Daniel Apatiga
Professor Anne Stapleton
RR #3 on Lady Audley’s Secret vol. 1
April 5th 2014
The
Prophetic Warnings in the Various Settings of Lady Audley’s Secret, by
Braddon
In Lady
Audley’s Secret, the various settings all seem to have a paragraph
dedicated to their description at the beginning of every chapter, which begin in-medias-res,
typically, and some have a tendency to create an uneasy feeling, as if there’s
a bad omen, in vol. 1. The imagery used
in the various settings may be symbolic of or foreshadowing larger things, like
for instance, when George Talboy is described as being on a ship that is
heading towards England from Australia, why does Braddon use a ship set in a
faraway location such as Australia? It
seems as though for her story to work or plausible, the ship’s distance is
necessary to convey that George Talboy is completely ignorant of the news in
England, which he later on reads when he’s with Sir Michael. For him to have read in the newspaper that
his wife is dead suggests the implausibility of this to happen if George had
been in England all along—it means that there’s something in England that’s
significant to Braddon’s story that the narrator is also not telling us. Furthermore, in Lady Audley’s Secret, there
are many extended metaphors used in the settings to describe the tone of what’s
to come; Braddon uses uncanny settings to foreshadow what will happen, as well. Especially in chapter IX titled, “After the
Storm,” Mr. Audley believes that the weather will be over, but it in fact
“…burst with terrible fury over the village of Audley about half an hour before
midnight” (Braddon 67). Could this be a
metaphor for the story itself—that things are just going to get worse for Sir
Michael Audley? Braddon uses many
literary devices in each setting, which seem to hold a special significance to
the novel.
The time that
transpires between chapters seems to be in elision. Braddon rarely explicitly states in a long
journey between the Court of Audley town and London via carriage what Mr. Audley,
the barrister, is doing, for instance. When
travel is concerned, time seems to go pretty fast. Also, when George Talboy is on his ship
sailing from Australia to England, only one or so day happens in a long journey
that would take ten days, I think, according to the novel. So in this way, the setting is a background
image in my mind, yet, it’s central to the plot because it wouldn’t make sense
for the things to have unfolded in the way they did.
Time seems to slow
down when we get into the mystery aspects of this sensation novel. Particularly, the barrister who is the nephew of
Sir Michael Audley, investigates as a police officer would the mysteries
surrounding George Talboy’s disappearance, (he fancies to himself), and when he’s
in dialogue with Mrs. Moloney in regards to the blacksmith who entered his office. At that point in the novel, time seems to
enter a more normal pace. He discovers
that, as it turned out, of course, his increasing paranoia had caused a false
alarm. Another place that time seems to
slow down even further to the point where it stands still, is in the
description of Lady Audley’s portrait and the day of the storm:
”Yes; the painter must have been a pre-Raphaelite. No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have
painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets… [etc.]” (Braddon 64)
“[He] took the thunder and lightning with the same
composure with which he accepted all the other ills of life. He lay on a sofa in the sitting-room,
osensibly reading the five-days’-old Chelmsford paper… [etc.]” (Braddon 67)
Anytime we, as in
us readers, come across a setting that seems to describe a painting on the
canvas of the novel, which could be a painting of a painting, or a thunder
storm, time stopped for me. The feeling
conveyed by the objects in the aforementioned settings seemed to suggest
Braddon was offering to me two pieces of evidence that are significant to the
enfolding mystery of Lady Audley’s secret precisely because time stood still.
The settings to me
was fantastic, because they reminded me of what Dostoevsky once said about his
own works: that his own works were too fantastic. And having read a few of his novels, I can say
that the images that the words evoke are very similar in quality. Not only that, but Lady Audley seems too
fantastic of a creature, in terms of beauty and perfection, to exist. But then again, I suppose that there are women who fit her
descriptions quite nicely…
