The Insane Illness In 'Lady Audley's Secret'

One might think that, for a woman of the Victorian era, a life of a happiness is automatically attained once she has successfully courted herself a financially secure and socially respectable husband. However, it is questionable how safe and secure a woman can be in her life after marriage. For one, her rights are legally transferred to her spouse, essentially giving him control over her life. Moreover, with divorce being an act that is socially shunned, there wasn’t any way to get out of an unhappy marriage without making big sacrifices. For the woman, that is. Men, on the other hand, had the ability to call their wives mad and, especially if someone in her family had a history of madness, she’d be out of his life and locked away in an instant. With the Victorian society’s newfound understanding and obsession with the concept of madness, no woman was truly safe from the imprisonment of the insane asylum.
Mary Elizabeth Brandon analyzes this problematic cultural practice in her novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, through examining the life of a woman who, affected by the trauma of seeing her mother locked up in an asylum, went through great lengths to obtain the ideal marriage only to find herself where her mother was due to the fickle diagnosis of madness.
Despite the apparent power of calling someone “mad” during the Victorian era, the term is thrown
around rather loosely in Lady Audley’s Secret. Madness, in the story, is construct often used by the characters to manipulate people into giving them what they want, be it through posing threats of losing one’s own sanity or discrediting someone else by claiming that they are insane. It begins with Clara Talboys threatening to go mad if Robert would not talk to her about her brother. She says, “…let me speak to you, or I shall go mad… and I shall go mad unless I can do something—something toward avenging his [George’s] death.” (Brandon ch. 23). To which, Robert obliges and obtains newfound motivation to solve the mystery behind George Talboys’ disappearance. Clara’s tactic of putting her own sanity on the line is effective in the sense that it got Robert to stop and pay attention to her, eventually leading her to attain her desired outcome. Madness is then used as a tool again when Lady Audley felt threatened by how close Robert was getting to the truth. When he refuses to stop searching for answers, Lady Audley goes behind his back and attempts to convince his uncle that he is mad. Much like Robert, Phoebe also got close to unveiling one of Lady Audley’s crimes; she suspected that Lady Audley had deliberately set fire the inn Robert was residing in, in attempts to kill him. In response, Lady Audley coldly calls Phoebe a “mad woman” and reprimands her for being overly concerned for Robert as well as quick to jump to conclusions (ch. 32). This brings Phoebe to tears and causes her to proclaim that she is in the wrong, thus giving Lady Audley exactly what she wants—for Phoebe to stop asking questions. Of course, luck was not on Lady Audley’s side and eventually her secret was discovered. After Robert backs her into a corner, Lady Audley proclaims herself as mad, in hopes of facing a less dire consequence as she would’ve had she been charged with the murder of George Talboys (ch. 34). The lose use of the term basically shows how unreliable the accusation of madness can be. Brandon reflects to us a Victorian society that is quick to use the concept of madness to their own benefit, causing sane people—such as Robert and Phoebe—to be wrongfully accused of being psychotic. It poses the question: with all the cases of wives being institutionalized because their husbands attested to their supposed madness, how many of those wives were truly mad? In fact, after Dr. Mosgrave examined Lady Audley Audley’s case, he came to the conclusion that “The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous!” (ch. 34). Even if the argument that madness is hereditary is true, Dr. Mosgrave is still admitting that he does not believe Lady Audley is. Yet, in spite of that fact, Lady Audley finds herself being sent to an asylum regardless. Because Robert had no solid evidence that she killed George Talboys and thus no way to prove to the law that she was guilty, he had her locked away by different means. What is most problematic here is how easily had her committed: simply by asking Dr. Mosgrave to write a letter. Moreover, Dr. Mosgrave emphasizes that he would not have written the letter if he had truly thought that Lady Audley was guilty of murder; instead, he wrote it merely on Robert’s request. This emphasizes how fickle the diagnosis of madness could be, and it also show easy it was for a man to have a woman committed into an insane asylum.
A way in which Brandon’s criticism of the male-biased stigma that madness was more prevalent in females was executed by creating a juxtaposition of Lady Audley claiming that Robert is mad versus her own confession to madness. When Lady Audley attempts to accuse Robert of being mad, Sir Michael laughs it off and continuously dismisses the notion. Eventually, Lady Audley manages to somewhat convince Sir Michael of Robert Audley’s madness using her skills of rhetoric. With confidence, she declares Robert mad and proceeded to give a long and detailed psychoanalysis of how he could be so, “…Robert Audley has thought of his friend's disappearance until the one idea has done its fatal and unhealthy work. He looks at a common event with a vision that is diseased, and he distorts it into a gloomy horror engendered of his own monomania.” Lady Audley even utilizes the same technique Clara does and puts her own sanity on the line, “If you do not want to make me as mad as he is, you must never let me see him again.” (ch. 30). Even then, Sir Michael questions if she was simply misunderstanding him. Despite her certainty, he remained unsure and essentially says that he would have to see Robert in person before coming to a consensus. He says, “It is always so difficult to believe that any one of the calamities that continually befall our fellow-men will ever happen to us.” Here, it seems that Sir Michael is saying that he has trouble believing that such unfortunate things could happen to mankind as a collective. Yet, the “us” here is somewhat vague, and could arguably mean the male gender. It might seem like far-fetched interpretation, but when we take into consideration the reactions surrounding Lady Audley’s self-proclamation of madness, the idea of Sir Michael’s gender bias is not implausible. When Lady Audley confesses that she is mad and reveals the fact that madness runs in her family, Sir Michael made no attempts to question—as he did with Robert—if Lady Audley’s madness was a mere misunderstanding. Despite having, at one point in time, cared for Lady Audley so deeply that even Robert felt threatened by her presence, Sir Michael was quick to give up on Lady Audley and place her under Robert’s care instead. To put it simply, when it comes to declaring a man mad, other men are quick to dismiss the notion. Even the use of the word “mad” holds no power when used to describe a man; Sir Michael, at one point, calls Robert “half mad” but then later dismisses his claim as mere “façon de parler” (ch. 30). Yet, when a woman either calls herself or is accused of being mad, it is taken seriously and, in the case of Lady Audley, met with countermeasures in order to protect the world from the madwoman.
The ease at which men could have women committed into madhouses is extremely problematic as it essentially destroys lives. The asylum is never a pleasant place to live in, much less die in. Lady Audley’s drive to seek out a secure marriage stems from the fact that she is afraid of ending up in a madhouse like her mother. She said, “I brooded horribly upon the thought of my mother's madness. It haunted me by day and night. I was always picturing to myself this mad woman pacing up and down some prison cell, in a hideous garment that bound her tortured limbs.” (ch. 34). Lady Audley, traumatized by her mother’s situation, made it her resolve to have a better life. While she holds onto a deep fear that she was bound to one day lose her sanity, the problem lies with the fact that the mother did not necessarily have had to end up that way. Her father could have, and would have, dedicated his life to taking care of her mother had he not been poor and had to work, “My mother, who might have been tended by a devoted husband, was given over to the care of hired nurses.” To put it simply, if a mother was to be called mad and sent away to a madhouse, it is not only the mother that would suffer but her child as well. Although her childhood trauma does not justify her actions, it provides us with an explanation of Lady Audley’s motives. It also makes her ending more tragic, with Lady Audley dying in the madhouse from “maladie de langueur”, leaving the implication that was not mad after all and that locking her up in a madhouse is what caused her death.
Brandon’s criticism of the Victorian society is effective due to its subtleness.
As she was writing for an audience of her time, she would not have been taken as seriously if she had written about the injustices committed against a morally sound character. Instead, she uses a complex character filled with faults to tactfully convey the problems surrounding the stigma of madness. Lady Audley might have been a cunning and selfish woman, but she was not crazy. Yet, under a man’s orders, she died as a madwoman. Not only had madness become highly overused in Victorian society, but it had become a tool used against
women.