Study Questions

Lady Audley’s Secret – Criticism

• Brantlinger argues that there are many different discourses encompassed within discourse of sensation fiction – primarily stage, journalism, and trial (courtroom) – to create a kind of Bakhtinian dialogic heteroglossia that suggests a decentralized text. Where can we detect this polyphony in LAS? Where do we see the languages of the stage, journalism, and the courtroom, and what is MEB suggesting by representing this polyphonic dynamic?
• Brantlinger argues that sensation fiction “marks a crisis in the history of literary realism” (27). Can we situate this comment in the context of Marxist criticism? In other words, what is the nature of the crisis that Brantlinger is speaking of? Can we characterize it as a doubt about Lukacsian ideas of realism, which proposes that the novel can actually reflect the reality of a specific historical moment? To put it yet another way: To what extent does LAS gesture toward Modernism and to what extent does it still preserve a Lukacsian sense of realism?
• Brantlinger suggests that the detective figure becomes EITHER a stand-in for the necessarily unreliable narrator OR a “personification of the morally ambivalent role of the narrator”. Which role do you think Robert Audley plays, if either?
• How credible is Montweiler’s argument that LAS promotes consumerism and democracy and social mobility? Where does LAS go against the language of advertisement or argue against capitalist / consumer culture and against this idea of social mobility?
• Montwieler’s article suggests that consumerism is a distinctly female language – that women are the buyers in a society. What evidence is there in the text that consumerism and consumption are distinctly female languages, as Montweiler suggests? Is Robert also a capitalist and a consumer? If so, does this mean that consumerism is a gender-neutral language, or does it mean that Robert is effeminized?
• Sturrock’s argument goes somewhat against other critics that have focused on the performativity of sensation fiction and the theatricality of Lady Audley, because she argues that Braddon is attempting to avoid spectacle. How credible is this argument?