Travis 1

Heidi Travis

Dr. Earle

Victorian Lit.

3 March 2015

Framed: A Portrait of Lady Audley

It is commonly said that art imitates life. The Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid

nineteenth century was particularly concerned with the expression of truth in all things. In

Lady Audley's Secret much ado is made of Lady Audley's portrait which is pre-Raphaelite in

style. It is a shocking image which rattles the onlookers and challenges their proper sensibilities.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon employs Lady Audley's portrait as a clever device to expose the truth

about the lady's character and, perhaps, foreshadow her fate. When Braddon describes Lady

Audley's portrait as pre-Raphaelite, she juxtaposes her within the framework of other tragic

heroines depicted in the art style and exposes her complex, hopeless situation as a trap crafted by

the Victorian patriarchal ideals of womanhood in nineteenth century England.

The pre-Raphaelite movement, which began in 1848, often addressed subjects of moral

seriousness in history, literature, religion or modern society (Doyle 4). Pre-Raphaelite artists

were keen to convey truth using hyperrealism and brilliant color palettes. While other artists of

the time were concerned with portraying military might and aristocratic grandeur, the pre-

Raphaelites instead chose poignant episodes and intimate scenes inspired by the middle ages,

Renaissance, Dante, Shakespeare, and the literary works of contemporary figures such as

Tennyson (Doyle 11). Beautiful women, drawn in a highly sensualized manner, were frequently

the subjects of these scenes, and often, the figures represented were taken from works of
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mythology or poetry. For example, among John William Waterhouse's most famous works are

The Lady of Shalott and Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, but scores of other pre-Raphaelite

painter's works engaged these types of female personages. Interestingly, there is yet another

common thread that connects the subjects of many of these art pieces. The women represented

are, in one way or another, trapped or condemned to a terrible fate. The Lady of Shalott is

trapped by a curse within her ivory tower; Circe is exiled to a great mansion on the remote island

of Aeaea. Other works, such as John Everett Millais' Ophelia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's La

Pia also tell of the equally dismal ends of their female subjects. The hopelessness of their

situations is captured masterfully with each brushstroke and brought to life in vivid color.1 In her

essay Death and the Lady: The Lady of Shalott and the Pre-Raphaelites, Christine Poulson

observes that, The changing social setting for women in the time period in which the majority

of these paintings were executed make it seem legitimate to conjecture that part of their function

was to suggest the vulnerability of women who step out of their appointed sphere, and the

judgement and punishment to which they are exposed (Poulson 183). However, the tragic

beauty of these images were not met with positive appraisal by all. On the contrary, in her

brochure for the National Gallery of Art, Margaret Doyle notes that, initial reaction to their

work was often brutal (Doyle 9). The frankness of the art style was thought to be distasteful by

English aristocracy for it did not conform to their ideals of beauty or propriety.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon deliberately evokes the pre-Raphaelite style when describing

Lady Audley's portrait to impart a subtle message to her reader. Throughout the novel, Braddon

paints a colorful picture of Lady Audley's beauty describing her physical attributes in varying

hues, such as in the following passage: The winter sunlight, gleaming full upon her face from

1 See Endnotes for art cited.

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the side window, lit up the azure of those beautiful eyes, till their color seemed to flicker betwixt

blue and green, as the opal tints of the sea change upon a summer's day (105). Even before the

portrait is unveiled, one has a sense that Lady Audley is like a living art piece herself, comprised

of vivid color schemes. But like an art piece, Lady Audley's beauty is a deliberate display that

she has worked hard to cultivate. Only when the portrait is introduced does the reader see Lady

Audley's beauty in a new light. The pivotal scene where George Talboys and Robert Audley steal

a glance at the unfinished work is striking in its imagery. It is detailed thus:

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 with every

glimmer of gold , and every shadow of pale brown. No one but a pre-Raphaelite

would have so exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give to a lurid

lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue

eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given that pretty pouting mouth the

hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait (65).

The painstakingly detailed description continues at length to expound on the appearance of her

crimson dress which hung about her in folds that looked like flames and of her fair head

peeping out of the lurid mass of colour, as if out of a raging furnace until the images culminate

into the pronouncement that she bears the aspect of a beautiful fiend (65). In this moment, the

reader is made to understand that the portrait exposes Lady Audley's true character and

duplicitous nature. In his book, In Lady Audley's Shadow, Saverio Tomaiuolo asserts, from both

an aesthetic and ideological point of view the lady's portrait [] introduces her complex

condition as victim and villain, delicate creature and femme fatale, ordinary woman and
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monster (Tomaiuolo 149). Lady Audley's portrait in pre-Raphaelite style is the key to

unraveling the lady herself on multiple levels. The revelation of the portrait serves as an

important plot point to move the narrative forward and deepen the mystery that is Lady Audley.

At the same time, the portrait cleverly juxtaposes Lady Audley in the place of other heroines

featured in pre-Raphaelite art who, like her, must suffer an unfortunate fate. But to better

understand this device, one must first understand the condition of the lady in question and for

that one must look to her humble beginnings.

By her own account, Lady Audley's early life, previous to that of her life at Audley Court

was nothing short of a misery. Helen Maldon, as she was known then, was born into extreme

poverty. Her father, an ex naval officer, is a ne'er-do-well drunkard and her mother was

institutionalized as a mad woman. In her own words, Helen bitterly recalls at a very early age I

found out what it was to be poor (296). To be poor and a woman in nineteenth century England

is doubly damning. Opportunities for social advancement ran very thin. Helen's one saving

grace, as she soon discovered, was her beauty. She recounts:

As I grew older I was told that I was prettybeautifullovely--bewitching. I

heard all these things at first indifferently; but by-and-by I listened to them

greedily, and began to think that in spite of the secret of my life I might be more

successful in the world's great lottery than my companions. I had learnt that

which in some indefinite manner or other every school girl learns sooner or later--

I learned that my ultimate fate in life depended upon my marriage, and I

concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my school fellows, I ought to marry

better than any of them (298).

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Here, Braddon presents her audience with a dilemma and pits the reader's sympathies against

their sense of morality. Helen's only means for survival in the world is, as it was for most

women, to marry well. Braddon further presses the reader's sympathies with the complication of

Helen's marriage to George Talboy's: an arrangement which leads to their ruin after George is

disowned by his father for his entanglement with a woman well beneath his station, and presses

further still with George's subsequent abandonment of his wife and child to seek his fortune in

Australia. Braddon masterfully paints another portrait of Lady Audley as a beauty trapped.

Helen's situation is a hopeless one for her station in life is as binding as a prison. Again, Saverio

Tomaiulo offers this insight saying, Lady Audley's Secret demonstrates that the narration of the

story of a sexually and socially marginal character who aspires to ascend the social scale can

shed a new light on the mechanisms of power in nineteenth century cultural systems

(Tomaiuolo 148). Social class and gender were everything. In her study, Golden Age to

Separate Spheres: A review of Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,

Amanda Vickery claims that 'Victorian' has long served as a general synonym for oppressive

domesticity and repressive prudery (Vickery 386). She describes Victorian England as a

culture with a crippling ideology of virtuous femininity and asserts that glorification of

domestic womanhood became associated with the deterioration of women's public power

( Vickery 384). Lady Audley's three demons: Vanity, Selfishness and Ambition stand very

much at odds with the Victorian feminine ideal and yet it is that very reliance on the established

code of conduct which cultivated these attributes in the lady (253). In order to survive, Lady

Audley must successfully negotiate the patriarchal system with the only commodities she has

available to her: her beauty, cunning and perseverance. Her only recourse is to marry. Amanda
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Vickery, speaking of the roles of wives in Victorian England states that, Mrs. Average led a

sheltered life drained of economic purpose and public responsibility [...] As her physicality was

cramped by custom, corset and crinoline, she was often a delicate creature who was, at best,

conspicuously in need of masculine protection and at worst, prey to individualism (Vickery

387). Lady Audley's masculine protection comes in the form of Sir. Michael Audley and she

binds herself to him in a bigamous marriage, thus saving herself from the ills of destitution but

consequently relinquishing her independence. Thus, unwittingly, Lady Audley trades one trap for

another.

Returning to the key scene where George Talboys and Robert Audley behold the lady's

portrait, we may now examine the device more closely. Tomaiuolo observes that, The

background of the portrait does not reproduce an 'idealized' naturalistic scene but the lady's

chamber ('A faithful reproduction of the pictured walls') as if to underline the fact that she is a

product of her times, of her social status and of her condition as a Victorian woman (Tomaiuolo

150). Lady Audley's dominion rests entirely within the confines of Audley Court. Her power is

limited to the domestic sphere and, therefore, her portraiture places her in the center of her

kingdom. Like the Lady of Shalott in her tower and Circe on her island, Lady Audley's very

identity is defined within the finite space that exists between the borders of her domain. In this

setting, the Lady's image seems to burn with ominous hell fire, as if issuing a warning to

onlookers that there are more sinister qualities that lie beneath her beautiful exterior. Yet

Braddon's description of Lady Audley's portrait is seen through the lens of a male point of view.

Lady Audley's vilification is a consequence of the Victorian male perspective on the feminine

ideal and the need to assert dominance over her person to reestablish order and control.
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Tomaiuolo asserts that, For both men Lady Audley is an assertive woman who needs to be

contained, controlled and 'framed' within a portrait which hints at the assertiveness and that, at

the same time, becomes her cage (Tomaiuolo 149). The social structures of the patriarchal

Victorian society make it clear that a woman is either virtuous or villain and there is no deviation

from this established belief. Robert Audley, a barrister, represents the law and order of Victorian

society and it falls to him to enforce those laws and reestablish proper social order. Robert

Audley asserts his control over Lady Audley when he exposes her duplicitous nature and

consequently sends her off to the madhouse where she is quite literally imprisoned until her final

days. In this manner, order is kept and Lady Audley is contained in her proper place in Victorian

society. Like, La Pia, the subject of Rossetti's famous painting featuring Dante's character whose

neglectful husband banished her to a castle, where the pious woman eventually lost her will to

live and died without receiving the last rites, Lady Audley's isolation and imprisonment lead to

her untimely death which is acknowledged with no ceremony, in a letter from the institution.

In the introduction to Lady Audley's Secret, Lynn Pykett claims that Mary Elizabeth Braddon

used Lady Audley both to challenge contemporary ideas of femininity and to explore and

exploit contemporary anxieties about them and that like many sensation novels, [it] expels its

disruptive heroine and restores domestic peace and order by the end of the final volume (Pykett

xxi).

Lady Audley's demise serves as a cautionary tale to Braddon's contemporaries. In truth,

all women in nineteenth century England were held to similar societal expectations. Any

deviation from the norm could result in total excommunication. Interestingly, Braddon herself

alludes to the potential in all women to dissent by drawing parallels between Lady Audley and
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her maid, Phoebe Marks. Countless times Braddon refers to sympathies between Lady Audley

and Phoebe Marks saying that, like Lady Audley, she is selfish, cold, and cruel, eager for her

own advancement, and greedy of opulence and elegance, angry with the lot that had been cast

her and weary of dull dependence (255). The similarities do not end here. Physically, the two

women vaguely resemble one another, though Phoebe is described as pale, and that [n]ot one

tinge of crimson flushed the waxen whiteness of her cheeks; not one shadow of brown redeemed

the pale insipidity of her eyebrows and eyelashes; not one glimmer of gold or auburn relieved

the dull flaxen of her hair (27). This is a stark contrast with the flagrant use of bold colors used

to describe Lady Audley and in particular her portrait and yet Braddon notes that there were

certain dim and shadowy lights in which, meeting Phoebe Marks gliding softly through the dark

oak passages of the Court, or under the shrouded avenues in the garden, you might have easily

mistaken her for my lady (94). In the pre-Raphaelite style, artists prepared their canvasses with

a layer of white, as opposed to the traditional earthen or mid-toned paints before applying

colored strokes. This method produced results that made the subsequent layer of colors seem

illuminated (Doyle 8). In this way, Phoebe Marks may represent that first layer upon the

canvass; the base coat for the luminous art piece that is to come. Viewing Phoebe through this

lens, one may see that, with just a flourish of color, she too could have evolved into the portrait

of another Lady Audley.

When Lady Audley's Secret was published in 1862, some critics referred to it as one of

the most noxious books of modern times ( Pykett xix). Lady Audley's portrayal was nothing

short of scandalous for it challenged the conventional views of womanhood of the times. Pykett

claims that many objections stemmed from the way which Braddon satirized the domestic
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feminine ideal by both exaggerating it and by showing that it is a role that can be played

(Pykett xix). As a literary device, Lady Audley's portrait serves a dual purpose. It reveals the

truth of Lady Audley's duplicitous nature while simultaneously illuminating the trap of the

patriarchal system in Victorian England by placing her among the ranks of scores of other tragic

heroines depicted in pre-Raphaelite art. Braddon frames Lady Audley within the Victorian

feminine ideal and paints a picture of a woman with no hope for recourse in the customs that

govern her world and who is irrevocably trapped within its laws.
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Endnotes

Fig. 1. John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott. 1888. Oil on canvas. 153 cm x 200 cm

(60 in x 79 in). Tate Britain, London.

Fig. 2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. La Pia. 1868. Oil on canvas. 105.4 cm 120.6 cm (41.5 in 47.5

in). Spencer Museum of Art. Lawrence. Kansas.

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Endnotes

Fig. 3. John Everett Millais. Ophelia.1851-1852. Oil on canvas. 76.2 cm x 111.8 cm ( 30.0 in x

44.0 in). Tate Britain. London.

Fig. 4. John William Waterhouse. Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses. 1891. Oil on canvas. 149

cm x 92 cm (59 in x 36 in). Gallery Oldham. Oldham.

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Works Cited

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012.

Print.

Pykett, Lyn. Introduction. Lady Audley's Secret. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012

Print.

Doyle, Maragaret. Pre-Raphaelite: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900. Washington: National

Museum of Art. 2013. Print.

Poulson, Christine. Death and the Maiden: The Lady of Shalott and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Reframing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays. Ellen

Harding, ed. Bournemouth: Scholar Press. (1996) Web. 28 Feb. 2015.

Tomaiuolo, Saverio. In Lady Audley's Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary

Genres:Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2010. Print.

Vickery, Amanda. Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and

Chronology of English Women's History. The Historical Journal 36.2

(1993): 383-414. Web. 22 Feb. 2015.