From Sensation To Society: Representations Of Marriage In The Fiction Of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1862-1866

Marriage, no doubt about it, was a vexed question for Mary Elizabeth Braddon; it eluded her in life since the father of her children had a legal wife in a lunatic asylum, while it served as the mainspring of her best-selling plots. In From Sensation to Society, Natalie Schroeder and Ronald A. Schroeder have compiled an exhaustive survey of Braddon's "reservations about contemporary marriage" in six early novels, arguing that she therein "undertook a rigorous and unflinching examination of the state of marriage and matrimonial relations in her culture" (p. 10). What she found was far from pretty. Her original sensation novels showed "the Victorian ideology of marriage" under quite literal assault from the criminal activity of apparent angels in the house (p. 11). In Lady Audley's Secret (1862), "Braddon practically represents marriage itself as a species of domesticated crime," both for the bigamous heroine and for the patriarchal accusers who rob her of her very identity, turning her into the ultimate femme couverte (pp. 48-49). With Aurora Floyd (1863), on the other hand, Braddon managed, after three volumes of sensational mayhem, to reconstruct her bigamist's second marriage according to "an alternate model of companionate happiness" based on mutual love, relative equality, and a modification of traditional gender roles (p. 86). The Schroeders see Braddon, for all her controversial extremes of fictional plotting, as a moderate when it comes to marriage, "advocat[ing] reform but not revolution" (p. 107).

Braddon's next several novels, while continuing her project of "fashioning an unpleasant profile of contemporary marriage" (p. 34), function in the Schroeders' scheme as "a bridge" between sensationalism and the devastating anatomy of the marriage market in her first society novel, The Lady's Mile (1866) (p. 115). During this interim period, the Schroeders find compelling images of the home as a prison and duty as bondage in John Marchmont's Legacy (1863), along with probing analysis of the danger posed by the sheer monotony and boredom of conventional middle-class marriage in The Doctor's Wife (1864). The central relationship in Eleanor's Victory (1863) "seems almost like a laboratory for what can go wrong in matrimony" (p. 140).

By 1866, already a veteran author of at least eight triple-deckers, besides anonymous penny and halfpenny dreadfuls, Braddon was prepared to cut loose from the sensational trappings that had brought her so much profit and notoriety. The Lady's Mile moves definitively from external incident to interior psychology, focusing on three varieties of marriage—purely mercenary, purely companionable, and a satisfying mix of love, companionship, and "mutual bondage" (p. 256). Braddon's advice, the Schroeders conclude, was that, absent institutional reform, "love is the best chance women have to improve their odds in the most important lottery of their lives" (p. 264). "Unfortunately," as they put it, "Braddon is mysterious about how this love comes into being" (p. 260). Nor, alas, was she particularly original in recommending love as the basis of happiness in marriage.

From Sensation to Society is something of a high-calorie treat for Braddon enthusiasts, filled with lengthy and toothsome quotations from favorite texts. For all the fascinating welter of detail, however, the Schroeders find it difficult, as they implicitly acknowledge, to draw any larger conclusions, either about the novels themselves or about the Victorian social context. If they can recover "no coherent agenda to ameliorate the conditions of marital inequality and dissatisfaction" in The Doctor's Wife, perhaps it is because that is too much to ask of a popular novel, or series of popular novels (p. 184). Although they attempt to provide a source for Braddon's "authority" in her enormous readership, the fact remains that these novels were written in haste, with the wolf or the printer at the door, as Braddon herself readily admitted (p. 9). Painting with a broad brush, keeping abreast of a fast market, Braddon, like other popular novelists, knew how to push the hottest buttons of her particular culture. She wrote with panache, insouciance, and wit, which the Schroeders, in their moral seriousness, tend to ignore. What has endured from her work is not argument or any program for reform, but indelible images and situations and character types—most of all, to Braddon's later chagrin, the iconic scene of the fair-haired child-wife pushing her extraneous husband down an abandoned well. There is something unanswerable about Lady Audley and her kin, something that still ignites even the most resistant twenty-first-century imagination.