's East Lynne, for example, a character's disguise is always known to the reader, and all of the terrible things that happen are heavily telegraphed for the reader: it seems like the pleasure of reading a sensation novel is in watching the catastrophe happen (akin to seeing a car crash in slow motion) rather than figuring out what happened and why - as Helen says, "the journey of the story depends less on what information is detected by rational means than the aesthetic/sensational experiences along the way." I think the distinction I want to make here is that while Robert undoubtedly performs "detective work," I don't know that the presence of detection can make this a detective novel.
I wonder how Michael's point about familiarity with a genre relates to my frustration that Lady Audley's secret wasn't more... scandalous. I think I'm not the only one that was expecting more secrets to be revealed (Phoebe as a secret half-sister!) before the asylum doors swung shut. But I wonder if we can look beyond these untrodden avenues of suspense as a side-effect of the abruptness inherent in the serialized nature of the novel or as markers of an as yet undeveloped genre and examine them more purposefully. I can't help but call to mind Mary Wollstonecraft's Preface to "Mary, or The Wrongs of Woman" where she claims to have deliberately made her narrative less sensational, the better to portray the real situation of women - "In many instances I could have made the incidents more dramatic, would I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society" (Pg. 67, Oxford World Classics edition). Wollstonecraft's heroine, Mary, is wrongfully imprisoned in a madhouse so that her money and child can be stolen from her.
ReplyDeleteTherefore in some ways, we can't have a more exciting premise to Braddon's novel, because to do so would be to take focus off the chilling idea that what happens to Lady Audley could, in effect, happen to any woman in England. Abandonment, Bigamy, Murder, Insanity - these are Lady Audley's secrets, and they all stem from the defacement of her identity and safety through marriage.
Great comments. Just a quick one here to say that it would be great if on the blog or in class we could continue to specify what we mean when we talk about Darwinian and Holmesian detection. Certainly Frank reads Holmesian detection as a response to/adaptation of an emerging Darwinian scientific method, but that is of course one reading.
ReplyDeleteI also like Janie's idea bout genre, sensationalism and realism. In The Novel That We Did Not Read (BLEAK HOUSE), Dickens insists in his Preface that he is devoted to representing the real and paradoxically uses the novel's treatment of spontaneous combustion as his example -- tantalizing those of us who want to understand what energies in that novel (sensational? realist?) are giving rise to the seminal figure of Inspector Bucket. Is ORIGIN a realist narrative, and, if so, does that shape its detective elements?