"Becky Sharp's Children": Criminal Heroines in Vanity Fair and the Sensation Novels of the 1860s

by

Alexandra Doeben

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Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) Fur meine Mutter, die mir Jane Eyre vorgelesen und damit meine Liebe zur Viktorianischen Literatur geweckt hat.

Und fur meinen Vater, der mir mit Hilfe von Astrid Lindgrens Tomte Tummetott geniigend Geduld beigebracht hat, um diese Arbeit zu schreiben.

„Geduldnur, Geduld!" Sprach Tummetott. (AstridLindgren)

And to Anthony, with love. Thank you for always believing in me.

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 THE REALISM OF VANITYFAIR 1

1.2 SENSATION FICTION 6

CHAPTER 2: PERFORMING IDEAL FEMININITY: BECKY SHARP AND LUCY AUDLEY 15

2.1 NARRATORS 16

2.2 CLASS 22

2.3 BEAUTY 25

2.4 PERFORMING THE ROLES OF SINGLE WOMEN 29

2.5 PERFORMING THE ROLES OF WIVES AND MOTHERS 35

CHAPTER 3: "UNNATURAL HEROINES" : BECKY SHARP AND AURORA FLOYD 43

3.1 CLAIMING REALISM 44

3.2 NOVELS AND EDUCATION 46

3.3 "UNNATURALHEROINES" 49

3.4 ABSENT MOTHERS .57

3.5 AMELIA SEDLEY AND LUCY FLOYD 63

CHAPTER 4: CRIMINAL FEMININITY: BECKY SHARP AND LYDIA GWTLT 72

4.1 LETTERS AND DIARIES 73

4.2 GOVERNESSES 78

4.3 FEMININITY AND CRIME 88

V CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 98

BIBLIOGRAPHY 104

VI ABSTRACT

This thesis challenges genre definitions of realism and sensationalism established by nineteenth-century critics and maintained throughout the 20th century. When sensation fiction emerged as a literary genre in the 1860s, critics established realism as thematically and aesthetically superior to sensationalism, as realist novels dealt with social and moral

"truths." Anxieties surrounding the genre of sensationalism were rooted in the sensation novel's immense commercial success, its unconventional depictions of femininity, and its inability to provide its readers with eligible role models. Strict distinctions between realism and sensationalism emerge to be part of elaborate Victorian ideologies that supported the assumed stability of Victorian culture. An analysis of Thackeray's realist

Vanity Fair in conjunction with Braddon's sensational Lady Audley 's Secret and Aurora

Floyd and Collins's sensational Armadale challenges firmly established generic boundaries and points to the cultural significance of Victorian genre definitions and gender ideologies.

VII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Rohan Maitzen, for making this project so rewarding. I could not have completed my thesis without her guidance, support, and encouragement. I am sincerely grateful for the helpful suggestions and advice of my second and third readers, Dr. Marjorie Stone and Dr. David McNeil. Special thanks to

Mary Beth Maclsaac for all her kind help throughout the year.

VIII CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis challenges genre definitions of realism and sensationalism established by nineteenth-century critics and maintained throughout the 20 century. When sensation fiction emerged as a literary genre in the 1860s, critics soon established realism as thematically and aesthetically superior to sensationalism; they asserted that realist novels dealt with social and moral "truth[s]" (Bronte 51) and depicted society and characters according to "nature" (Masson 15) and "experience" (Eliot, qtd. in David 3). However, my thesis demonstrates that the plot-based, exaggerated, and "unnatural" stories and characters—especially heroines— of sensation novels express social and cultural "truths" equally well or even better than realist novels. Analysing Thackeray's realist novel Vanity

Fair in conjunction with Mary Elizabeth Braddon's and Wilkie Collins's sensation novels and considering the sensation heroines of the 1860s as "Becky Sharp's children"

(Mitchell76) calls generic boundaries into question and exposes the cultural anxieties that determined Victorian genre definitions and gender ideologies.

1.1 THE REALISM OF VANITY FAIR

When Vanity Fair was serialized from January 1847 to July 1848, the novel was generally received positively by contemporary critics and readers. In response to Vanity

Fair, Charlotte Bronte writes: "The more I read of Thackeray's works the more certain I am that he stands alone—alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling, [...] alone in his power, alone in his simplicity, alone in his self-control" (51). George Henry

1 Lewes states that "knowledge of life, good humoured satire, penetration into motive, power of characterization, and great truthfulness are qualities in fiction as rare as they are admirable; and no work that has been published for many years past can claim these qualities so largely as 'Vanity Fair'" (758). Critics were pleased with Thackeray's

"unapproachable quickness, fineness, and width of observation on social habits and characteristics, a memory the most delicate, and a perfectly amazing power of vividly reproducing his experience" (Roscoe 178). It was primarily Thackeray's "truthfulness" and "reproduction of experience," then, that made critics and readers regard him as a

"unique" "genius" (Bronte 751). Nineteenth-century reviews indicate that it was this truthfulness, together with a literary reproduction of what was "natural," that defined literary realism.

In his 1851 review of Dickens and Thackeray David Masson writes that "in the real style of art, the aim is to produce pictures that shall impress by their close and truthful resemblance to something or other in real nature or life" (15). Similarly, George

Eliot, the "doyenne of realism" (Pykett "Sensation and the Fantastic" 192) explicitly articulates the principles of realist aesthetics in Adam Bede, when she writes that it is her goal to "give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind [...] I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath" (qtd. in David 3, omission in original). Kenneth Graham argues that "the major theme running through

George Eliot's comments on her art is the necessity to avoid exaggeration, conventionality, and all literary affectation" (20). Furthermore, Graham establishes

Trollope as "the High Priest of Victorian realism" and states that "'realistic,' 'truthful,'

2 and 'natural' are [Trollope's] favourite words of commendation; ordinary human nature is always held up as the lodestar of the novelist" (21). Like Eliot and Trollope, Henry

James demands an "air of reality" from fiction. For him, "solidity of specification" is "the supreme virtue of a novel—the merit in which all its other merits [...] helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life"

(qtd. in David 3, omission in original). George Levine points out that this demand for an

"illusion of life" was reinforced (but also complicated) by the nineteenth-century assumption that realist writers, as opposed to authors of romance and melodrama, dealt with '"things as they are' rather than as [they] 'would like them to be for [their] own convenience'" (Levine "Realism Reconsidered" 242). Therefore, nineteenth-century writers and critics believed that "ordinariness is more real—at least more representative and therefore truthful—than heroism, that people are morally mixed rather than either good or bad, that the firmest realities are objects rather than ideas or imaginings" (Levine

"Realism Reconsidered" 236). Graham concludes that Victorian critics and readers were

"not really concerned with the possibilities of the sublime in fiction, or with the nature of illusion. The earthbound is most suited to [their] taste, and [their] enthusiasm is reserved for simple recognisability of drawing—for the outward effects rather than the analysable causes of realism in the novel" (22).Contemporary critics found Thackeray as a novelist who exemplified these realist qualities.

Indeed, Masson states that "in [...] [Thackeray's] characters his study seems to be to give the good and the bad together, in very nearly the same proportions that the cunning apothecary, Nature, herself, uses" (21). Roscoe writes that Thackeray's

3 characters "are certainly creations, living breathing being, characteristic not only by certain traits, but by that atmosphere of individuality which only genius can impart" and that "it is exactly as if you had met the people in actual life, mixed constantly with them, known them as we know our most intimate friends" (180). George Levine points out that the Victorian novel attempted to be "sweet, [...] useful, [and] truthful" ("Realism

Reconsidered" 240). However, the literary depiction of truth could easily become immoral if a novelist concentrated on exposing unpleasantness or vice. Trollope defines the goal of novel-writing as encouraging "the mind [to] be induced to sympathise warmly with that which is good and true, or be moved to hatred against that which is vile" (qtd. in

Maitzen 171). Trollope, like other critics, associates "truth" with morality. Some sceptical critics, therefore, were concerned about the moral message of Vanity Fair. They pointed out that Thackeray's realism in the depiction of vice (and especially the creation of

Rebecca Sharp) might be realistic and entertaining, but in no case moral and educational.

Margaret Oliphant, for example, asks: "does everybody like that clever, unbelieving, disagreeable book?" ("Mr. Thackeray" 89), and Roscoe ponders if Thackeray's very realism might not actually be a threat:

it can be good for none of us to mingle so pleasantly and so closely with old

Sir Pitt Crawley, with Becky, with old Osbourne, [...]. It is bad for us to be

constantly rubbed against vice or sin of any kind; and we do not know

whether the constant minutae of selfishness, of weakness, of false ambition,

of cringing meanness and vulgarity, are not more harmful than the details of

murder and other violent crime. (207)

4 To most contemporary literary critics and readers, however, Thackeray's success as a novelist was rooted in his "observation on social habits and characteristics": Masson

states that "abundant as are the rogues, fools, and bores in Mr. Thackeray's fiction, we believe he has kept very neatly the numerical ration that Nature herself observes in her

supply of such individuals" (26). Roscoe praises Thackeray for writing about "the social human heart, man in relation to his kind" (179) and states that his novels are "mirror[s]" that "give a true but a brilliant reflection" of "the world as he sees it" (183). Despite her

objections to various characters of Vanity Fair, Elizabeth Rigby writes that '"Vanity Fair'

is mainly a novel of the day—not in the vulgar sense, of which there are too many, but as

a literal photograph of the manners and habits of the nineteenth century, thrown on paper by the light of a powerful mind; and one also of the most artistic effect" (769), and thereby suggests that realism is superior to melodrama and romance.

However, Levine persuasively argues that

wherever we look in the history of English fiction, we are unlikely to find a

novel unequivocally 'realistic' according to any of the definitions we have

been working with. Realistic heroes get a bit too heroic, coincidences intrude

to resolve difficulties, society fails to impinge as completely on the fate of the

protagonists as would seem appropriate, elements of the exotic or violent or

excessive appear. ("Realism Reconsidered" 242)

Indeed, Vanity Fair introduces Becky Sharp as a villainess who has what will later become distinctively sensational characteristics; she is "famously a bad woman, selfish

and endlessly designing, and rarely bothered by a concern for truth, morals, or the good

5 of the community" (Bloom 2). Almost fifteen years before the emergence of the sensation novel and its beautiful villainesses, Rebecca Sharp uses a facade of ideal femininity to seek a marriage that will guarantee her financial security and social respectability. In her search for social status, she lies, prostitutes herself, and supposedly commits adultery and murder. As exactly these issues dominate many of the sensation novels of the 1860s,

Sally Mitchell concludes that "the whole race [of sensation heroines and villainesses] are

Becky Sharp's children: women who pursue money, position, power and security by the socially acceptable route of marriage" (76). Therefore, the firmly established genre distinction between realism and sensationalism that has been established since the 1860s becomes highly problematic.

1.2 SENSATION FICTION

The genre of the sensation novel developed in the early 1860s, when Wilkie Collin's

The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's

East Lynne were published within a short time of each other. The term "sensational" referred as much to the "extraordinary, exaggerated, shocking" (Loesberg 125) plots of sensation novels as to the physical effects of those plots on the readers' "senses"

(Loesberg 125); the novels made their readers' "flesh creep" and "cyrdle[d] [readers'] blood, cause[d] their hair to stand on end, g[a]ve them 'pins and needles' in the region of the heart, and fix[ed] their eyes with a rigid stare for at least twenty-four hours" (qtd. in

Casey 4). Furthermore, Lena Eden's 1862 review of Lady Audley 's Secret uses the term

"sensation[al]" in an economic sense; Eden states that "by publishing both its first and second editions on the same day and its third within a day or two, Braddon's novel

'comes into the world determined to make 'a sensation'" (qtd. in Casey 4). Sensation

6 novels, inspired by the gothic romances of the late 18 century and the Newgate novels of the early 19 century, generally deal with crimes, secrecy, mystery, and sexual misdemeanour; they are "novels with a secret" (Fantina and Harrison xii). Hughes points out that, different than the realist focus on character, "in the sensation novel, character does not resist plot or create it, but is plunged headlong into its turbulent depth. Heroes and villains alike are at the mercy of accident, of external caprice" (57). However, rather than dismissing sensation fiction as inferior to realism, Hughes attributes this dominance of plot to "a new view of human character as a shifting and uncertain quantity, played upon by forces outside its control" (57). And even though "among the critics of the 1860s

E.S. Dallas is alone in recognizing this larger import of the sensation novel" (Hughes 57), his contemporary assessment is an interesting challenge of genre aesthetics: Dallas points out that "to show man as the sport of circumstance may be a depressing view of human nature; but it is not fair to regard it as immoral or to denounce it as utterly untrue." (qtd. in Hughes 57-58). However, most contemporary critics were convinced that "plot [is] the element of narrative that least define[s] and sets off high art—indeed, plot is that which especially characterizes popular mass-consumption literature" (Brooks 4). This status as

"mass-consumption literature" contributed majorly to the critics' opinion that sensation fiction was aesthetically inferior to realism. Anne Cvetkovich summarizes the generic, critical, and aesthetic implications of the term "sensation fiction" by writing that "the term 'sensation novel' thus functioned as a label for literature perceived to be aesthetically inferior, and by implication morally questionable, and whose popularity thus caused concern about the status of both culture and society" (17). However, while the

7 sensation novel's heavy reliance on plot indeed resembles the genre of melodrama, sensationalism actually draws on a variety of different genres, including realism.

Unlike the gothic, sensation fiction locates the issues of crime and misdemeanour within the proper Victorian middle-class home. Henry James states that sensation fiction deals with "the most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors

[...] Instead of the terrors of Udolpho, we [are] treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely more terrible" (qtd. in Pykett The Sensation Novel 6, omission in original) and Henry

Mansel points out that a

tale which claims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thoroughly

effective unless the scene is to be laid in our own days and among the people

we are in the habit of meeting [...] The man who shook our hand with a hearty

English grasp half an hour ago—the woman whose beauty and grace were the

charms of last night [...] —how exciting to think that under these pleasing

outsides may be concealed some demon in human shape, a Count Fosco, a

Lady Audley! (qtd. in Maunder 38)

Because of its focus on the English, the familiar, and especially the domestic sphere as the origins of crime and vice, sensation fiction challenges Victorian cultural ideals and ideologies and comments on a variety of social phenomena and political reforms; it is

"both the product and symptom of quite profound changes in fiction and the fiction market in the mid-Victorian period" (Pykett The Sensation Novel 9). Pykett points out that

8 the plots and central preoccupations of sensation novels both embodied and,

to some extent, explored the hopes and fears of the Victorian middle classes.

They were generated by a range of interconnected anxieties arising from

contemporary social changes and the attendant challenging and questioning of

the social and moral status quo. (9-10)

Maybe the most important of these anxieties addressed the cultural ideal of the home and the family, with the ideally feminine "angel of the house" at its centre.

Sensation fiction questions the perception of the home as "sanctuary," a place of refuge from "threatening social upheavals" (Pykett The Sensation Novel 11); "behind the smooth facade of home and family, it was suggested, jealous passions and madness fester and threaten even the most comfortable of domestic situations" (Maunder xii). In a variety of sensation novels, including The Woman in White, Lady Audley 's Secret, and

East Lynne, the home itself is physically infiltrated and morally threatened by villainous characters and "alien intruders" (Trodd 97). However, what contemporary critics objected to most was the sensation novel's depiction of femininity and its exploitation of gender ideologies. Characters that embody the Victorian ideal of the passive, intrinsically good

"angel of the house" become not only endangered but also dangerous in sensation fiction.

Its many female authors and its dominant and transgressive heroines and villainesses suggest that the sensation novel comments on contemporary anxieties surrounding "the nature and status of respectable femininity and the domestic ideal"

(Pykett The Sensation Novel 10). Maunder states that

9 the (re)emergence of 'The Woman Question' in the 1860s, including

questions and viewpoints about female emancipation, about a woman's rights

to education and professional training and to earning and keeping her own

income and property, her ability to make her own decisions [...] were seen by

some as threats to the presumed stability of Victorian patriarchal culture,

(xvi)

Indeed, Hughes points out that "because, ideally, 'the life of women cannot well be described as a life of action,' their fictional prominence can only bring about a distortion of the accepted social order" (45). Hughes quotes Dallas, who wrote that "when women are thus putforward to lead the action of a plot, they must be urged into a false position.

To get vigorous action they are described as rushing into crime, and doing masculine deeds" (qtd. in Hughes 45). In sensation fiction, ideally angelic heroines such as Collins's

Laura Fairlie become the preferred victims of villainous conspiracies and therefore imply the potential dangers inherent in cultural ideals of passive and oppressed femininity.

Sensation villainesses, on the other hand, are anything but passive and angelic, and their beauty successfully hides (at least initially) their unconventionality and criminality.

Braddon's Lady Audley, for example, who is deserted by her husband, changes her name and commits bigamy before attempting murder twice. Braddon's Aurora Floyd elopes with her father's groom and, when she, too, re-marries bigamously, bribes him into silence. Wilkie Collins's Lydia Gwilt is a convicted murderess, forger, thief, and adulteress before the novel even starts. Clearly, sensation villainesses "represent a moral ambivalence rather than a moral certainty" (Hughes 44) and therefore challenge not only cultural ideals but also traditional notions of literary heroines. Kimberley Reynolds takes

10 this moral ambivalence as the beginning of a change in the literary representation of women, as it is "one of the major contestations of female roles operative in the nineteenth century" (99). Similarly, Virginia Morris states:

The women who shoot, poison, stab, steal, and blackmail their way through

the sensation fiction of the 1800s changed the nature of crime and criminals

in Victorian fiction. These women are more ambitiously independent and less

sexually repressed than traditional heroines, and their criminality is pervasive,

and even bizarre. [...]. But they also introduce the revolutionary idea that

women are capable of committing almost any crime to achieve their personal

goals. (88)

Contemporary critics were highly concerned about the sensation novel's representations of femininity. Margaret Oliphant complains that "it is painful to inquire where it is that all those stories if bigamy and seduction, those soidisant revelations if things that lie below the surface of life, come from" and that "what is held up to us as the true story of the feminine soul as it really exists underneath its conventional coverings, is a very fleshly and unlovely record" ("Sensation Novels" 174). Henry Mansel calls the genre "mere trash or something worse" (38) and Henrietta Keddie hopes that "we may not have the sorrow and shame of knowing that the reign of good Queen Victoria, our true woman and wife, will be identified in after generations with the reign of female criminals in English literature" (86). Many critics were concerned that sensation novels would corrupt the "sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanness" of the (realist) English novel

(Oliphant "Sensation Novels" 172-73) and the morality of their readers—impressionable female readers in particular. An unsigned review titled "Thackeray and Modern Fiction"

11 and published in 1863 emphasizes the superiority of realism to sensationalism and states that "if we compare the works of Thackeray or Dickens with those which at present win the favour of novel-readers, we cannot fail to be struck with the very marked degeneracy"

(77). Because sensation novels were "creating an unrealistically sordid, extreme portrayal of individuals and society which experience did not support" (Nemesvari Introduction

15), their characters, plots, and especially their immense commercial success were considered threatening. Sensation fiction, then, written merely for readers' amusement, was considered not only as thematically and aesthetically inferior, but also as dangerous.

However, sensation fiction's "extreme portrayal of individuals and society" often functioned to critique social issues, cultural ideals, and literary conventions. Therefore, sensation villainesses and heroines, with their improper behaviour and their unfeminine passions, were actually more realistic than many realist heroines and expose ideal femininity as a mere social construction. The depictions of unconventional heroines such as Becky Sharp, Lucy Audley, Aurora Floyd, and Lydia Gwilt, then, dissolve generic boundaries and challenge the firmly established distinctions between realism and sensationalism.

This thesis explores if literary heroines with sensational characteristics can be read as more realistic than traditional literary heroines precisely because they challenge cultural ideals of femininity and expose them as social constructions rather than reality.

Just like the moral threat embodied by Thackeray's Becky Sharp, the threat posed by most of the sensation villainesses of the 1860s is that they are "morally mixed" (Levine

"Realism Reconsidered" 236) and that their criminality is the result of social contexts and economic pressures rather than viciousness or moral degeneracy. Because of their

12 dominant role in the novels and readers' sympathies for them, the characters' status as heroines or villainesses is eternally ambiguous, emphasising the novels' implicit social criticism. By comparing Becky Sharp to her sensational "daughters" (Thomson 49) my thesis explores how the similarities between these criminal heroines dissolve the genre distinctions of realism and sensationalism.

My first chapter will focus on the exposure of ideal femininity as carefully staged performances by Becky Sharp and Braddon's Lucy Audley. Becky and Lucy put on a facade of virtue, exploiting their ideally feminine appearances and established gender roles, to overcome class barriers and to gain a "higher place in the world" (Thackeray

105). My second chapter will explore nineteenth-century debates about the nature and nurture of femininity through Vanity Fair and Braddon's Aurora Floyd, as Becky's rational calculations and Aurora's sexual passions are both equally unacceptable according to Victorian constructions of femininity. In my last chapter I will compare

Becky Sharp and Collins's Lydia Gwilt in terms of their criminality and in terms of their narrators' attitudes. As this thesis demonstrates, the genre boundaries of realism and sensationalism are not as stable as presumed by critics. Nineteenth-century anxieties about the genre of sensationalism and assumptions about firm distinctions between realism and sensationalism are closely tied to the belief that different genres appealed to different social classes (while melodrama was literature for lower-class readers, realism was associated with the middle-classes). Sensationalism was unsettling because it

"temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the Drawing Room" (Rae qtd. in Nemesvari Introduction 15). These beliefs imply that unstable genre boundaries result in blurred class and market distinctions. Furthermore,

13 unstable generic distinctions are connected to non-traditional literary depictions of women. As heroines with unconventional and sensational characteristics appear in realist novels such as Vanity Fair as well as in the sensation fiction of the 1860s, traditional definitions of realism and sensationalism are undermined. These heroines threaten the assumed "stability of Victorian patriarchal culture" (Maunder xvi) by exposing ideal femininity as a cultural construction rather than reality. Firmly established generic boundaries and distinctions between realism and sensationalism, then, like class distinctions, gender ideals, and literary conventions of heroine construction, emerge as crucial elements of highly artificial Victorian cultural ideologies.

14 CHAPTER 2

PERFORMING IDEAL FEMININITY : BECKY SHARP AND LUCY AUDLEY

The focus on women's economic dependence and the sensation novel's potential for social criticism is much more explicit in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley 's Secret than in Aurora Floyd and Collins's Armadale. Aurora, of course, is an heiress and is only confronted with her father's economic authority when she has to bribe her first husband into silence. And while Lydia's schemes are motivated by her poverty, she is essentially a professional criminal and Collins's social critique is targeted at the entire social system rather than at issues of women's legal protection. The main points of comparison between

Vanity Fair and Lady Audley's Secret, then, are the heroines' economic dependence, rooted in their lower-class origins, and the methods with which they attempt to rise from these origins. The many similarities between Thackeray and Braddon's heroines raise questions about the distinctions between realist and sensation fiction and about literary traditions of heroine construction. Their unconventionality, their eternally ambiguous status as heroine/villainess, makes Becky and Lucy morally threatening characters; however, at the same time they become more realistic than the ideal and traditional heroines of Vanity Fair and Lady Audley's Secret. Both Becky and Lucy have an ideally feminine appearance that hides a calculating and self-interested personality and that they use very effectively to deceive the men (and, less frequently, women) on whom they depend for their social advancement. Their ideal femininity is a constant, carefully- monitored performance that ultimately exposes the cultural myth of angelic femininity as

15 fraud. Even Becky and Lucy's advantageous marriages, the goal of every realist and sensational lower-class heroine, fail to secure the women's financial security. When Miss

Crawley disinherits Rawdon and when Lucy has to discover that George Talboys is still alive and threatens to expose her true identity, both women resort to increasingly desperate (and criminal) methods to achieve and, in Lucy's case, to maintain their financial stability and social respectability. The novels establish an intriguing ambiguity in their treatment of their female characters; Becky and Lucy are both the heroines and the villainesses of their novels. Rebecca is "famously a bad woman, selfish and endlessly designing, and rarely bothered by a concern for truth, morals, or the good of the community" (Bloom 2), but she is also "the happiest person in the book" (Van Ghent 7) and, despite her immorality and criminality, she "lives outside the punishment of poetic justice" (Levine "Literary Realism" 22). Similarly, Lucy is, on the one hand, "a fiend in human form if there ever was one" (Hughes 30). On the other hand, however, she is merely the victim of a patriarchal society, and her crimes are the results of a lack of legal protection for women as well as economic pressures. This ambiguity is emphasized throughout the novels by the attitudes of the intrusive narrators towards Becky and Lucy.

2.1 NARRATORS

While Thackeray's narrator is indulgently sympathetic to Becky's many schemes and misdeeds, he condemns her on more than one occasion. Throughout the novel the narrator openly admits that Becky turns most social situations into elaborate performances and that her schemes to establish her place in the world depend on lies and corruption: "in later days Miss Sharp would never have committed herself so far as to advance opinions, the untruth of which would have been so easily detected. But we must remember that she

16 is but nineteen as yet, unused to the art of deceiving" (Thackeray 23). Later, the narrator more explicitly classifies Becky as unsympathetic villainess, as he says: "But who could tell what was truth which came from those lips; or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?" (Thackeray 677) and describes her as "a woman without faith—or love—or character" (Thackeray 813). The classification of Becky as a mermaid (an image that reappears in all three sensation novels) indicates that the narrator (and, ultimately,

Thackeray) takes part in the Victorian "mythography of womanhood" (Auerbach Woman and Demon 8) that views women as either angels or demons (Auerbach Woman and

Demon 88). Nina Auerbach states that Thackeray's "stock euphemism for 'demon' is

'siren' or 'mermaid'" (90). Becky's depiction as a "siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling" (Thackeray 812), then, indicates her demonical and dangerous potential and implies the narrator's caution in treating her as the novel's heroine, despite her attractiveness. However, at the very end of the book the narrator's attitude becomes less ironic and less judgemental, and his comments once again emphasise his ever-ambiguous attitude. He simply states that Becky "has her enemies. Who has not?" (Thackeray 877), implying that Becky's schemes and crimes are indeed villainous, but ultimately not worse than the social hypocrisy of the other characters, even of the angelic Amelia.

Remarkably, Thackeray's realist narrator employs a quite sensational narrative technique for Becky's criminality. The narrator of Vanity Fair presents himself as a

"puppeteer" rather than a narrator, indicating that he is not only omniscient but also in control of the story's development. Indeed, he has access to his characters' thoughts and actions, as well as to additional stories to which he alludes but which he never reveals to the reader: "We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that

17 lightness and delicacy which the world demands" (Thackeray 814). When it comes to

Becky's possible adultery and murder, however, "all the moralizing puppeteer can do is to shake his head in wonderment at his creature and ask: 'was she guilty or not?'"

(Auerbach Romantic Imprisonment 70). Patrick Brantlinger argues that narrative wilfulness and caprice, meaning the omniscient narrators' deliberate omission of information about the characters' crimes, are a distinctive characteristic of sensation novels ("What is Sensational" 14). He states:

Without any consciously experimental intention, [Braddon] pushes third-

person omniscient narration to its logical limits. The narrator, even while

foreshadowing with fatalistic implications, ceases to convey all information

and begins to disguise much of it as hints, clues, hiatuses [...] the narrative

persona shares the knowledge of the crime with the criminal characters but

does not share it directly with the reader. (14-16)

For Brantlinger this "undermining of the narrator's credibility" embodies, similarly to the sensation novels' content itself, "a [structural manifestation of the genre's] challenge to bourgeois morality" (15). Similarly, Lyn Pykett points out that the sensation novel's narrative technique represents

a modification, in some cases quite radical, of the omniscient narrator's role

as the reader's guide, guardian, and friend. Without this helping hand, and in

the absence of all the facts of the case, the reader is left to make provisional

moral judgements as the narrative unfolds. The result is a considerable degree

of moral ambiguity. {The Sensation Novel 5)

18 This sensational narrative treatment of Thackeray's heroine indicates that Becky's status as heroine or villainess is so complex and that her "artifice" is "so flashingly mobile [...] that even her creator, the novel's God, is unable to impale her" (Auerbach Romantic

Imprisonment 70) or to determine her guilt.

In Lady Audley 's Secret, the narrator's "original sympathy for Lucy [gradually] gives way to open antagonism" (Morris 98). While she describes Lady Audley's angelic beauty and behaviour without narrative commentaries in the beginning of the novel, the narrator becomes increasingly moralistic and judgemental as the novel progresses. She states: "[Lucy] had strayed far away into a desolate labyrinth of guilt and treachery, terror and crime" (Braddon Audley 296) and concludes that Lucy's motives for this treachery are "the demons of Vanity, Selfishness, and Ambition" (297). The fact that Lucy exploits her appearance to act the role of an ideal woman is never as explicitly articulated as in

Vanity Fair. However, the narrator incorporates subtle linguistic clues, which indicate that Lucy's ideal femininity is a performance. When Lucy returns from the race track, for example, she is "wearied out by the exertion of fascinating half the county" (Braddon

Audley 55). Similarly, during a conversation with Robert Audley, Lucy looks like "a childish, helpless, babyfied little creature" and speaks "with that peculiar childish vivacity which seem[s] so natural to her" (Braddon Audley 138, emphasis added), but which is in reality a constant, carefully monitored, performance.

Similar to Vanity Fair, Braddon's narrator employs the dichotomy of the representation of female characters as angels and demons to emphasize her own, and the other characters', attitudes towards Lucy. Initially, Lucy is depicted as a "domestic angel

[...]" who "beautif[ies]" Audley Court (Montwieler 51). However, Lucy, like Becky, is

19 also associated with "sirens" and "mermaids," images that expose Lucy as a "beautiful

fiend" (Braddon Audley 71). The first indication for this characterization of Lady Audley

as demonic is her portrait, which presents Lucy as "by no means [...] agreeable" (Braddon

Audley 71). Appropriately, in this moment George Talboys recognizes not only that Lucy

is still alive, but also that she evidently is not the helpless "little wife" he believes he has

married. This realization, not yet revealed to the reader, retrospectively contributes to

Lucy's status as a villainess, as she transgresses her self-sacrificing angelic status and

becomes "a creature of transformations and mysterious interrelations, able to kill and to

regenerate [...], unfurling in secret her powers of mysterious [...] dispensation" (Auerbach

Woman and Demon 7). When the narrator states later in the novel that Lucy is an

"amber-haired siren" (282) and that her eyes show "a greenish light, such as might flash

from the changing hued orbs of an angry mermaid" (Braddon Audley 321), Lucy's

demonic potential becomes explicit. Here, similarly to Thackeray's use of the mermaid-

image, Braddon employs the comparison of Lucy to a mermaid to signal "the secrecy and

spiritual ambiguity of woman's [and therefore Lucy's] ascribed powers" (Auerbach

Woman and Demon 8). Both Becky and Lucy, then, are "mermaids" in that they "conceal

their power" and demonic potential by successfully performing the roles of angels.

However, while the image of the mermaid on the one hand classifies Lucy as villainess,

at the same time it refers to "the social restrictions that crippled woman's [and therefore

Lucy's] lives, [and the fact that] the physical weaknesses wished on them, were fearful

attempts to exorcise a mysterious strength" (Auerbach Woman and Demon 8). The

ambiguity of an image that can function to demonize female characters as well as to

imply social criticism mirrors Lucy's own role in the novel. Throughout the novel, many

20 of the narrator's condemnations can be read as commenting on Lady Audley's ambiguous status as villainess and as victim of a patriarchal society and its gender ideologies.

Lucy's confession counteracts the narrator's increasingly condemning attitude towards her and therefore complicates the readers' own moral judgements. The confession evokes compassion and empathy, and Lucy emerges as the victim of the cultural ideologies she has internalized. Hughes argues that

Lucy Audley may claim, with justice, that she is only doing what is expected

of her [both] as [an unmarried girl and, after her marriage, as] a Victorian

lady [...] She has an instinct for pleasing [...]. She traces her crimes, again

with some justice, to the universal and absolute necessity of finding a

husband. (126)

It is exactly this strategic exploitation of cultural ideals and of the "commonplace social realities" (Barickman 8) faced by (lower-class) women that makes both Becky and Lucy so threatening not only to the other characters in the novels, but also to their narrators and readers. By placing their main female characters in between the categories of heroine and villainess and of victim and offender both novels represent "elaborate play[s] with fictional female stereotypes" (Pykett Improper Feminine 88) and comment on the potential dangers of the "myth" (Hughes 126) of ideal femininity. Becky and Lucy consciously exploit their ideally feminine appearances and push established gender expectations to criminal extremes in order to transgress class boundaries and to achieve a

"higher place in the world" (Thackeray 105).

21 2.2 CLASS

Becky and Lucy's lower-class origins are important elements of their criminal developments. Acknowledging the limitations posed by their class and gender, Becky and

Lucy "maneuver [their] way[s] through the social landscape around [them] without

[attempting to alter] the landscape itself (Schroeder 30) and both women "undermine patriarchal authority simply by succeeding within the terms the culture sets for them"

(Schroeder 31). Similarly, Barickman argues that

when women like Becky Sharp [...] seize masculine powers, they do so within

the limits of customary female social roles [...]. When [Thackeray]

undercuts] the powerful female characters [he has] created, [his] narratives

reveal how threatening woman's power can be even when it is exercised

covertly within existing social roles. (8)

Indeed, Becky and Lucy exploit their ideally feminine appearances and employ their awareness of cultural expectations and gender ideologies in their attempts to transgress their "prisons" of "dismal [...] poverty" (Thackeray 19).

When Rebecca moves to Chiswick after her father's death she is confronted for the first time with the everyday rituals of upper-class young ladies: "the rigid formality of the place suffocated her: the prayers and the meals, the lessons and the walks, which were arranged with a conventual regularity, oppressed her almost beyond endurance; and she looked back to the freedom and the beggary of the old studio in Soho with [...] much regret" (Thackeray 18). Despite her contempt for these rituals, Becky's ambitions are awakened when she observes that one girl gives herself "airs because she is an earl's granddaughter" and that people "cringe and bow" to young ladies with fortune, even

22 though she herself is "a thousand times cleverer and more charming" than any of Miss

Pinkerton's upper-class students (Thackeray 19). Because "the happiness—the superior advantages of the young women round about her, g[i]ve Rebecca inexpressible pangs of envy" (Thackeray 19), Becky determines to take "advantage [...] of the means of study

[Miss Pinkerton's academy] offer[s] her" (Thackeray 19). Becky becomes the embodiment of a rising middle class for whom "money was displacing class status as the chief mark of success" (Levine "Literary Realism" 24). George Levine points out that even though she "[aspires] to the condition of the aristocracy, much of the narrative depends on the fact that Becky Sharp must make a living. She [first] tries to make it the old way, by marrying up [...]" ("Literary Realism" 23). Indeed, Becky ponders:

I have nothing to look for but what my own labour can bring me; and while

that little pink-faced chit Amelia, with not half my sense, has ten thousand

pounds and an establishment secure, poor Rebecca (and my figure is far better

than hers) has only herself and her own wits to trust to. Well, let us see if my

wits cannot provide me with an honourable maintenance, and if some day or

the other I cannot show Miss Amelia my real superiority over her. [...] it will

be a fine day when I can take my place above her in the world. (Thackeray

105)

The narrator adds that "in all her castles in the air, a husband was the principle inhabitant" (105). Therefore, Becky's ambitions to find a husband who will establish her place in the world depend on her "wits" to successfully sell her "good figure."

23 Lucy, like Becky, learns "what all respectable young women know: venturing into courtship and marriage [...] is the only path to social status open to her" (Schroeder 29).

Being told repeatedly that she is "beautiful—lovely—bewitching" (Braddon Audley 351), she begins to view her beauty as "a right divine, a boundless possession which was to be a set-off against all girlish short-comings" (Braddon Audley 296). Lucy internalizes cultural ideologies of femininity and, having no fortune herself, heavily relies on the economic value of her beauty: '"I learned that my ultimate fate in life depended on marriage, and I concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry better than any of them'" (Braddon Audley 350). Lucy's attitude is reinforced by her father, who also views Lucy's beauty as capital investment. He employs various

"shallow tricks to catch one of [the regiment at Wildernsea] for his pretty daughter" and is "ready to sell [her] to the highest bidder" (Braddon Audley 18). Just as she marries

Talboys for "financial reasons [and] her love for him is incidental and by her account contingent upon his prodigality" (Schroeder 33), she loves Sir Michael for lifting her

"into the sphere to which [her] ambition had pointed ever since [she] was a schoolgirl, and heard for the first time that [she] was pretty" (Braddon Audley 353).

According to the narrator, Lucy's ambitions make her "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" (Braddon Audley 299). However, while selfishness and cruelty are traditionally villainous characteristics, rebellion against her social situation and against her (financial) dependence is only villainous in an otherwise ideally passive heroine. As Schroeder points out, by leaving her son and her father Lucy merely "attempts what Talboys did: to abandon her miserable, constraining life, desert

24 the domestic sphere, and reinvent herself (35-36). Morris convincingly argues that it is mainly Lucy's "refusal to accept her plight as a poor daughter, an abandoned wife, or a penniless governess, when everything she has learned teaches her that a woman's success is measured by an affluent marriage" (95) that makes Lucy a threat to Sir Michael's family and, by extension, to society.

Both Becky and Lucy acknowledge that their immoral actions are motivated by their financial situations; they are convinced that they could be "good women" if they had

"five thousand a year" (Thackeray 532) or if "fate would have allowed [them] to be so"

(Braddon Audley 354). These considerations indicate both the realist and the sensation novel's potential for social criticism, as they depict Becky and Lucy's immorality and criminality as rooted in social contexts and economic pressures. The narrator of Vanity

Fair immediately articulates this potential for social criticism when he ponders: "And who knows but Rebecca was right in her speculations—and that it was only a question of money and fortune which made the difference between her and an honest woman?"

(Thackeray 532). The realist and the sensation heroine, then, react strikingly similarly to economic pressures and actively employ their knowledge of cultural ideologies and their physical appearances to further their social and financial advancement.

2.3 BEAUTY

The precondition for Becky and Lucy's successful performance of ideal femininity is their beauty—a beauty that challenges literary traditions of heroine construction in that it contradicts the women's characters. Jeanne Fahnestock establishes that when, by the mid- nineteenth century, "novelists begin to create irregular featured heroines who deviate from the standard of beauty [...] the characters are allowed imperfection, too. [...] The

25 heroine of irregular features is capable of irregular conduct" (330-31). Becky Sharp and, later, Braddon's Lady Audley take this development one step further, as their beauty, attractiveness, and childlike appearances become crucial elements of the facades that hide the women's secret ambitions and strong self-interests; they both are, as an 1866 review regretfully says of sensation villainesses, 'beautiful women of elegant figure and golden locks, whose fascinating exterior only hides [...] a pitiless heart.' (qtd. in Mitchell 74). In an 1867 article Margaret Oliphant, commenting on Braddon's sensation heroines, observes that "wicked women used to be brunettes long ago, now they are the daintiest, softest, prettiest of blonde creatures [...]" (qtd. in Schroeder 31). Similarly, Wilkie Collins points out that "the generally accepted tall, black-haired [...] type of Lady Macbeth was all a mistake. You may depend on it [...] that she was a rather small, fair-haired, blue- eyed woman" (qtd. in Ofek 103). Becky Sharp, then, foreshadows the development of the murdering blond sensation heroines, a literary type that is epitomized in Lady Audley.

In the first chapter of Vanity Fair, we encounter Rebecca as she leaves Miss

Pinkerton's academy for young ladies and as she flings a Johnson's dictionary, which she has received as a parting present, out of her coach's window and back into the academy's garden. Amelia is "flurried" at Becky's conduct and exclaims: "O Rebecca, Rebecca, for shame!" (Thackeray 14), but Becky declares "I'm no angel" (15), and immediately establishes herself as transgressing the nineteenth-century ideal of women as "angels of the house," as centers of morality and guardians of domesticity. At the same time,

Rebecca already refers to her own "moral ambiguity" (Hughes 44) and challenges traditional concepts of literary heroines when she states: "revenge may be wicked, but it is natural" (Thackeray 15). Rebecca's "irregular conduct" (Fahnestock 331), then, is

26 established even before her appearance is described, and her ideally feminine appearance is therefore somewhat unexpected.

Becky is described as "small and slight in person; pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes habitually cast down; when they looked up they were very large, odd, and attractive; so attractive that the Reverend Mr. Crisp [...] fell in love with Miss Sharp; being shot dead by a glance of her eyes [...]" (Thackeray 16). Already, Rebecca's appearance contradicts her character. Her blond hair classifies her as an "ideally feminine" and virtuous heroine, as Galia Ofek argues:

Part of the very foundation of the patriarchal Victorian culture consisted of an

acceptance of traditional gender characteristics—both anatomical and

behavioural— which differentiated [...] 'fallen' from virtuous women. [...]

Authors took part in the cultural discourse which perceived women's bodies

in general and hair in particular, as text or signs that could be readily read or

classified. (102)

Even though Becky's eyes are consciously "cast down," a physical indication of docility

(Curtis 81), the fact that Becky purposefully "fires" a glance at Mr. Crisp "all the way across Chiswick Church from the school-pew to the reading desk" (Thackeray 16) indicates that she is very aware of the effect her eyes have on men and that she intends to exploit this effect for her own purposes. When her glancing at Mr. Crisp causes a small scandal in Miss Pinkerton's academy, Becky pretends to be both ignorant and innocent.

She explains that "she ha[s] never exchanged a single word with Mr. Crisp, except under

[Miss Pinkerton's] own eyes on the two occasions when she ha[s] met him at tea"

27 (Thackeray 17), demonstrating her ability to see through the hypocrisy of social decorum and propriety as well as her inclinations to exploit them. Becky's child-like, and therefore innocent, looks hide that Becky "ha[s] been a woman since she was eight years old"

(Thackeray 17) and that she has plenty of experience in talking to "dun[s]," "coax[ing]" tradesmen, and listening to her father's "wild companions" (Thackeray 17).

Like Becky, Lady Audley is represented in at least "two fundamentally different ways: as a childlike beauty and as a powerful, self-interested woman" (Montwieler 49).

Lucy's ideal beauty consist of her "soft and melting blue eyes," her "slender throat and drooping head," and her "showering flaxen curls" (Braddon Audley 6). Unlike Becky, whose unconventional character is revealed at the very beginning of the novel, Braddon's heroine initially seems to follow literary traditions; to all appearances Lucy's character can be read in her face (Fahnestock 325). While Becky performs a variety of different roles for her changing audiences, Lucy continuously emphasizes her ideal beauty through her ideally angelic demeanour. Lucy is observed to be always "light-hearted, happy, and contented under any circumstances" whether she is teaching "the girls to play sonatas by

Beethoven and to paint from Nature after Creswick [or walking] through the dull, out-of- the-way village to the humble little church three times on Sunday" (Braddon Audley 5).

Both women realize that, without a dowry, finding an eligible husband involves not only the marketing of their beauty but also the winning of influential and respectable friends through targeted performances.

28 2.4 PERFORMING THE ROLES OF SINGLE WOMEN

Before their marriages, both Becky and Lucy successfully perform the roles of caring teachers, governesses, and nurses to earn a living and to make themselves indispensible to characters whose social status and influence can help them advance in their social climbing. Becky's intelligence, together with a good instinct for human nature, enables her to recognize what different characters expect from her. Depending on her relationship with and her dependence on the other characters, Becky willingly fulfills these expectations in order to achieve her goals. The initial chapters of Vanity Fair already show various characters' reactions towards Rebecca's character and behaviour. While

Mr. Crisp "actually propose[s] something like marriage in an intercepted note"

(Thackeray 16) to Becky and Miss Jemima, a gullible old lady, "believe[s] Rebecca to be the meekest creature in the world" (Thackeray 17), Miss Pinkerton refers to Becky as the

"viper" she has "nursed on [her] bosom" (Thackeray 20). Because a patriarchal society dictates Becky that she depends on men rather than women, Becky is more inclined to please various male characters; consequently, she is generally liked by men and disliked by women. As Nina Auerbach points out, Becky "is able to act all things for all men, turning herself into the women they want to see" (Romantic Imprisonment 70).

Accordingly, she "seduces" a number of men that will eventually be useful to her, from

Jos Sedley and George Osbourne, to Sir Pitt Crawley, Rawdon, General Tufto, and finally the Marquis of Steyne. Before their wedding Rawdon already regards Becky with

"admiration, [...] delight, [...] passion, [...] wonder, [...] unbound confidence, and frantic adoration" (Thackeray 190), and Sir Pitt Crawley confesses: "I can't git on without you. I

29 didn't see what it was till you went away. The house all goes wrong" (177), before offering her to become Lady Crawley.

Becky's performances for characters like Lord Steyne and Miss Crawley, whose life experience and higher social status seem to make them more challenging "victims" for

Becky's charms, differ from her other roles. In the company of these bored and slightly cynical upper-class characters, she is able to exhibit characteristics to her advantage that would be unacceptable in any other company. Even though she is a woman, Miss

Crawley's sympathy is crucial for Becky; she is not only wealthy but also inclined to leave her fortune to Rawdon. While Becky still pretends to be "dear, artless, tender­ hearted, affectionate, [and] incomprehensible" (184) and makes herself indispensible to the old lady during Miss Crawley's sickness when she adopts the role of a caring and brave nurse, she also effectively "caricaturefs]" people and "[tears] them to tatters, to the infinite amusement of [Miss Crawley]" (Thackeray 127). Miss Crawley, weary of conversations governed by conventions of propriety and infinitely bored by her family's attempts to ensure her inheritance by constantly flattering her, is amused by Becky's demonstration of her wittiness and maliciousness. Indeed, Miss Crawley declares that

Becky is "a perfect trouvaille" and repeatedly insists on Becky's company. Similarly,

Becky knows exactly how much flattery, flirtation, and how many obvious little

"feminine" lies will amuse Lord Steyne enough to regularly obtain money from him and to convince him to introduce her to "the very best of company" (Thackeray 598) at Gaunt

House.

Becky not only exploits her femininity throughout the novel, but she also cultivates her poverty and inferior social status in order to evoke compassion and guilt in the other

30 characters—emotions that invariably lead to financial or social support. Early in the novel, while she is a guest at the Sedley's house, Rebecca repeatedly alludes to herself as

"poor orphan" (Thackeray 32), which results in an invitation to extent her visit. Later, after she confesses to be married, she says: '"Have you all loved me, and been so kind to the poor orphan-deserted-girl, and am I to feel nothing? O my friends! Oh my benefactors! [...]' and she sank down in a chair so pathetically, that most of the audience present were perfectly melted with her sadness" (Thackeray 182). Becky attempts to manipulate Miss Crawley and Sir Pitt's emotions so that they will later forgive and financially support her marriage to Rawdon. Becky repeats this method in her letter to

Briggs, when she announces that Rawdon is her husband: "I leave the home where the poor orphan has ever met with kindness and affection. [...] Oh, my excellent and kind friend, intercede with my Rawdon's beloved aunt for him and the poor girl to whom all his noble race have shown such unparalleled affection" (Thackeray 196). Later, Becky extends this performance of herself as a poor and friendless orphan into a full-grown conspiracy theory that she uses to blame others for her misfortunes whenever she comes close to being exposed as guilty, improper, and unlawful. When she tries to convince Pitt

Crawley of her innocence when she is suspected of adultery, she states: "Before God, I am not guilty. I seem so. Everything is against me" (Thackeray 694), and after Jos's death, when his insurance company orders an examination of the case, Becky declares that "she [is] the object of an infamous conspiracy, which ha[s] been pursuing her all through life, and triumphed finally" (Thackeray 877). Overall, Becky's "career" as social climber effectively shows that social respectability is the result of a number of convincing performances. Ideal femininity, just like conventions of conversation and propriety,

31 becomes an act that can be learned, performed, and exploited. The narrator states: "If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue"

(Thackeray 598) and, much later, Becky remembers her youth as "happier days, when she was not innocent, but not found out" (Thackeray 824). Like Lucy, Becky is not bothered by her conscience, but by the threat of being exposed and by her tainted reputation.

While Becky's performances target specific characters, Lucy's consistent role as

"sweetest girl that ever lived" (Braddon Audley 7) makes her exceedingly popular in the entire community. She is praised by "the verger at church," "the vicar," "the porter from the railway station," and "her employer" alike (Braddon Audley 6). She tells Alicia: "I know I'm no better than the rest of the world, but I can't help it if Ympleasanter. It's constitutional" (Braddon A udley 104). Lucy's pleasantness, however, is not constitutional; it is the result of elaborate "habits of self-surveillance" that Lucy has developed in response to her fear of inheriting her mother's madness. Lucy has perfected

"that self-scrutiny enjoined upon every woman by prevailing ideas of the proper feminine" (Pykett Improper Feminine 90) and becomes an embodiment of ideal femininity (Hughes 126). Luce Irigaray, who defines femininity as mere social construct, states that "woman [...] borrows the disguise that she is required to assume. She mimes the role imposed upon her. The only thing really expected of her is that she maintain without fail, the circulation of pretence by enveloping herself in femininity" (qtd. in Curtis

77, emphasis in original). Lucy is the epitome of this pretence; she indeed "envelop[s] herself in femininity" just like she wraps her "fragile figure" in "heavy velvets and stiff rustling silks" (Braddon Audley 52), and both the metaphorical and the physical act of

"enveloping" result in a "masquerade" of ideal femininity. Lucy's performances and

32 masquerades allow her to embody a cultural ideal so unattainable and artificial that Lucy becomes a "[brilliant] parod[y]" (Hughes 127) of Victorian constructs of angelic femininity. Lucy has a seemingly natural "magic power of fascination by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Everyone loved, admired, and praised her" (Braddon Audley 6). However, Lucy's ability to "intoxicate with a smile" is only one of the many aspects of her performance and of a well-played role. Supported by her appearance and people's belief in the "myth" of women as angels (Hughes 126), Lucy approximates this ideal so closely that she "almost gets away with her masquerade"

(Hughes 127) and her treachery.

Like Becky, who reacts to accusations of murder and adultery by presenting herself as the victim of a conspiracy, Lucy retorts Robert's accusations by presenting herself as the victim of his paranoid imagination. After she has told Sir Michael that she thinks

Robert mad, she disguises her "outburst of natural grief as agitation caused by an encounter with Robert. Her agony "[shakes] her husband to the very soul. It bewilder[s] and terrifie[s] him. It reducefs] the strong intellect of the man to helpless confusion and complexity" (Braddon Audley 284). Lucy then argues: "[Robert] really seems to have taken some absurd notion into his head about me [...] he seems to connect me in some vague manner—which I cannot quite understand—with the disappearance of this Mr.

Talboys" (Braddon Audley 289). Becky and Lucy's strategies to present themselves as virtuous women indicate both women's preoccupation with their appearances as heroines and their awareness of how easily an ideal heroine can become a fallen villainess. Both

Becky and Lucy demonstrate that "affect [...] can be learned; interiority is another issue"

(Montwieler 49). However, their social success indicates that affect is all it takes to

33 embody ideal femininity and respectability in the worlds of both the realist and sensation novel.

Lucy, like Becky, appeals to men much more than to women. Lucy's husbands,

George Talboys and Sir Michael, both fall in love with Lucy instantly. Robert Audley, too, repeatedly notices that he is falling in love with his aunt before George Talboys disappears. Virginia Morris goes as far as suggesting that "young Audley's growing revulsion at and vindictiveness toward his aunt's behaviour are fuelled by his initial attraction to her, and the intensity of his hatred is set against the adoration he would have felt had she been as sweet and docile as she seemed" (95). Lucy's step-daughter Alicia, on the other hand, is, as Katherine Montwieler points out, "the real lady—who sports the blood of the Audleys in her veins— [and she] recognizes an impostor if she sees one"

(49). Alicia tells her father: "you think her sensitive because she has soft little white hands, and big blue eyes with long lashes, and all the manner of affected, fantastical ways, which you stupid men call fascinating" (Braddon, Audley 103). A little later, she confronts her cousin, saying: "I'm sorry to find you can only admire wax-dolls" (Braddon

Audley 56), suspecting that Lady Audley's appearance may only hide "the underside of the feminine ideal [...]" (Hughes 126). Similarly, Miss Tonks states: "Miss Graham told me nothing; she was too clever for that. She knew how to keep her own secrets, in spite of her innocent ways and her curly hair" (Braddon Audley 235-36). Both Alicia and Miss

Tonks know that Robert's assumption, based on literary traditions of heroine construction, that women are "merciful, or loving, or kind in proportion to their beauty and their grace" (Braddon Audley 214) is fundamentally unrealistic. They demonstrate a stereotypical feminine intuition in sensing that Lucy's behaviour is not as harmless and

34 natural as the infatuated male characters assume. In both novels, Becky and Lucy's female antagonists are more carefully aware of a possible inconsistency between "affect" and "interiority" (Montwieler 49) than the male characters. Rawdon Crawley, George

Talboys, and Michael Audley all learn rather slowly that their wives are not innocent and artless girls, but intelligent, self-interested, and cunning women, who do not hesitate to deceive even their doting husbands. And even though Braddon's narrator states: "I cannot believe that an honest man, however pure and single may be his mind, however trustful his nature, is ever really deceived by falsehood" (Braddon Audley 352), there is, despite a vague "sensation of regret and disappointment" (351) after his proposal, absolutely no indication that Sir Michael, or George Talboys, are able to tell that Lucy is not the

"embodiment of the feminine ideal" that she appears to be (Hughes 125). Apart from their lack of wifely devotion, another indication of Becky and Lucy's potential villainy is, mostly for other female characters but also for Rawdon Crawley, the narrators, and the contemporary audience, Becky and Lucy's attitudes towards motherhood.

2.5 PERFORMING THE ROLES OF WrvES AND MOTHERS

Soon after her wedding Becky realises that, having failed to eliminate economic pressures by "marrying up," she will once again have to employ her beauty and her wits to ensure that her family can "live on nothing for a [number of] year[s]." She tells

Rawdon confidently: "/'//make your fortune" (Thackeray 199) when Miss Crawley disinherits them, and Rawdon responds good-humouredly by saying: "You can do anything" (Thackeray 199). However, Becky realises that she can best achieve this goal by becoming a social success and that she has to make influential, if questionable, friends such as Lord Steyne. Of course, Becky relies on her status as Mrs. Crawley for her un-

35 chaperoned social excursions, and it is only because she is respectably married that

Becky can "go from party to party without a companion" (Thackeray 666) at least for a while. To dispel Rawdon's suspicions, Becky takes on the role of a loving and respectable wife. She "always ha[s] a kind smile" for Rawdon, but as soon as he falls asleep after dinner, Becky's face becomes "haggard, weary, and terrible" (Thackeray

667). To Becky, the role of a wife, and, later, a mother, is just another performance that will help her achieve the social respectability she so desperately desires. Contrary to popular ideologies, the role as Rawdon's wife and of little Rawdon's mother is no more and no less natural and fulfilling to Becky than the role of Sir Pitt's governess and Lord

Steyne's mistress. Nina Auerbach convincingly argues that "the men in her life are indistinguishable to [Becky]; acting with a profound grasp of the wife/whore question, she seems indifferent as to which selfhood she will finally adopt. [...] She sees money and position as the only real determinants of identity" {Romantic Imprisonment 20).

Similarly to Becky, Lucy only takes on the role of a happy and willingly self- sacrificing young wife as long as her husbands can offer her money and status. After

George's father disinherits the young couple, Lucy complains that George has "allied

[her] to poverty and misery" (Braddon Audley 352) and when she sees her role as Lady

Audley threatened by George's reappearance she does not hesitate to resort to drastic and criminal means to protect her position. However, initially Lucy "successfully performs all the duties of a conventional well-to-do wife, whether engaged in displaying her domestic graces at the tea table or anxiously nursing her husband" (Hughes 125). Resembling

Becky's lucrative cultivation of her poverty, Lady Audley "cultivates her childlikeness,

[...]" (Montwieler 49), an important aspect of ideal femininity, as she is very aware of the

36 effects her apparent innocence and helplessness has on both her husbands. The narrator states that Lucy's

very childishness had a charm which few could resist. The innocence and

candour of an infant beamed in Lady Audley's fair face, and shone out of her

large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of

fair ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her beauty the character of extreme

youth and freshness. [...] Her fragile figure, which she loved to dress in heavy

velvets and stiff rustling silks, till she looked like a child tricked out for a

masquerade, was as girlish as if she had but just left the nursery. All her

amusements were childish. (Braddon Audley 52)

Evidently, Lucy's performance of girlishness is highly effective. Both her first and her second husband preferably refer to Lucy as "my little wife," as "lovely little darling," and as "my dear girl" (Braddon 18, 128, 285), emphasizing their belief that Lucy depends on their guidance and protection. Lucy repeatedly supports this perception when she confesses "herself terribly frightened" of a thunder storm, skips through the halls of

Audley Court, and seats herself "upon a velvet covered footstool at Sir Michael's feet" to drop "her fair head" "upon her husband's knee" (Braddon Audley 282-83). Furthermore, she calls herself a "poor little woman" (Braddon Audley 119) in order to dispel Robert's suspicions and to reinforce that her appearance and childish behaviour are "[anatomical and behavioural] signs" that establish her as a virtuous woman (Ofek 102). Indeed, her childlike femininity so ideally complements Lucy's appearance that the narrator states:

"It was so natural to Lucy Audley to be childish, that no one would have wished to see her otherwise. It would have seemed as foolish to expect dignified reserve or womanly

37 gravity from this amber-haired siren, as to wish for rich basses in the clear treble of a skylark's song" (Braddon Audley 282-83). However, it is exactly Lucy's "natural" childishness, just like her natural "magic power of fascination," that is a performance and that comments on the complexities of socially accepted concepts of femininity and traditional constructions of literary heroines. Lyn Pykett argues that

Braddon not only shows Lady Audley adopting a series of different roles, but

also focuses on the way her heroine plays a number of different parts within

one apparently stable role. That of 'Lady Audley,' the respectable

gentlewoman, childbride of a wealthy baronet, is itself fraught with

contradictions; it is a kind of masquerade. By foregrounding Lady Audley's

impersonations of proper femininity, the novel does more than simply focus

attention on the feminine duplicity in which the entire narrative originates. It

also explores and exploits fears that the respectable ideal, or proper feminine,

may simply be a form of acting, just one role among other possible roles.

Even more seriously, the representation of Lady Audley, like that of some of

Braddon's other heroines, raises the spectre that femininity is itself

duplicitous, and that it involves deception and dissembling. {Improper

Feminine 90-91)

If femininity is indeed "duplicitous," then literary heroines/villainesses with sensational characteristics like Becky or Lucy approximate the nature of femininity more closely than traditional heroines such as Amelia Sedley or Clara Talboys. The threat of this implication becomes especially daunting in moments in which Becky and Lucy are most explicitly characterised as villainesses: in their roles as mothers.

38 Jeni Curtis asserts that 19 century texts frequently depict "the fulfillment of desire through motherhood [...] as being natural" (79). Citing William Acton, who states that

"love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions [many of the best mothers, wives, and managers of households] feel," (qtd. in Curtis 79) Curtis notes that

"central to Acton's construction of ideal womanhood was the belief in the innate desire for self-abnegation on the part of the women" (79) that expressed itself as maternal instinct. As has been argued above, both Becky and Lucy excel at performing a "desire for self-abnegation," but their schemes and goals indicate an exceptionally strong self- interest. This self-interest, together with the women's neglect of their children, indicates that Becky and Lucy are anything but ideal heroines. Correspondingly, Sally Mitchell points out that in sensation fiction "good women have children, bad women reject them" and that "the good mother was still a standard for the good woman" in the 1860s (84).

The women's attitude towards motherhood, then, is highly problematic. However, while

Becky's mothering is depicted as thoroughly heartless and villainous, Braddon's novel is, once more, ambiguous in its assessment of Lucy's mothering and in its classification of her as heroine or villainess.

Becky "scarcely ever [takes] notice" of her son (Thackeray 475). While she ignores little Rawdon at home, Becky uses him as a physical proof of her status as a respectable woman—a status which necessarily includes being a wife and mother. When Becky takes her son to the park, "gentlemen on splendid prancing horses c[o]me up, and [smile], and

[talk] with her. How her eyes [beam] upon all of them!" (Thackeray 477). Rawdon's presence sanctions Becky's interactions with these "gentlemen"; the display of her motherhood justifies interactions that might otherwise be considered improper. Similarly,

39 Becky experiences that Rawdon is a means to bond with respectable upper-class women such as Lady Jane and Amelia. After Lady Jane gives "Rebecca a bank note, begging her to buy a present with it for her little nephew" (Thackeray 532), Becky realizes that her role as mother has the potential to be very profitable if she exploits it carefully.

Accordingly, when Lady Jane states: "How happy you will be to see your darling little boy again," Becky enthusiastically answers: "Oh, so happy! [...], and [throws] up the green eyes" (Thackeray 534). On her next visit to Queen's Crawley, she takes her son with her in order to perform her role as a doting mother more convincingly. "Seeing that tenderness [is] the fashion" Becky "call[s] Rawdon to her one evening, and stoop[s] down and kisse[s] him in presence of all the ladies" (Thackeray 572). And when Becky tells Amelia that Rawdon is "a perfect angel, who adore[s] his mother" but that "the ruffians tore him shrieking out of her arms, and have never allowed him to see her"

(Thackeray 838), Amelia completely forgets what Becky has done to her in Brussels.

While Becky cannot maintain her role as doting mother, her performance gains her temporary friendships and rewards. Lady Jane introduces Becky at Court and Amelia gives Becky a room in her house in Germany and re-acquaints her with Jos. Ultimately, however, Becky's careless, loveless, and even violent behaviour towards her son is one of her most villainous traits. The narrator rebukes her behaviour by stating: "mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children; and here was one who was worshipping a stone!" (478). Contemporary critics agreed with the narrator's critique. In his 1848 review of Vanity Fair, Charles Astor Bristed takes a strong offence at Becky's neglect of her child; it "is the most hateful [characteristic of Becky]: in our simplicity we hope it is an exaggeration. That a woman should be utterly regardless of her offspring

40 seems an impossibility—in this country [America], we are proud to say, it is an impossibility" (72). Furthermore, little Rawdon himself exposes Rebecca's true emotions to the company at Queen's Crawley when he states that he "dine[s] in the kitchen when

[he is] at home" (Thackeray 567) and exclaims "You never kiss me at home, mamma"

(Thackeray 572), which results in "general silence and consternation" as well as a "rather

[...] chill" relationship with Lady Jane.

Lucy's loveless mothering, likewise an indication of her villainous status, is also exposed by her son. When Robert visits Mr. Maldon at Southampton, Georgey states:

"Mama was always crying. I didn't like mamma [...] and she didn't like me" (Braddon

Audley 93). Lucy herself says that after her baby was born "the crisis which had been fatal to [her] mother arose in her [...] [she] escaped; but [she] was more irritable perhaps after [her] recovery; less inclined to fight the hard battle of the world. [...] [She] did not love the child; for he had been left a burden upon [her] hands" (Braddon Audley 352-53).

However, unlike Becky, Lucy's attitude towards motherhood seems to be rooted in her social situation rather than her character. Her safekeeping of her baby's shoe indicates a maternal sentimentality that Becky never exhibits. Furthermore, Georgey has thoroughly positive memories of "the pretty lady; the lady that was dressed so fine, and that gave me my gold watch" (Braddon Audley 92), indicating not only that Lucy has visited him, but also that she can be a better mother when she is financially stable, even though separated from her child, than when she lives with her child in poverty and misery. Once again, the novel's potential for social criticism is tied to its heroine's ambiguous status of victim or villainess. Indulgent and devoted motherhood, then, like benevolence and ideal femininity, becomes not a natural feminine attribute but a privilege of the upper-classes

41 that is highly dependent on financial security. In this reading, Lucy is once more the victim of a patriarchal society that labels her as villainess for leaving her child to make a living after she has been abandoned by her husband "with no protector but a weak, tipsy father and with a child to support" (Braddon Audley 353).

The many similarities between Thackeray's realist heroine and Braddon's sensation heroine raise questions about the strict distinctions between realist and sensation fiction.

If Becky Sharp successfully advances in the world of a realist novel with the same methods as the sensational Lucy Audley, assumptions about realist fiction as following

"the subtle workings of human nature" ("Thackeray and Modern Fiction" 77) and sensation fiction as being morally degenerate (78) become questionable. Furthermore, if sensation fiction is merely "written to amuse" ("Thackeray and Modern Fiction" 80) while realist novels are intended to "instruct the mind, or purify the heart" (81), Becky

Sharp becomes a more morally threatening character than Lucy Audley: not only does she charm her narrator, various other characters, and her readers, but she also, unlike

Lucy, remains unpunished for her immoral and criminal actions by the end of Vanity

Fair. The novels' critiques of cultural gender ideologies as fraud through their depictions of Becky and Lucy's exploitations of these ideologies question literary traditions of heroine constructions. Both the realist and the sensation novel indicate that ideally feminine attributes can be learned and that affect can be performed. The sensational aspects of both Becky and Lucy, their ever-ambiguous status as both heroines and villainesses, become more representative, more realistic, than their antagonists Amelia and Clara, who are represented according to traditional constructions of literary heroines.

42 CHAPTER 3

"UNNATURAL HEROINES": BECKY SHARP AND AURORA FLOYD

Aurora Floyd represents a different type of sensation heroine than Lucy Audley.

While Lucy is initially perceived to be an angel of the house, she is soon discovered to be an "adventuress" (Mitchell 76), a term Thackeray uses for Becky as well. Aurora, black- haired, tall and "intoxicating" (Braddon Floyd 33), seems to be a femme fatale at the start of the novel. The only child of the indulgent banker Archibald Floyd, Aurora is "spoiled," too capricious, and too "horsey" to be a proper lady. Her marriage to her father's groom is inappropriate in that it is as much a transgression of class boundaries as it is a

spontaneous and sexually motivated action. Aurora's status as bigamous villainess, however, is accidental and the narrator is unwaveringly supportive of her protagonist— while Becky, Lucy, and Lydia purposefully commit adultery, bigamy, and murder,

Aurora is convinced that her first husband is dead when she marries John Mellish.

Therefore, Aurora has to undergo a successful process of learning how to control her passions and of being "domesticated [and] tamed" (Curtis 85) before she can have her happy ending and become the heroine of Braddon's story. At the end of the novel Aurora

emerges as an angel of the house; the last image Braddon presents of Aurora shows her

"bending over the cradle of her first-born" (Braddon Floyd 459). Her successful domestication is facilitated by the fact that Aurora is born with all the social respectability and fortune that Becky and Lucy desire. Her status as an heiress provides her with eligible offers of marriage as well as social respectability, and consequently she is never tempted to embark on or continue a "quest for money" (Levine "Literary

43 Realism" 23) that requires desperate (and immoral) means. Therefore, Braddon's Aurora

Floyd shifts its focus from women's economic dependence to women's sexuality and desire. The novel's social criticism is less general than in Lady Audley's Secret and

Armadale. Like Vanity Fair, Aurora Floyd participates in the debate surrounding the nature of femininity and, once again, the realism and moral impact of literary heroines by contrasting two opposing heroines. Throughout the novel Aurora is contrasted by her cousin Lucy, who is ideally blond and blue-eyed and who resembles Thackeray's Amelia in her docile passivity. Compared to their feminine antagonists, then, Becky's exploitation of her sexuality and Aurora's passionate impulsiveness are, despite the fact that the women embody opposing extremes of femininity, equally unacceptable to the characters surrounding them and to contemporary literary reviewers. This unacceptable femininity raises questions about the very nature of femininity. As both Becky and

Aurora are motherless while Amelia and Lucy grow up under the constant supervision of corrective mothers, the novels seem to suggest that proper femininity is rooted in education rather than in natural predispositions. Interestingly, both Thackeray and

Braddon's narrators claim that their formal and thematic transgressions of literary conventions make their stories more authentic and their novels more realistic. A comparison of Becky and Aurora, therefore, once again challenges conventional genre distinctions and questions the realism of literary traditions of heroine construction.

3.1 CLAIMING REALISM

The narrators of Vanity Fair and Aurora Floyd are explicitly conscious of conventions and expectations that define the genre of the novel. Both narrators repeatedly comment on their transgressions of these conventions and self-consciously mock their

44 audiences' expectations. Both narrators state that, even though conventionally novels conclude with the happy marriage of the hero and heroine, their stories—like life—do not end on this note. Thackeray's narrator states that

as his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelists generally

drops the curtain, as if the drama were over then: the doubts and struggles of

life ended: as if, once landed in the marriage country, all were green and

pleasant there: and wife and husband had nothing but to link each other's

arms together and wander gently downwards toward old age in happy and

perfect fruition. (Thackeray 319)

Similarly, Braddon's narrator points out that

now my two heroines being married, the reader versed in the physiology of

novel writing may conclude that my story is done, that the green curtain is

ready to fall upon the last act of the play, and that I have nothing more to do

than to entreat indulgence for the shortcomings of the performance and the

performers. Yet, after all, does the business of real lifedrama always end upon

the altar steps? [...] Does man cease to be, to do, and to suffer when he gets

married? (Braddon Floyd 163)

Interestingly, both the realist and the sensational narrator claim that their depiction of married life and its problems qualifies them as realists. By stating that the unconventional plot developments of their stories are more realistic than conventional

endings, the narrators argue, by extension, that their unconventional heroines are realistic as well. The novelists establish traditional endings and conventions as artificial

45 and unrealistic, and anticipate reviews that criticize the novel's "unnatural" heroines.

The narrators' implied response is that their heroines are only perceived as "unnatural" because literary tradition is concerned with cultural ideologies of femininity rather than reality.

3.2 NOVELS AND EDUCATION

The claim that literary realism reflects cultural ideologies is supported by the

Victorian idea, expressed by various reviews, that novels should be morally educative.

Vanity Fair and Aurora Floyd become themselves transgressive in that they fail to provide their (female) readers with heroines that can function as role models. Becky's calculating rationality and Aurora's passionate sexuality are not only threatening to the other characters in Vanity Fair and Aurora Floyd, but also to the novels' audience— young, impressionable female readers in particular. Numerous literary reviews show that novels were attributed a similar pedagogical authority as conduct books. In an 1883 article in the Saturday Review, the anonymous writer points out that

the heroine of fiction is, let us remember, the ideal woman of the period, the

mould of form with which our young women naturally compare themselves.

Her example will outweigh, with them, all the exhortations of their guardians,

and for them, therefore, there is the pleasant prospect of seeing the attractive

qualities described, reproduced in their daughters and wards, (qtd. in

Reynolds 105)

Trollope, too, argues that "the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teachings chiefly from the novels they read" (qtd. in Brantlinger

46 Reading Lesson 122) and, in his Autobiography, asks "can anyone by search through the works of the six English novelists I have named [which include Thackeray], find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest [...]? When [...] women [in their pages have been described] as immodest, have they not ever been punished?" (186).

However, Becky is of course immodest and Thackeray's narrator, aware of the social expectations for novels, self-consciously comments on the depiction of modesty in literature when he claims that "a polite public will [not] bear to read an authentic description of vice" and that Becky therefore "has been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner" (Thackeray 812). The novel itself, then, by keeping "everything above the water line [...] proper, agreeable, and decorous"

(Thackeray 812-13) while introducing a highly improper heroine, echoes Becky's own tactic of displaying "false" modesty. Vanity Fair, like Braddon's sensation novels, structurally and thematically exploits the reading public's "anxiety to discriminate between 'false' virtue and the 'true,' [which] persistently troubles the discourse of female modesty" (Yeazell 10). Preferably, novels should promote "true" virtue and a novelist should "show, as he carries on his tale, that his [immodest heroines] will be dishonoured in the estimation of all readers by his or her vices" (Trollope 187).

Becky, as a heroine who prostitutes herself for power, money, and social respectability is, of course, not a desirable role model. Margaret Oliphant reminds her readers that "the cleverness of Becky and the silliness of Amelia were very favourite objects of reprobation to virtuous critics" ("Sensation Novels" 185), indicating that

"critics were disconcerted because [Becky] is more interesting than her insipid, clinging counterpart" (Maunder 189). George Henry Lewes points out that "it is very strange that

47 the reader has a sort of liking for [Becky] in spite of his better knowledge" (756), echoing

Trollope's concern that there is an inherent moral danger in a female character who is

"clever, beautiful, attractive—so as to make men love her and women almost envy her—

[but who is] also heartless, unfeminine, and ambitious of evil grandeur" (186). Becky is neither an ideally feminine nor a moral character and her attractiveness makes the novel's moral message accordingly problematic. As Van Ghent points out,

there is nothing [in Vanity Fair] to suggest that to be 'honest and humble' can

possibly bring happiness. From Becky's delighted exercise in being alive, we

can learn nothing about the happiness to be derived from humble dutifulness.

On the other hand, from Amelia's humble dutifulness we can learn nothing

that convinces us doctrinally that happiness lies in such a way of life. (7)

Vanity Fair, like most sensation novels, fails to offer its heroine as an example of ideal femininity with which its young female readers are encouraged to identify. Aurora Floyd differs from these novels in that Aurora, freed from the suspicion of murder, legally married to John Mellish, and reformed by motherhood, has become an excellent role model by the end of Braddon's novel. Vanity Fair, then, has a very different moral message than Aurora Floyd. Aurora's reform from an unruly girl into an ideal wife distinguishes Aurora's initial sexual villainy from more strategically criminal villainesses, such as Becky, Lucy Audley, and Lydia Gwilt. By the end of Aurora Floyd the novel has established Aurora as well as her cousin Lucy as two heroines who doubtlessly have educational potential. Both Aurora and Lucy are happily and respectably married and have just become mothers; they both are contently confined to their "natural" domestic sphere. However, despite—and partly because of—Aurora's

48 reformation, reviewers were outraged by Aurora's deviant femininity and by Braddon's presentation of a "femme fatale as heroine" (Hughes 128).

3.3 "UNNATURAL" HEROINES

Both Becky and Aurora were characterized as "unnatural" by contemporary reviewers. Interestingly, reviewers used the same classification to criticise two radically different characters. The realistic and rational Becky and the sensational and passionate

Aurora embody opposite transgressions of the feminine ideal; however, by the standards of Victorian gender ideology they are both equally unacceptable as literary heroines.

In his 1848 review of Vanity Fair Lewes points out that "Becky has neither affections, nor passions, nor principles. She uses men as chessmen—and is not checkmated at last." (756). Indeed, Becky's lack of emotion and her inability to love make Becky essentially "unfeminine," as love, compassion, and morality, were values that were considered to be guarded and epitomized by women—if not in reality then in literature. Becky's sympathies only take the extent of liking and esteeming: she "like[s]

Amelia rather than otherwise" (Thackeray 284), "admirefs] Dobbin" for his "noble heart"

(Thackeray 853) and is "fond of her husband" (Thackeray 478). In her 1848 review of

Vanity Fair Elizabeth Rigby argues that Becky "is not one of us" because she "came into this world without the customary letters of credit upon those two great bankers of humanity, 'Heart and Conscience'" (81). But while Rigby concludes that Becky's un- human (and decidedly unfeminine) inability to love leaves her readers indifferent towards her wickedness, Becky's heartlessness actually heightens the threat that her exploitation of her sexuality poses. Helsinger explains that in nineteenth-century theories about

49 sexuality, feminine sexual desire was almost always associated with romantic love, marriage, and the desire for motherhood and that it was "society's last, best hope that woman does not want sex" (58). The fact that Becky consciously stages and exploits her sexuality not only before she is married but also after her wedding for men other than her husband, points to a feminine interest in sexuality that has nothing to do with romantic love, motherhood, or even physical desire, but everything with power and "ambitions of evil grandeur" (Trollope 186).

Unlike Becky, Aurora's transgression of the "proper feminine" consists of her inclination to love too passionately and too sexually. Even Aurora's appearance is that of a conventional femme fatale. Her blue-black hair and black eyes are appropriately paired with the potential for sexual passion, physical violence, and a "quasi masculine self- worth" that enables Aurora to "practice [...] male dominance" and to completely subordinate her suitors' wills to hers (Edwards "Introduction" xviii). To Talbot Bulstrode with "his construction of womanhood on purely conventional grounds" (Curtis 84),

Aurora is "like Mrs. Nisbett [...]; like Cleopatra [...]; like Nell Gwynne [...]; like Lola

Montes [...]; she is like Charlotte Corday with the knife in her hand, standing behind the friend of the people in his bath; she is like everything that is beautiful and strange, and wicked and unwomanly, and bewitching" (Braddon Floyd 47). Bulstrode's comparison of

Aurora with a series of famous actresses, dancers, bigamists, and murderesses not only foreshadows Aurora's own crimes of bigamy and bribery, but also represents Aurora "as very obviously transgressing the boundaries of the proper feminine" (Pykett Improper

Feminine 88). This transgression is implied in Aurora's interest in horses and her passion

50 for riding—a sport that in itself represented "sexual permissiveness" (Nemesvari

Introduction 21).

In response to the unconventional heroine of Aurora Floyd, Margaret Oliphant states that "horsey is "akin to immoral" ("Sensation Novels" 185) and articulates the assumption that riding literary heroines, and especially Aurora Floyd, represent a

"challenge to the Victorian womanly ideal" and a "major violation of feminine mores"

(Nemesvari Introduction 19-20), as their love for horses and riding implies their characters' capacity for sexual passion and personalities that are governed by potentially dangerous physical urges rather than by social conventions. Richard Nemesvari points out that the association of riding and sexuality was so conventional and familiar to a contemporary audience that "when Aurora is absent with the handsome young groom from 2 p.m. to sunset, and returns her thorough-bred chestnut 'with heaving and foam- flecked sides,' Victorian readers would have understood clearly why the heroine is hurriedly sent off to school" (Introduction 21).

However, apart from signifying a woman's sexuality, the way they treat animals in general and horses in particular also mirrors Becky and Aurora's characters. While Becky does not rejoice in horses the way Aurora does, she displays her resolution and willpower in her riding. Becky has a way of riding "that kicking mare at Queen's Crawley"

(Thackeray 190) that mirrors the power she gains over the male characters through her rational schemes and practical considerations. Accordingly, Rawdon concludes that

Becky is "fit to be Commander-in-Chief, or Archbishop of Canterbury" (Thackeray 190).

Aurora, on the other hand, tames horses with caresses and softly-spoken words—the evidence for her too passionate emotionality. Therefore, the women's handling of animals

51 reflects the opposing manifestations of their femininity. However, while Becky's treatment of the mare is consistent with Rawdon's perception of her as a powerful and highly strategic woman, Talbot Bulstrode views Aurora's talent in handling animals as unfeminine and potentially dangerous but, paradoxically, also as an indication that

Aurora is a "good, generous-hearted creature" (Braddon Floyd 49). Talbot Bulstrode ponders that

if this terrible woman, with her unfeminine tastes and mysterious

propensities, were mean, or cowardly, or false, or impure, I do not think my

thorough-breds would let her hands caress their velvet nostrils: the dog would

snarl, and the horses would bite, as such animals used to do in those remote

old days when they recognized witchcraft and evil spirits, and were convulsed

by the presence of the uncanny. (Braddon Floyd 49)

Bulstrode might despise Aurora's "horseyness" and see her as a dangerous "siren"

(Braddon Floyd 46), but he also realizes Aurora's innate goodness and, therefore, her potential to be reformed into a modest and respectable woman. This ambiguous interpretation of Aurora's passion for horses comments on contemporary debates about the "nature" of femininity. Aurora's passions, indicated by her interest in horses, with both their positive and negative connotations, may well be an integral part of her individual "nature," but these passions dominate Aurora's character in a way that is decidedly improper and "unnatural."

In response to the scene in which Aurora brutally horse-whips "the Softy" Steeve

Hargraves, W. Fraser Rae's 1865 review in the North British Reviewer states in that

52 "from a lady novelist we naturally expect to have portraits of women which shall not be wholly untrue to nature. [...] The following example will prove that Aurora Floyd is [...] wanting in the traits which constitute a true woman" (587). Aurora's status as "true woman" is an issue that is repeatedly problematized and never fully resolved in the novel itself. Jeni Curtis comments on how ambiguously the novel depicts the "nature" of femininity and states that

in raising questions of what is natural and unnatural in women, the text

exposes the way in which the oppositional construction of femininity is just

that—a construction. According to different perspectives in the text, Aurora is

both natural and unnatural, open and readable, and yet secretive and

transgressive. (80-81)

Curtis concludes that "it would appear, paradoxically, that the most 'natural' Aurora is the one who, at the end, has been suitably constrained and conventionalized, no depths and all surface, no longer 'an original' but quiet and docile, 'in the safe harbour of a happy home,' 'the happy wife, secure in her own stronghold of love and confidence'"

(86).

According to the Victorian cultural ideal of angelic femininity, a "true" woman is defined by her innate and instinctive modesty and moral purity. The ideally modest woman occupies "a mystified space between, a space largely defined by the repudiation of those imagined opposites [of the prude and the coquette]" (Yeazell 6). However, even in the early nineteenth century, before literature began to react "to the unfixing of gender categories which accompanied the challenges of reformers and feminists" (Pykett

53 Improper Feminine 10), the "very existence" of conduct books challenged the idea of innate and instinctive modesty (Yeazell 5). Paradoxically, these conduct books implied that feminine "'instinct' must be elaborately codified and endlessly discussed: women's

'natural' modesty must be strenuously cultivated" (Yeazell 5). Both Thackeray's Vanity

Fair and Braddon's Aurora Floyd participate in this debate about natural and instilled femininity. While Thackeray exposes proper femininity as the result of education rather than instinct, Aurora's innate goodness and potential for "true" modesty are merely overshadowed by her unrestrained passions. Braddon therefore complicates the debate about the nature of femininity by associating proper femininity with nature as well as nurture. Furthermore, literary characters like Becky, Lady Audley, and Lydia Gwilt, who turn the ideal of innate modesty into highly immodest performances, and Aurora, whose unrestrained nature contains neither modesty nor sexual prudery, challenge the cultural ideal. Becky, Lucy, and Lydia's "production[s] of [...] affect [manifest] the Victorian concern with representation" (Montwieler 49) and indicate that "natural" femininity and

"true" modesty can easily be performed and exploited. These women's true "nature," then, is everything but moderate and modest; all four characters are "unnatural" and

"unfeminine" in that they are either too rational or too passionate. Becky's impersonation of modesty and her exploitation of her sexuality, as well as Aurora's improper and sexually motivated marriage to James Conyers show that both characters lack feminine instincts; their "nature" is somewhat "unnatural." Becky's exploitation of her sexuality is purely rational while Aurora's relationship with James Conyers is purely emotional; however, both characters become, at least temporarily, fallen women.

54 Deborah Anna Logan argues that "the prominence of the period's middle-class sexual ideology, defined in terms of angels, madonnas, and magdalens, even when its inadequacy to experience was evident, manifests itself in a powerful code of ethics that categorizes deviancy in any form (this includes all women of other classes and races) as fallenness" (9). Both the possibly adulterous Becky and the unintentionally bigamous

Aurora are sexually deviant enough to be considered fallen women. Logan quotes the

Victorian-prostitution theorist William Acton, who states that

many forcible divines and moralists have maintained that all illicit intercourse

is prostitution, and that this word is as justly applicable as those of

'fornication' and 'whoredom' to the female who, whether for hire or not,

voluntarily surrenders her virtue. According to them, her first offence is as

much an act of prostitution as its repetition, (qtd. in Logan 9)

Even if Becky's guilt is never proven, the scene in which Rawdon surprises his wife with

Lord Steyne is highly sexually suggestive and marks Becky as fallen woman, if not as prostitute: Lord Steyne is "hanging over the sofa on which Becky [sits]" and Becky

displays all her physical charms; she is "in a brilliant full toilette, her arms and all her fingers sparkling with bracelets and rings; and the brilliants on her breast which Steyne had given her" (Thackeray 675). And even though Aurora is not only systematically

seduced by her first husband but also redeemed at the end of the novel, the heroines of

Thackeray and Braddon's novels undeniably have sexual relationships with men to whom they are not legally married. Indeed, Becky's possible adultery and Aurora's bigamous marriage can be aligned. Margaret Oliphant points out that bigamy is nothing but a legalised form of adultery; she states that bigamy "goes against the seventh

55 commandment no doubt, but it does so in a legitimate sort of way, and is an invention which could only have been possible to an Englishwoman knowing the attraction of impropriety, and yet loving the shelter of law" ("Sensation Novels" 178).

However, even if Aurora is tempted by "the attraction of impropriety," her reaction when she realizes that she has committed bigamy reinforces that she is an accidental villainess. She utters "a gasping cry, more terrible to hear than the shrillest scream that ever came from the throat of woman in all the long history of womanly distress," faints, and is "hysterical throughout the remainder of the day" (Braddon Floyd

172). Similarly to her reaction when Talbot Bulstrode breaks off the engagement because of Aurora's refusal to reveal her secret to him, James Conyers, her "secret humiliation"

(Braddon Floyd 352), is the one subject about which the otherwise so eloquent Aurora cannot speak. While she articulates all her other emotions, in the instances James Conyers and her first marriage are mentioned, Aurora resembles her docile and "naturally modest" cousin Lucy and expresses her emotional distress merely through her physical reactions.

As Becky never displays physical indications of distress or emotions while advancing in her criminal career, Aurora's difficulties to handle her "crimes" of bigamy and deviant sexuality without displaying her true emotions through flushed cheeks and flashing eyes

(Braddon Floyd 147-48) indicate that Aurora has the potential to be reformed into a modest woman. If she can learn to restrain her spontaneity and the intensity of her emotions, her already instinctively modest body language will reinforce her newly acquired emotional modesty. The fact that, after the birth of her son, Aurora is "a shade less defiantly bright, perhaps, but unspeakably beautiful and tender" (Braddon Floyd 459) indicates that her improper sexual passions, her "physical, bodily needs" finally have

56 been replaced with "a [natural] desire for maternity" (Curtis 79). Throughout the novel,

Aurora's initially 'unnatural' femininity is, like Becky's, repeatedly attributed to her motherlessness. In addition to absences of the heroines' mothers, both Becky and

Aurora's mother were actresses and dancers—professions that were at best questionable and that refer to contemporary speculations about the possibility that improper femininity might be genetic.

3.4 ABSENT MOTHERS

Logan argues that Victorian middle-class ideology included "the assumption that motherless girls are destined to fall. [...] To the Victorian reading public, the primary significance of the absent mother concerns her inability to foster proper moral growth during her daughters' sexual rites of passage, a device employed by many writers to exonerate their fallen heroines" (6-7). This assumption is confirmed by the novels' own emphasis on their heroines' motherlessness, as well as by contemporary reviews. In her

1867 article "Sensation Novels," Oliphant, in response to various sensation novels, observes that

ill-brought-up, motherless girls, left to grow anyhow, out of all feminine

guardianship, have became [sic] the ideal of the novelist. There is this

advantage in them, that benevolent female readers have the resource of saying

'Remember she had no mother,' when the heroine falls into an unusual lapse

from feminine traditions. (179-80)

Thackeray's narrator comes to a similar conclusion, namely that Becky's scheming and somewhat shameless attempts to find a husband have to be excused to a certain extent by

57 her status as an orphan. Commenting implicitly on the literary conventions criticised by

Oliphant he states:

If Miss Rebecca Sharp had determined in her heart upon making the

conquest of this big beau [Jos Sedley], I don't think, ladies, we have any right

to blame her; for though the task of husband-hunting is generally, and with

becoming modesty, entrusted by young persons to their mammas, recollect

that Miss Sharp had no kind parent to arrange these delicate matters.

(Thackeray 26)

However, Becky's lack of a mother also leaves her free of maternal control, a control that

Mrs. Sedley and Mrs. Alexander Floyd exercise rigorously over their daughters. Even more, Becky uses her absent mother as a way to elevate her own social status (she pretends to be derived from the French aristocracy) and to make herself interesting to other characters. Becky cultivates her French heritage and invents a past for herself, carefully reinventing her mother's story to suit her own needs. Becky claims that her mother "was a Montmorency [...] Of course she [does] not say that her mother had been on the stage; it would have shocked Mr. Crawley's religious scruples. How many noble emigrees had this horrid revolution plunged into poverty!" (Thackeray 109-10). Becky has "several stories about her ancestors ere she had been many months [at Queen's

Crawley]; some of which Mr. Crawley happened to find in D'Hozier's dictionary, which was in the library, and which strengthened his belief in their truth and in the high- breeding of Rebecca" (Thackeray 10). Similarly to Becky's intentional allusions to her poverty and her status as an orphan to gain compassion, she displays her foreignness and her status as an impoverished aristocrat to manipulate the other characters' reactions to

58 her. Sometimes, Becky combines all three of these factors to assert herself, while at the same time expressing a sort of social critique by causing socially superior characters to feel guilty about their privileges:

Do you suppose I have no feeling of self-respect, because I am poor and

friendless, and because rich people have none? Do you think, because I am a

governess, I have not as much sense, and feeling, and good breeding as you

gentlefolks in Hampshire? I'm a Montmorency. Do you suppose a

Montmorency is not as good as a Crawley?' When Miss Sharp was agitated,

and alluded to her maternal relatives, she spoke with ever so slight a foreign

accent, which gave a great charm to her clear ringing voice. (Thackeray 166)

Furthermore, the nationality of Becky's ancestors offers another explanation for Becky's immorality. Rigby states in her review that

the only criticism which we could offer [about Becky] is one which the author

has almost disarmed by making her mother a Frenchwoman. The construction

of this little clever monster is diabolically French. Such a lusus naturae as a

woman without a heart and conscience would, in England, be a mere brutal

savage [...]. France is the land for the real Syren, with the woman's face and

the dragon's claws. (85)

This statement implies that feminine immorality might not only depend on genetics and education, but also on nationality.

While Becky's French, opera-dancing mother, then, is an important element in

Becky's self-fashioning, Aurora knows "very little of her poor mother's history"

59 (Braddon Floyd 20). Becky uses her mother's absence to elevate her social status, but

Aurora's social status can only be diminished by her mother's profession as an actress and her obscure family history. However, Aurora's motherless childhood is, like Becky's, relatively free from social restraints: Aurora

shot whither she would, and there was none to lop the wandering branches of

that luxuriant nature. She said what she pleased; thought, spoke, acted as she

pleased; learned what she pleased; and she grew into a bright impetuous

being, affectionate and generous-hearted as her mother, but with some touch

of native fire blended in her mould that stamped her as original. (Braddon

Floyd20)

Jeni Curtis points out that Braddon's use of nature images when describing Aurora's development echoes the vocabulary of contemporary conduct books (82-83). She quotes the conduct book writer Sarah Ellis, who, in 1844, used similar imagery to describe the development of young girls: '"If ever then the care of a judicious mother is wanted, it is in the open feeling of a young girl, when branches of the tenderest growth have to be cherished and directed, rather than checked and lopped off (qtd. in Curtis 83). Braddon's novel, then, takes part in the discourse surrounding girls' education and indicates that

"Aurora's problem is that she is motherless, and so does not experience the necessary surveillance and corrective training Ellis's good mother would provide" (Curtis 83). As a little girl, Aurora

evince[s] a very decided tendency to become what is called 'fast.' At six

years of age she rejected a doll, and asked for a rocking-horse. At ten she

60 could converse fluently upon the subject of pointers, setters, fox-hounds,

harriers, and beagles, though she drove her governess to the verge of despair

by persistently forgetting under what Roman emperor Jerusalem was

destroyed, and who was legate from the Pope at the time of Catherine of

Arragon's divorce. (Braddon F/oyt/21)

Because it takes a mother to impose properly feminine restrictions on, Aurora, her motherlessness allows Aurora to develop an unrestrained capability for (sexual) passion and impulsiveness.

Ultimately, then, Aurora's lack of maternal control leads to her criminal and improper conduct, which climaxes in her infatuation and elopement with James Conyers.

In retrospect, Aurora admits that she "had only a schoolgirl's sentimental fancy for

[Conyers's] dashing manner, only a schoolgirl's frivolous admiration of his handsome face. [She] married him because he had dark-blue eyes, and long eyelashes, and white teeth, and brown hair" (Braddon Floyd 352). By stating that she had "no romantic, overwhelming love for this man" (Braddon Floyd 352), Aurora confesses a purely physical and sexual attraction to her father's groom, "a desire that is neither romantic nor maternal, outside of the patriarchally acceptable constructs of Victorian girlhood and womanly desire" (Curtis 86). Similarly, Lyn Pykett argues that

for many critics the sensation novel most obviously entered the transgressive

domain of the improper feminine in its treatment of sexuality, particularly

female sexuality. In this respect sensation novels were doubly transgressive.

61 They did not simply portray women as sexual beings; they also dwelt on the

details of women's sexual response. {Improper Feminine 34)

Indeed, Margaret Oliphant found Aurora's active sexuality highly inacceptable, as she complains that

what is held up to us as the story of the feminine soul as it really exists

underneath its conventional coverings is a very fleshly and unlovely record.

[...] The heroines who have been imported into modern fiction [...] [wait] for

flesh and muscles, for strong arms that seize [them], and warm breath that

thrills [them] through, and a host of other physical attractions, which [they]

indicate to the world with a charming frankness. (174-75)

Oliphant concludes that Braddon "might not be aware how young women of good blood and good training feel" ("Sensation Novels" 175). Interestingly, Oliphant, who laments that literary motherlessness has become a literary tool to excuse morally decayed heroines, here emphasises "good training" as crucial for the restraint of young girls' sexuality. As popular beliefs and various conduct books held mothers responsible for providing "good training" to young girls, Oliphant herself here implicitly excuses

Aurora's improper behaviour with her motherlessness.

Aurora's social status as a motherless heiress, paired with her sexuality, not only marks her potential to become a fallen heroine, but it also makes her vulnerable to the charms and schemes of her first husband. Similarly to Wilkie Collins's Laura Fairlie,

Aurora becomes the victim of a unscrupulous lower-class man, who exploits her

"sentimental fancy" (Braddon Floyd 352) and marries her merely for her fortune. The

62 very prosperity that Becky and Lucy Audley view as guaranteeing social security and independence proves to be a threat to Aurora. Perceiving Aurora's attraction to him,

Conyers exploits Aurora's naivete and "insinuate[s] himself into a kind of intimacy with

[her], by bringing [her] all the empty gossip of the race-course, by extra attention to [her] favourite horses, by pampering [her] pets" (Braddon Floyd 352-53). When Conyers tells

Aurora his life story, his depictions of himself and his past resemble Becky's closely: "He was a prince in disguise, of course; he was a gentleman's son; [...] he was at war with fortune; he had been ill-used and trampled down in the battle of life" (Braddon Floyd

353). Even Talbot Bulstrode, to whom Aurora confesses her story, automatically associates Aurora's fall with her lack of a mother; "his heart [bleeds] for the motherless girl" (Braddon Floyd 353). Aurora herself emphasizes this association by stating that her governess, hired in a failed attempt to substitute a mother's supervision, was "a silly woman" who encouraged Aurora's romantic fancy for James Conyers "out of mere stupidity" (Braddon Floyd 353) instead of exercising maternal control and authority over her student in order to prevent Aurora from "falling." In both Vanity Fair and Aurora

Floyd the argument that "motherless girls are destined to fall" (Logan 6) is emphasized further by the protective mother figures of Mrs. Sedley and Mrs. Alexander Floyd and their respective daughters, Amelia and Lucy.

3.5 AMELIA SEDLEY AND LUCY FLOYD

Thackeray establishes early in the novel that Amelia "is not a heroine"

(Thackeray 7). She is, however, a "properly feminized" (Pykett Improper Feminine) young lady, without any excessively criminal or sexual tendencies. Unlike Becky and

Aurora, Amelia grows up under the constant supervision of first her mother and, later,

63 Miss Pinkerton. Her education consists of music, dancing, orthography, needlework, geography, and posture, as well as religion and morality. Sheltered and raised to believe in the myth of the "knight of romance riding down the forest glades, ready for the defence and succour of all the oppressed, for whom the dreaming maiden waits" (Oliphant

"Sensation Novels" 175), Amelia, like Lucy Floyd, falls in love and worships her future husband with a devotion and ardour that is silently passionate and that turns out to be physically and emotionally destructive for her. When Amelia's engagement with George seems to be breaking off, Amelia's "appearance [becomes] so ghastly and her look of despair so pathetic" that Dobbin tells George that Amelia is dying (Thackeray 222-23).

Similarly, after George's death Amelia is "out of her mind like for six weeks or more"

(Thackeray 443). Unlike Lucy, however, Amelia wastes her devotion for a man who is unworthy of her. George is nothing like the gentlemanly and ideally patriarchal (and paternalistic) Talbot Bulstrode and instead resembles an upper-class James Conyers.

Ultimately, then, Amelia's carefully supervised education and her family's arrangement of her engagement with George Osbourne protects her from the shame that Aurora's first marriage would have caused if it had become public. However, it cannot protect her from the neglect and emotional abuse that George inflicts on her before and after their wedding. Ultimately, while Amelia's feelings for George are comparable to Lucy's love for Talbot, ironically the reality of Amelia's marriage is very similar to Aurora's marriage to James Conyers—with the crucial exception that Amelia's marriage is socially sanctioned and widely accepted as a desirable match. Ultimately, Amelia's proper feminization does not protect her from a villainous man; it merely prevents her from

64 articulating (or even realizing) George's cruelty and, later, from breaking out of her role as devoted widow.

While contemporary reviews repeatedly establish Amelia as the only "woman in

Vanity Fair from whom we should not shrink in private life as from a contagion" (Bell

759-60), Thackeray intended Amelia not as a character "whose pale lustre shines out so gently in the midst of these harpies" (Bell 759-60), but as another "foolish and selfish

[character] [...] [who is] eager after vanities" ("Thackeray to Bell" 761). Sally Mitchell argues that

Amelia, in fact, is deliberately constructed to show how flimsy an ideal

woman would be in a world of real people. She is a romantic fiction who can

only live happily in a world of pretence. Becky is a realist; she understands

what people want to believe and she uses their stereotypes for her own ends.

(58)

Therefore, the character of Amelia is necessary not only to contrast Becky's selfishness and vices with her devotion and goodness, but also to further Thackeray's argument about the futility of (literary) gender stereotypes. As Nina Auerbach rightly points out, "it is not until the end of the third volume that Amelia achieves her unenviable apotheosis as angel in the house; she gains it primarily through the proceedings of the 'demonic' Becky

Sharp" (Woman and Demon 89). Angelic and demonic characters are therefore interdependent and, ultimately, Amelia and Becky are equally vain, selfish, and unsatisfied. Even more crucially, just as Becky is never punished for her vices and crimes, Amelia is never rewarded for her unwavering fidelity, goodness, chastity, and

65 morality—Vanity Fair defies literary conventions by refraining from imposing narrative

"justice" (Levine "Literary Realism" 22).

Unlike Amelia, Braddon's Lucy Floyd is rewarded in the end of Aurora Floyd.

Lucy is "fair-faced, blue-eyed, rosy-lipped, [and] golden-haired" (Braddon Floyd 21) and indeed has the "true" and "natural" modesty that Becky and Aurora lack, the sort of "true modesty [that] is not conscious of itself and knows nothing of what might violate it"

(Yeazell 5). However, Jeni Curtis points out that "even Lucy, the epitome of perfect girlhood" does not naturally develop "true" modesty but that she is educated to this end.

Indeed, Lucy is

exactly the sort of woman to make a good wife. She had been educated to that

end by a careful mother. Purity and goodness had watched over her and

hemmed her in from her cradle. She had never seen unseemly sights, or heard

unseemly sounds. She [is] as ignorant as a baby of all the vices and horrors of

this big world. She [is] lady-like, accomplished, well-informed; and if there

[are] a great many others of precisely the same type of graceful womanhood,

it [is] certainly the highest type, and the holiest, and the best. (Braddon Floyd

48)

Appropriately, to Talbot Bulstrode, Lucy is

the ideal woman[:] [...] some gentle and feminine creature crowned with an

aureole of pale auburn hair; some timid soul with downcast eyes [...]; some

shrinking being [...], spotless as her own white robes, excelling in all

66 womanly graces and accomplishments, but only exhibiting them in the

narrow circle of a home. (Braddon Floyd 40)

However, Braddon shows that Lucy is indeed capable of passion, even though she has been "far too well educated to betray one emotion of her heart, and she [bears] her girlish agonies, and conceal[s] her hourly tortures, with the quiet patience common to these simple womanly martyrs" (Braddon Floyd 55-56). Throughout the novel, Lucy belongs to the young women who Margaret Oliphant praises; she "ha[s] been brought up in the belief that [her] own feelings on [the] subject [of love and desire] should be religiously kept to [herself]" (Oliphant "Sensation Novels" 174). Lucy only displays "faint signs and tokens [of suffering]" (Braddon Floyd 93). The one crucial result of Lucy's apparently proper feminisation through her mother, then, is the ability to repress her emotions so successfully that the only indication of her desperation is physical; Lucy suffers a "slow sick pain in [her] gentle breast" (Braddon Floyd 64) and eventually "Lucy's cheeks

[loose] much of their delicate colour" (Braddon Floyd 74). Lucy does not even articulate her passion after Talbot's proposal or even after their marriage. When Bulstrode proposes, all Lucy can do is blush, droop her eyelids, and cry. Braddon's narrator states that Lucy is "the most undemonstrative of women, and, except by her blushes and her drooping eyelids, and the teardrop trembling upon the soft auburn lashes, she made no reply" (Braddon Floyd 160).

Lucy's body language is another indication of her "true" emotional modesty.

Yeazell argues that "the modest woman can be recognized by her downcast eyes, her head turned aside, and above all by the blush that suffuses her cheek—an 'innocent paint' more attractive than any rouge, and mysterious proof that she has neither done nor

67 thought anything for which she genuinely need blush" (5). Braddon also comments on the different manifestations of femininity by comparing Lucy and Aurora:

How hard is it upon such women as these that they feel so much and yet

display so little feeling! The dark-eyed, impetuous creatures, who speak out

fearlessly, and tell you that they love or hate you—flinging their arms round

your neck or throwing the carving-knife at you, as the case may be—get full

value for all their emotion; but these gentle creatures love, and make no sign.

(Braddon Floyd 160)

The narrator here contradicts her previous statement that "there are so many Lucys and so many Auroras" (Braddon Floyd 48) and attributes a silent and secret, yet complex emotional life to Lucy. Most heroines and villainesses in Vanity Fair, Lady Audley 's

Secret, and Aurora Floyd have "secret li[ves]" (Curtis 90) as the result of socially demanded passivity and propriety. Their secrets and desires not only contribute to sensational plot developments, but also comment on the tradition of ideal heroines and attempt to establish a more realistic and less ideological construction of female literary characters.

One crucial difference between Lucy and Aurora is that Lucy's desire is never depicted as sexual. That her love is not physical becomes obvious when Talbot Bulstrode compares Aurora's riding skills with Lucy's. As riding in Aurora Floyd is always linked to sexual passion, Lucy's being a "timid horsewoman" (Braddon Floyd 63) characterizes her as ideally feminine and her desire as asexual. And even though he approves of Lucy's desire and her lack of sexuality as ideal, Talbot Bulstrode "never admire[s] Lucy so little

68 as on horseback. His pale saint with the halo of golden hair seem[s] to him sadly out of place on horseback" (Braddon Floyd 63). While Lucy adores Talbot as "her idol, her adored, her demi-god, her dark-haired and grey-eyed divinity" (Braddon Floyd 93), her desire manifests itself mainly as a socially sanctioned "desire to please" and an "instinct for self-abnegation" (Curtis 79). Indeed, after their marriage, Lucy holds "herself in a manner responsible for [Talbot's] ease and comfort" (Braddon Floyd 348) and "obey[s]

[him] as dismissively as a child" (Braddon Floyd 350), once again contrasting and highlighting Aurora's unconventional and "unnatural" femininity.

Overall, however, the contrast between properly and improperly feminized heroines in both Vanity Fair and Aurora Floyd defies literary gender stereotypes. The properly feminine Amelia and Lucy are neither safe from rogues like George Osbourne and James

Conyers, nor are they happier than the "unnatural" Becky and Aurora. The endings of the novels emphasize this defiance of literary conventions. As stated before, Becky and

Amelia are not punished (or rewarded) by poetic justice at the end of Vanity Fair, and, similarly, Aurora Floyd defies melodramatic conventions by bestowing a happy ending on its fallen heroine (Hughes 30).

With its focus on the problematic issue of women's sexuality rather than women's economic dependence, Braddon's second novel contributes to contemporary debates about the nature of femininity. Focusing on Aurora's initial passions and Lucy's repression of her emotions, as well as both women's happy endings, Braddon employs ideas of both innate modesty and instilled femininity and therefore complicates the debate about the nature of femininity. Aurora's fortune distinguishes her from Becky, Lucy, and

Lydia, however, interestingly the very fortune that the other three characters desire above

69 everything else makes Aurora vulnerable to the schemes of James Conyers. This vulnerability is heightened by Aurora's passion and spontaneity—characteristics that she develops because she is missing the corrective control of a protective mother. Like

Becky, Aurora's motherlessness leaves her improperly feminized (Pykett Improper

Feminine 86), a fact that disturbed contemporary reviewers and led them to articulate concerns about the moral effect a literary heroine like Aurora might have on an impressionable young, female audience. Becky certainly cannot function as role model for her female readers, and even though Aurora Floyd depicts the process of Aurora's redemption and ultimately reinforces the idea of a woman's domestic and modest nature,

Aurora's initially active sexuality and even her reformation were considered dangerous transgressions of approved melodramatic conventions. However, Thackeray and

Braddon's narrators claim explicitly that their novels' breaks with literary traditions make their novels—and their sensational heroines—more realistic. The narrators state that the structure and plot of their novels is lifelike, because they do not end "upon the altar steps"

(Braddon Floyd 163). However, they also claim—more implicitly—the futility of gender stereotypes and the artificiality of literary conventions. Both novels end without imposing poetic justice: the wicked Becky and the sexually deviant Aurora end as happily (or unhappily) as the virtuous Amelia and Lucy. While these transgressions of the literary

(and, specifically, melodramatic) conventions of punishing villainesses and rewarding heroines were considered morally problematic by contemporary critics, they are closely tied to both the realist and the sensation author's explicit claim of literary realism. Both

Thackeray's realist Vanity Fair and Braddon's sensational Aurora Floyd, then, challenge literary and cultural gender ideals and dissolve generic boundaries through the

70 unconventional portrayals of and narrative attitudes towards their heroines and villainesses. CHAPTER 4

CRIMINAL FEMININITY: BECKY SHARP AND LYDIA GWILT

Contemporary reviews judge Wilkie Collins's Lydia Gwilt to be "a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of 35, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol, and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty" (Boyle 170). Lydia is more criminally experienced and more explicitly unlawful than Lucy Audley and Aurora Floyd. While Lucy and Aurora's crimes are revealed late in the novels and the suspicion of their guilt is the major tool to create suspense, Armadale includes Lydia's letters and diaries and grants the reader access to Lydia's thoughts, emotions, and criminal schemes. The fact that Collins allows

Lydia's own voice to dominate the narrative results in the reader's problematic identification with the villainess. Just as readers of Vanity Fair are, despite their better knowledge, fascinated by Becky's, Collins's novel makes readers question their own morality and criminal capacity when they sympathise with Lydia and her murderous plans. Another point of comparison is Thackeray and Collins's use of the nineteenth- century "institution" (Brandon 1) of the governess to comment on cultural anxieties.

Lydia and Becky take advantage of their positions as governesses to infiltrate respectable upper-class families. The position of the governess is therefore closely associated with feminine criminality, as Becky and Lydia, having forged respectable references, pose financial, sexual, and social threats to their employers' families. The themes of criminality and morality that pervade both Vanity Fair and Armadale once again blur

72 genre distinctions. Collins's use of contemporary newspaper stories questions the truthfulness of realism and the "impurity" (Nemesvari Introduction 15) of sensationalism.

Furthermore, contemporary reviews condemned Lydia Gwilt more mercilessly than

Becky, despite the suspicion that Becky, too, is a murderess. Ultimately, then, the never- resolved question about Becky's guilt as an adulteress and murderess, when compared to

Lydia's explicit guilt, becomes a key aspect in the classification of Vanity Fair as a realist novel.

4.1 LETTERS AND DIARIES

Rebecca's letters from Queen's Crawley to Amelia illustrate, in Becky's own voice, aspects of her personality, such as her sense of humour and her wit, that the narrator has pointed out before. Becky uses her letters as another chance to cultivate her poverty and her status as an orphan; she reminds Amelia that she is "friendless and alone"

(Thackeray 88) and that "'twas safe [for the groom] to insult poverty and misfortune"

(Thackeray 88). However, the overall tone of her letters is surprisingly cheerful and humorous. As Becky adjusts to every new life situation quickly and as she is socially

"mobile" (Van Ghent 11), her depictions of people and events are always ambiguous. Her descriptions of Sir Pitt point out his unfitness to be a baronet and Becky's (at least grammatical) superiority over him. However, even though Becky caricatures Sir Pitt's

"droll" pronunciation and his use of "wicked" words, she seems to be familiar enough with those wicked words that she can translate them into more acceptable expressions for

Amelia. Furthermore, her depiction of the doctor's proposal indicates that the proposal is both a compliment and an insult. Her reaction to the doctor's offer is an expression of

Becky's ambition: "as if I was born, indeed, to be a country surgeon's wife!" (Thackeray

73 118). At the same time it subtly reminds Amelia that, even though Jos did not propose to

Becky, other men recognize her charms and would feel appropriately honoured to be her husband.

The few shorter letters Becky writes are part of her public performance rather than private recollections as in a diary. The note she leaves on the pincushion for Miss

Crawley, just as various letters that Becky has Rawdon write to his aunt, is written to appeal to Miss Crawley's sympathy for Becky and highlights Becky's acting abilities and her eloquence. Similarly, the note Becky sends to Rawdon when he is in jail supports her performance as concerned and ideal wife and aims at concealing her meeting with Lord

Steyne. The letters, then, reinforce the narrator's portrayal of Becky and function to establish a more authoritative and well-rounded depiction of her character. The moral danger of the letters consists of the reader's amusement at Becky's tone, her vivid descriptions, and her intelligent schemes. The letters, therefore, contribute to the readers' fascination with and interest in the villainess of the novel.

Despite the moral danger of this fascination, Becky's wickedness is always mediated through the narrator and does not involve the reader as actively as Lydia's diary. MacColl argues that "the morality and immorality of the work depends on the bias which it is calculated to give to our sympathies" (qtd. in Maitzen 170). However, even though MacColl points out that "if the bias is towards the evil, the novel is immoral; if towards the good, it is moral" (qtd. in Maitzen 170), Thackeray's narrative strategy keeps the reader at a certain moral distance from its evil heroine and therefore preserves a more objective depiction of Becky. The readers' fascination with Becky, then, is less morally threatening because the novel's "bias" towards Becky is less personal, la Armadale the

74 readers' access to Lydia's private thoughts might be immoral, but interestingly it also defies a traditional characteristic of melodrama: by reading the diary readers enters into a personal, intimate relationship with Lydia and gain access to her crimes and murderous schemes as well as to her emotions, memories, and regrets. This intimacy prevents the audience from viewing Lydia as stereotypically and thoroughly evil villainess.

The narrator of Armadale is less intrusive and apparently less omniscient than

Thackeray's puppeteer. Initially, he only contributes a description of Lydia Gwilt's physical appearance to her characterization; the reader encounters her first and foremost in her letters and her diary. Lydia herself narrates multiple chapters of the novel; as she records her hatred for Allan and her spite for Neelie in her letters, and as she outlines her criminal schemes in her diary, Lydia becomes a sensation author herself As Deborah

Wynne points out, when Lydia consciously withholds information from Mother

Oldershaw and states that "my dairy says, 'don't tell her [what I have got on my mind to do]'" (Collins 453), it becomes obvious that "Lydia, as a writer, understands the power of language, and the ways in which narrative can be used to play with readers' responses, and it is her ability to adopt a position of authority in relation to the reader which appears so disturbing" (153). Randa Helfield persuasively argues that "the more a woman appeared to be the author—and therefore the plotter—of her own story, the less she could maintain the appearance of innocence" (162). As opposed to Becky's letters that reveal little about Becky's plotting and even less about her criminal activities, Lydia's diary indeed functions to provide evidence for her guilt. However, at the same time as it establishes Lydia's criminality and moral deviancy, the diary makes Lydia an intriguing, if not sympathetic, character. Readers are inducted not only into Lydia's plans, but also

75 into her private habits and emotions—habits that even the narrator might not be aware of, such as her laudanum addiction, her love of Beethoven, and the painful memories of her past. These characteristics of Lydia were considered especially dangerous by contemporary reviewers because they distracted from her vices and suggested that Lydia had likable and pitiable characteristics. An unsigned review in The Spectator expresses this danger, stating that "so long as Miss Gwilt is talking about Beethoven's sonatas, eclipsing Byron's sarcasm about girls in their teens, and Dickens's joke about church bells, we are tempted to forget the character of the speaker" (149). Collins's narrative strategy, then, makes the reader the accomplice of "the sorceress of Armadale " (Corley

146), and the novel's suspense is based not so much in the revelation of Lydia's past as in the suspense whether or not she will be able to successfully execute her plans. Helfield points out that female sensation authors were frequently accused of linguistically

"poisoning" their audiences by "making profligacy attractive" and by '"pollut[ing]' not only their 'their pages,' but their readers as well" (162). In winning the readers' sympathies through her diary Lydia, then, "disseminates] literary 'poison'" (Helfield

162), an act that figuratively mirrors her poisoning of Mr. Waldron and Allan.

Furthermore, the intimate confessions of Lydia's diary allow readers to become spies themselves; "Collins reveals the usually hidden aspects of the private self. [...] This

'Peeping Tom" quality extends to the reader, whose access to Lydia's private letters and diary [...] amounts to a collision with the culture of spying and secrecy which pervades the novel" (Wynne 153). Because of the reader's knowledge of Lydia's habits, plans, and crimes, Armadale's social critique transgresses the boundaries of the novel's plot and actively involves the reader in Lydia's schemes.

76 Whether readers' response to Lydia and her violent hatred of Allan Armadale is agreement or disapproval, their emotional reactions reflect on their own morality— especially, because Collins's preface claims that Armadale "may be a very daring book"

"estimated by the Clap-trap morality of the present day" but that it "is only a book that is daring enough to speak the truth" when it is "judged by the Christian morality which is of all time" (Collins 7). While reading Armadale, Bishop Thirlwall found it unbearable to be told the story from Lydia's perspective: "Is it not marvellous that anybody could have conceived it possible for Miss Gwilt to write such a journal? It is a comfort to think that she cannot go on much longer, and that almost the only doubt remaining is whether she is to poison or drown herself (145). And an unsigned review in the London Quarterly

Review is, once again, concerned that "[...] perhaps that the familiarity with [Lydia's] evil is more likely to leave a lasting impression on those young and susceptible minds, which ought most carefully to be guarded from such influences, than the spectacle of the good

[...]" (156). While Braddon writes Lady Audley's confession in Lucy's own voice, likely in order to gain sympathy for Lucy and to emphasize her social criticism, Collins's strategy to include the perspective and history of the villainess so majorly into his novel responds and contributes to more complex discussions about femininity and criminality.

These discussions are furthered by Lydia's position as governess, as she infiltrates a respectable upper-class family in her function as governess in order to further her career as criminal and social climber. By locating criminality in the familiar social and literary figure of the governess, Collins, like Thackeray, comments on contemporary anxieties about criminality entering the private sanctuary of the home and the family.

77 4.2 GOVERNESSES

Becky enters her position as governess to escape Miss Pinkerton's academy. The fact that she has received a lady's education because she is clever enough to take advantage "of the means of study the place [Chiswick] offer[s] her" (Thackeray 19) makes her eligible for the position of a governess, even though this position was usually restricted to impoverished middle- and upper-class girls. Miss Pinkerton only agrees to provide the necessary reference for Becky because it is the only possibility to "remove this rebel, this monster, this serpent, this firebrand" (Thackeray 20) from her school.

Knowing that Becky is an immoral and unscrupulous character, she "reconcile[s]" her role as Becky's reference "to her conscience" (Thackeray 21) by thinking that she

"cannot, certainly, [...] find fault with Miss Sharp's conduct, except to [herjself; and must allow that her talents and accomplishments are of a high order" (Thackeray 20). Being a future governess puts Becky in an ambiguous and marginal social position. As Ruth

Brandon points out, governesses had to be

born [ladies][...]; it was the job's basic requirement. But a lady's defining

characteristic was that she did not work for a living. So the mere fact of

seeking paid employment instantly relegated the governess from middle-class

respectability to an ambiguous limbo between upstairs and downstairs. (6)

Becky soon encounters the prejudices against governesses from both "upstairs" employers and "downstairs" servants. Mrs. Sedley is exceedingly displeased at the thought of her son marrying Becky. She thinks of Becky as "little, humble, grateful, [and] gentle" but nevertheless a governess, who should not "dare to look up to such a

78 magnificent personage as the collector of Boggley Wollah" (Thackeray 37). And Mrs.

Blenkinsop, the Sedleys' housekeeper, states: "I don't trust them governesses [...] they give themselves the hairs and hupstarts of ladies, and their wages is no better than you or me" (Thackeray 75), accurately summarizing the social "limbo" governesses occupied.

Lady Eastlike, in her review of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review, states that

the line which severs the governess from her employers is not one which will

take care of itself, as in the case of servants. [...] there is nothing upon the

face of the thing to stamp her as having been called to a different state of life

from that in which it has pleased God to place you; and therefore the

distinction has to be kept up by a fictitious barrier, (qtd. in Brandon 194)

This "fictitious barrier" is emphasized by the fact that Rebecca is not accustomed to "dine at the table" (Thackeray 126) at Queen's Crawley—a fact that also refers to the isolation of the governess, as Brandon points out:

this loneliness was partly a function of the job's nature [...]. Employers [...]

preferred not to be faced, every evening across the family hearth, with

someone who was at once an awkward social liability, a reproach to their

consciences and a constant reminder of everything that they prayed their own

daughters would never become. (15)

However, because Lady Crawley is not "of the least consequence in her own house" and only asks Rebecca to be kind to her daughters rather than intruding on Rebecca's educational methods, Rebecca quickly recognises that she "need not be afraid of Lady

79 Crawley (Thackeray 92) as an employer (or as a potential rival). Without the authority of the lady of the house to control her, Becky is free to discover means to make herself indispensible to every other member of the family and to cross the "fictitious barrier" that divides her from her employers. Therefore, she slowly becomes the embodiment of the threat that governesses could pose.

First of all, Rebecca's education of her students is shockingly inadequate; she encourages the girls' unladylike and sentimental tendencies by letting them "have their own way in regard to educating themselves" (Thackeray 106). She encourages Miss

Rose's preference for novels and keeps Miss Violet's "peccadilloes" secret. Secondly,

Rebecca soon assumes a position of power at Queen's Crawley that is highly unsuitable for a governess. She is familiar with Sir Pitt's financial affairs, advises him on the management of the estate, and has access to his correspondences. Ultimately, Becky slowly becomes "almost the mistress of the house when Mr. Crawley [is] absent"

(Thackeray 110) and has "the upper hand of the whole house" (Thackeray 116).

Additionally to her increasingly powerful position at Queen's Crawley, Rebecca poses a sexual threat. Becky not only eventually marries Rawdon, but also receives a proposal from Sir Pitt himself and wins Pitt Crawley's affection enough to receive a diamond clasp and financial as well as social support over the years. However, the family never forgets Becky's inferior social position and is shocked when "Rawdon marrie[s]—

Rebecca—-governess" (Thackeray 198). Years later, when Becky returns to Queen's

Crawley as Rawdon's wife, she gains her former students' approval by openly acknowledging that her marriage was socially advantageous to her. Miss Rose approvingly says that Becky '"gives herself no airs, and remembers that she was [their]

80 governess once' [...] intimating that it befit[s] all governesses to keep their proper place"

(Thackeray 524). Whether Lady Crawley is aware of and concerned about the threat

Rebecca poses to her position in the house remains questionable; Becky writes Amelia that "my lady looks on" all events occurring at Queen's Crawley "with equal placidity"

(Thackeray 118). However, Mrs. Bute Crawley, Sir Pitt's sister-in-law, assumes the jealously controlling role that suits a mistress who is not "secure enough emotionally not to see the governess as a rival, and [who does not have] the social assurance not to feel her position compromised" by her (Brandon 11). Mrs. Bute Crawley suspiciously observes "the arrival of such a personage as Rebecca at Queen's Crawley, and her gradual establishment there" and she cannot "pass over the Hall governess without making every inquiry respecting her history and character" (Thackeray 115). She listens to rumours about "the new governess be[ing] a rare manager—Sir Pitt befing] very sweet on her—Mr. Crawley, too" and concludes that Becky is "an abandoned little wretch"

(Thackeray 115) and "an artful hussy, and ha[s] some dreadful designs in view" (116).

Mrs. Bute Crawley's remarks indicate that she is aware of "horror stories [that] circulated among employers about lower-class girls who became governesses in order to insinuate themselves into families who would otherwise be far above their station" and that it was a common fear that governesses might cause "husbands [to] stray [and] sons [to] fall unsuitably in love" (Brandon 10). Therefore, Mrs. Crawley writes to Rebecca's reference,

Miss Pinkerton, to inquire about Becky's "history." This inquiry emphasises the importance of respectable social connections and reputable references in a time when an infiltration of the "privacy and sanctity of the home" (Trodd 97) by "alien intruders" and, by extension, the infiltration of the upper and middle classes by members of the lower

81 classes, became increasingly threatening. As stated before, while Miss Pinkerton is an exceedingly respectable reference, her recommendation is the result of her own hatred of

Rebecca rather than her conviction of Rebecca's morality and virtue. Miss Pinkerton's selfishness and hypocrisy, epitomized in her reference for Becky, lead to Rebecca's infiltration of Queen's Crawley.

The position of the governess becomes an ideal opportunity for a social climber like Becky and, worse, a criminal like Lydia Gwilt, to begin their "careers." As Collins's

Mrs. Oldershaw tells Lydia Gwilt: "A woman [...] with your appearance, your manners, your abilities, and your education, can make almost any excursions into society that she pleases, if she only has money in her pocket and a respectable reference to appeal to in cases of emergency" (Collins 167). The figure of the governess, then, was useful to both realist and sensation authors. Through the literary depiction of a governess and her life- story, authors could express social criticism and realistic plot developments such as unsuitable marriages. However, the governess could also be sensationalized as an "evil infiltration," bringing destruction and criminality into a respectable upper-class home.

Both Becky and Lydia initially plan to use their positions as governesses for the realistic purpose of finding a suitable husband. However, once this plan fails both women resort to increasingly criminal schemes. Both Becky and Lydia, then, are at once realist and sensational governesses, and Thackeray and Collins use the social "institution" (Brandon

1) of the governess to transgress genre boundaries and to explore cultural anxieties through their heroines and plot developments.

Lydia applies for the position as Neelie Milroy's governess to make the acquaintance of the Milroys' landlord, Allan Armadale, and to pursue her original

82 scheme of becoming Mrs. Armadale. Lydia's talents in music and languages and her education at an upscale French boarding school make her eligible for the position as long as she can disguise her dubious origins and her criminal past. Aware of the difficulties of being employed as governess for a respectable family, Mother Oldershaw fashions an intricate plan in order to become Lydia's reference. This plan involves Lydia's use of her maiden name, as well as Mrs. Oldershaw's adoption of a false identity and the move to new apartments in a respectable neighbourhood. Lydia, too, is actively involved in the fraud by giving an elaborate performance as a respectable and modest young woman at the interview with Neelie's grandmother. When old Mrs. Milroy asks how Lydia became a governess, Mrs. Oldershaw replies: "In the usual way. [...] A sad family misfortune, in which she behaved nobly" (Collins 316). Despite the fact that Mother Oldershaw is, of course, lying, this statement evokes the social and ideological problems associated with hiring a governess that Brandon points out: the governess

set a dangerous social example, her presence offering an inescapable

reminder of [...] constantly nagging dreads. The first, in an era of tremendous

financial fluidity [...] concerned the pupils she was hired to teach. Since no

lady would become a governess unless forced to do so it was safe to assume

that her family [...] had suffered some sort of financial catastrophe [...] And

since these things might easily happen to anyone, who was to say that your

own [...] daughters might not, in turn, have to become governesses? (13)

Neelie's grandmother is indeed embarrassed by Mrs. Oldershaw's answer; she writes that

"hearing this, of course I felt the same delicacy on my side. It was no part of mine to intrude on the poor thing's private sorrows, my only business was to do [...] to make sure

83 that I was engaging a capable and respectable governess to instruct my grandchild"

(Collins 316). This classification of the governess as "poor thing" runs through a number of 19 century realist and sensation novels, including Vanity Fair and Armadale, and is even expressed by the governesses themselves. Furthermore, old Mrs. Milroy's impression of Lydia as "poor thing" emphasizes the governess's dependence on her employers' families and the idea that "the governess, as a lady employed by another lady, theoretically expected to find a home from home in her charges' family" (Brandon 15).

However, Patricia Thomson's argument about Becky and Jane Eyre is certainly also true of Lydia: all three governesses have a "proper appreciation of their own value as individual human beings," they "consider themselves as women, first, and as dependants, second," and, ultimately, they do "not knuckle[e] under to circumstances or [allow] their personalities to be submerged" (46).

Once she arrives at Thorpe Ambrose, Lydia assumes that her position will be temporary and she is therefore less inclined than Becky to "make friends." While Becky is careful not to insult the servants even when she has already become Sir Pitt's confidante, Lydia, from the beginning on, "lock[s] herself up in her room (which [...] look[s] as if she distrust[s] the servants)" (Collins 271), posts her own letters "instead of giving them to the servants" (Collins 315), and makes no attempt to win Neelie's sympathy. Lydia's contempt for people in general and women in particular makes her a less patient and less good-humoured governess than Becky. While Becky seems to genuinely enjoy the process of her gradual establishment at Queen's Crawley and does not care the least whether or not her students grow into young ladies, Lydia has to make a constant effort to keep her temper (Collins 284). She is annoyed not only by Neelie's

84 relationship with Allan, but also by the girl's slow progress in her music lessons, the only subject Lydia seems to passionately love. Lydia states that Neelie

would try me past all endurance, if I didn't see that I aggravate her by

keeping my temper—so of course I keep it. If I do break out, it will be over

our lessons [...] Half the musical girls in England ought to have their fingers

chopped off, in the interest of society—and if I had my way, Miss Milroy's

fingers should be executed first. (Collins 284-85)

Unlike Lady Crawley, Mrs. Milroy has a strong desire to guard her household

(and her husband) from the intrusion by the beautiful governess and to control the "red- haired hussy" (Collins 312). Her jealousy and suspicions are based not only on Lydia's beauty but also on some surprisingly accurate interpretations of Lydia's appearance. She exclaims: "Red hair and a scrofulous complexion and a padded figure, a ballet girl's walk, and a pickpocket's light fingers. Miss Gwilt! Miss, with those eyes, and that walk!"

(Collins 312). When her jealousy causes her to intercept Lydia's letters and, more importantly, when her own inquiry to "Mrs. Mandeville," Lydia's reference, is returned because no person of that name can be located, Mrs. Milroy, like Mrs. Bute Crawley, comes to the conclusion that "an adventuress ha[s] stolen her way into the house by means of a false reference" (Collins 319-20). Unlike, Mrs. Crawley, however, Mrs.

Milroy is equally scheming as her opponent—her employment of Allan's curiosity and infatuation for her own means is more successful than she has hoped. By enticing Allan to research Lydia's history and discovering her connections to the dubious characters of

Mrs. Oldershaw and the abortionist Dr. Downward in Pimlico, Mrs. Milroy not only manages to get Lydia out of her house, but also spoils Lydia's original plan to marry

85 Allan. Ultimately, Mrs. Milroy successfully performs the role of the angel in the house— to defend her home and her family from a threatening intruder. Trodd argues that "the extensive and habitual treatment of servants as potential criminals in the fiction of the period rests on the assumption that as alien intruders under the family roof they compromise the privacy and sanctity of the home" (Trodd 97). Surely this argument can be extended to governesses, especially governesses like Becky and Lydia. After she can no longer hope to marry Allan (a plan that is immoral, but by no means criminal), Lydia, motivated by her ambition for money and social status, as well as her desire for revenge, develops a highly complicated murderous plot. Patricia Thomson points out that "of the daughters of Miss Sharp, Wilkie Collins'[s] Miss Gwilt, in Armadale, bears the closest family resemblance. Beautiful, a-moral and ambitious, she starts out on her career of villainy with determined purpose" (49). Lydia is more explicitly criminal than Becky, and as she enters her position as governess much later in her life than Becky, she has more

criminal "history" that can be researched. Not only are Lydia's crimes more numerous than Becky's, but they are also proven through her trial, her police records, and her diary.

Most likely, it is this explicit criminality, as compared to Becky's supposed guilt, that caused contemporary reviewers to state that "Miss Gwilt is a tragic Becky Sharp"

(Thirlwall 145) and that, compared to Lydia, "Miss Sharp is quite as great a sinner, but with all her vices is a bit of genuine human nature" ("Review of Armadale" Saturday

Review 152).

It seems that the distinction between Becky as a scandalous yet interesting realist heroine and Lydia as a thoroughly evil sensation heroine is ultimately rooted in the refusal of Thackeray's narrator to admit that Becky is guilty of adultery and murder.

86 Considering that Becky knows "how useless regrets are, and how the indulgence of sentiment only serves to make people more miserable" and her determination "to give way to no vain feelings of sorrow" (Thackeray 365), while Lydia is repeatedly tormented by her conscience, one would conclude that it is Lydia, not Becky, who displays "a bit of genuine human nature" ("Review of Armadale" Saturday Review 152). As John

Sutherland points out in his introduction to Vanity Fair, "it is, of course, odds on that

Becky was thoroughly guilty of both [adultery and murder] and many like offenses. [...]

But if we pass a verdict of guilty, we have on our hands an extraordinary Victorian novel" (xii)—in other words, if the narrator would state explicitly that Becky was guilty,

Thackeray's realist novel would entail a sensation heroine even more sensational than

Armadale's Lydia Gwilt in that Becky escapes the "canons of poetic justice, quite Mosaic in their severity" (Sutherland xii). Sutherland states that "there is no adulteress I can think of who escapes capital punishment in the pages of mid-Victorian fiction and only one other murderer. Yet at the end of Vanity Fair, Becky and Amelia are found in what is apparently a condition of perfect social equality—both ladies of impeccable respectability" (xii). By withholding the crucial revelation of Becky's guilt and refraining from punishing her, the narrator of Vanity Fair becomes Becky's most important accomplice and the readers, like the novel's other characters, must make their own moral judgements. While Armadale condemns Lydia's crimes and conveys the novel's moral message, Thackeray's moral message is more ambiguous and, therefore, Becky can remain a realist heroine.

87 4.3 FEMININITY AND CRIME

Becky progresses slowly from immorality to crime. She lies and steals throughout the novel, she supposedly commits adultery and takes to drinking, but she does not

(supposedly) commit murder until the very end of Vanity Fair. While Thackeray never establishes Becky's guilt explicitly, Jos's fear of her and the fact that her solicitors' names are the names of contemporary murderers (Thackeray 949) indicate that it is more than likely that Becky has been actively involved in Jos's passing. The murder is the sensational climax of Becky's criminal career. This climax is foreshadowed by one of the most sensational moments of Vanity Fair. Becky's performance as Clytemnestra, a moment Thackeray refers back to with the title of his illustration of the murder scene.

In the charade in which Becky performs the role of Clytemnestra, Becky looks like "an apparition—her arms are bare and white,—her tawny hair floats down her shoulders,—her face is deadly pale,—and her eyes are lighted up with a smile so ghastly, that people quake as they look at her" (Thackeray 646). Mirroring the uncertainty about

Becky's involvement in Jos's death, Clytemnestra's murder is not actually acted out in the charade: "you see [the dagger] shining over her head in the glimmer of the lamp, and—and the lamp goes out, with a groan, and all is dark" (Thackeray 646). Becky's performance is so authentic "that the spectators [are] all dumb" and frightened. However, as soon as the room lights up again people applaud "the charming Clytemnestra;" only

Lord Steyne remarks to himself that "she'd do it, too" (Thackeray 646). Despite the foreshadowing that this scene represents, it also illustrates an audience's fascination with fictionally deviant femininity and its possible outcomes of crime and murder. Virginia

Morris argues that Clytemnestra, as well as Lady Macbeth, were often cited "as

88 exemplars of the evil women were capable of (4) in fiction as well as in theoretical writings on crime and that these literary characters were considered to have "denied

[their] [feminine] nature" in committing violent crimes (Morris 4). Becky reinforces this idea of the natural harmlessness of her femininity—as opposed to Clytemnestra's—when she makes "the prettiest little curtsy ever seen" (Thackeray 646) after her performance.

Contemporary theories about criminality and women varied from the opinion that women were "almost always drawn into crime by a false pride about their poverty, by a desire for luxury, and by masculine occupations and education, which give them the means and the opportunity to commit crimes" (Morris 52-53) to the view that sexual abnormality, "by which they generally meant being too interested or experienced in sexual matters," caused violence and aggression (Morris 53). Morris points out that

"because one underlying assumption in these novels was that passion motivated crime, women who were presumed sexually inexperienced could not feel passion intense enough to drive them to murder" (90). Indeed, Becky, like Lydia and most other sensation heroines, only resorts to murder after she has been married and sexually experienced, closely associating feminine sexuality and murder. However, both Becky and Lydia seem, despite their active exploitation of their sexuality, too rational and calculating rather than too passionate. They carry out their crimes with calculation and elaborate, goal-oriented scheming and they murder out of greed, revenge, and, in the case of Lydia's first murder, potentially self-defence rather than out of passion. Jos's murder takes place at the hands of his nurse—Becky has "tended him through a series of unheard-of illnesses" (Thackeray 873) before his death. Becky's crime (most likely poisoning), then, is a "private" crime that, committed within the home and by a woman, "shook traditional

89 ideas of love and safety" (Kalikoff 59). In the nineteenth century poisoning was generally associated with a female murderer, not only because arsenic could be easily obtained and was an essential ingredient in cosmetics (Talairach-Vielmas 141), but also because it did not require any physical strength. Beth Kalikoff argues that "most disquieting of all, poison can be administered during the normal round of domestic care, by people who serve dinner, raise children, and tend to the sick" (59).

Lydia begins her "career" as a criminal much earlier than Becky and by the time she plans her second murder she is familiar with professional criminals and impostors whose support becomes crucial to the successful execution of her plans. When she is twelve years old, Lydia forges letters for Mrs. Armadale and enables her marriage with

Ingleby. Lydia contemplates whether she has a natural predisposition for criminality when she writes: "there are not many girls of twelve who could have imitated a man's handwriting, and held their tongues about it afterwards, as I did" (Collins 425). However, the novel seems to indicate that criminality is environmental and the result of neglect and an abusive upbringing rather than Lydia's nature. Lydia's earliest memory is that of

"being beaten and half starved" (Collins 521), and when she is eight years old, the

Oldershaws use her as an exhibit in order to advertise their cosmetic practices and products. After the forgery, Lydia's second crime is her involvement in illegal gambling years later; she becomes the "decoy" for a group of "card-sharpers" (Collins 525). After this group's confederacy has been exposed by Mr. Waldron, Lydia, being "amazingly virtuous or amazingly clever" (Collins 525), as Jemmy Bashwood says, gives Mr.

Waldron the ultimatum of either "address[ing] her honourably or leav[ing] her forever"

(Collins 525). When their marriage becomes emotionally and physically abusive and

90 when Lydia has fallen in love with Captain Manuel, Lydia poisons her husband. Despite the marital violence, which allows the interpretation of self-defence, Lydia has two other strong motifs for killing Waldron: his will which, to her knowledge, would make her

"mistress of a fortune upon his death" and the fact that "she was by her own confession contemplating an elopement with another man" (Collins 529). Unlike Becky, Lydia is tried for her murder but, like Becky, she insists on her innocence—even if, at least for the reader, there can be no doubt about her guilt. Various critics point out that Lydia's trial mirrors a number of nineteenth-century murder trials that dominated contemporary newspapers.

Just as Lydia's "private" crime of poisoning her husband dominates the press as

"the Trial of the famous Mrs. Waldon" (Collins 525), a number of murderesses gained questionable fame for the killings of their husbands in the 1850s, such as "Marie Lafarge and Euphemie Lacoste in France" (Talairach-Vielmas 147) and Madeleine Smith in

England, who, in 1857, "was accused of poisoning her lover by putting arsenic in his food and claimed to have bought arsenic to use in a face-wash for her complexion"

(Talairach-Vielmas 147-48). Talairach-Vielmas points out that

all [these murder cases] involved arsenic, thus locating criminality in

typically feminine cosmetic practices. [...] In the same way as Smith, Lacoste

used a cure-all, Fowler's Solution, a mixture of oil of lavender, cinnamon,

and arsenic. Significantly, modes of female education and of training in 'fine

ladyism' often came into question during the trials. (148)

91 While there is "no evidence to connect [Lydia] with the possession of poison" (Collins

529), Lydia's knowledge of cosmetics, acquired during her time with the Oldershaws, and her almost hateful caution in her own use of them links her explicitly to these historical murderesses: when Mother Oldershaw encourages her to "use one or two of

[her] applications" (Collins 160), Lydia writes: "Keep your odious powders and paints and washes for the spotted shoulders of your customers; not one of them shall touch my skin, I promise you" (Collins 162). Collins's use of contemporary newspaper stories become ironically explicit when Lydia re-reads a letter from her bigamous lover Manuel in which he refers to "any collection of trials" and "yesterday's newspaper" to convince her that murdering a husband is not "beyond a woman's courage," but rather a commonplace event (Collins 444).

During Lydia's trial, her beauty and her ladylike appearance work in her favour; when she is convicted

the female part of the audience was in hysterics; and the male part was not

much better. The judge subbed and the Bar shuddered. She was sentenced to

death in such a scene as had never been previously witnessed in an English

Court of Justice. And she is alive and hearty at the present moment; free to do

any mischief she pleases. (Collins 529-30)

Again, Collins alludes to contemporary murder trials. Anthea Trodd points out that reports of Madeleine Smith's and Constance Kent's trials caused "extraordinary emotional scenes. In both trials there was strong sympathy for the accused in press and court-room, The acquittal of Madeleine was vigorously applauded; in sentencing

92 Constance the judge joined the rest of the court in weeping" (40). Collins, then, by repeatedly alluding "to the case of Madeleine Smith [...] testifies to the link between sensation fiction and contemporary news" and introduces a new kind of realism into a genre that was considered melodramatic by contemporary critics. As Richard Nemesvari points out, by "making fictions out of the stuff that filled the newspapers every day ,"

(Brantlinger "What is Sensational" 9) "sensation fiction could argue that it was more

'real' than realism, because it possessed a connection to actual events which realism, as

'pure' art, could not match. In its very 'impurity,' then, the sensational undercut realist fiction's claim to superior truthfulness" (Introduction 15).

Lydia's plan to inherit Allan's fortune by marrying Midwinter under his real name, Allan Armadale, and then killing Allan and impersonating his widow is planned unscrupulously and meticulously. Her motif is greed and financial necessity, but also hurt pride; she wants revenge for the "insults" she has suffered from Mrs. Armadale, Allan, and Neelie (Collins 450). Initially, plotting her revenge thrills Lydia; it makes her "blood leap, and [her] cheeks flush" (Collins 486). Lydia executes her three attempts to kill

Allan with calculating determination. Morris argues that Lydia's decision to murder

Waldron and later Armadale is "always a choice from which she maintain[s] intellectual and even emotional distance" (121). However, Mother Oldershaw's remark about Lydia's waking "anxious in the small hours of the morning" (Collins 160) and Lydia's laudanum addiction imply that Lydia is not completely insensitive to her guilt and her violations of morality.

When Lydia recalls her first murder while planning the second, she writes "some women would say—'it's easier the second time than the first.' Why can't I? Why can't

93 I?" (Collins 448), indicating that despite her criminal past she possesses moral sensitivity and suffers from a guilty conscience. Her laudanum addiction is the result of insomnia, which, in turn, seems to be caused by the memories of her criminal past. She writes:

Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of

my heart, whoever he was. If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and

mind, whose comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises,

what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of oblivion; I have

woke up with my mind composed. (Collins 426-27)

Even with the drugs, Lydia "groan[s] and [grinds] her teeth in her sleep" (Collins

315). However, Lydia is careful enough to take her laudanum "drops" only at night and to therefore avoid a more destructive addiction. When anxiety and depression occur during the daytime, Lydia ponders that "a man in my place would find refuge in drinking. I'm not a man, and I can't drink" (Collins 444). Interestingly, Becky Sharp takes to the

"masculine" habit of drinking in Vanity Fair, when Jos visits her unexpectedly in her hotel in Baden, she hides a bottle of brandy in her bed. However, it is highly questionable that Becky drinks out of guilt or desperation. Lydia is repeatedly haunted by "the ghosts of those other men" and the "horror of those old remembrances" (Collins 421) and she realizes, with a surprising psychological insight, that her past experiences, Waldon's abuse, Manuel's bigamy and betrayal, and her own crimes have turned her into a woman who cannot feel love or compassion anymore (Collins 425). When she re-reads Manuel's letter in which he encourages her to kill Waldon, she states, with a tone of regret and desperation, that he is the man who "made [her] who [she is]" (Collins 444). Lydia's moody wavering between her rational scheming of a murder plot and her fear of her

94 memories makes the villainess of Armadale an ambiguous character. Thomas Boyle argues that Lydia "represents the furthest development in sensation fiction of the disturbing admixture of Good and Evil in one woman, the angel-as-tigress" (167) and that

"Gwilt steadfastly refuses to conform to either the conventional image of the passive, frail female or that of wild-eyed she-wolf (171). Consequently, "at the climax of the novel, in the tradition of Lady Audley, Gwilt is in her own unique way both culprit and victim" (172). Indeed, Lydia's decision to rescue Midwinter, her final display of the love she did not know she could still feel, and her suicide note are the most genuine actions and emotions in the entire novel. Lydia's sincerity is further emphasised by the contrast it provides to Mother Oldershaw's successful marketing of her career as a reformed

"sinner." Like Lucy Audley, Lydia, as a criminal and murderess, has to be eliminated from society at the end of the novel. Morris points out that

The dilemma the [creators of murderesses] created for themselves is this: in

explaining the women's motives and in making the women sympathetic, there

is a latent advocacy of violence and law-breaking. While the novelists were

sympathetic, they were also Victorians; they could not allow women to get

away with murder or destroy the established power structure. As a result,

guilty women did not benefit from their crimes by finding happiness or peace.

When novelists did not subject the women to the jurisdiction of the courts,

they made them commit suicide, withdraw from society, or become insane.

(5)

However, by making Lydia commit suicide, "unlike Lady Audley, [Collins allows Lydia] to control destiny" (Boyle 172). The ending of Armadale, then, while it follows the

95 sensation novels' convention of restoring social order at the end, closes with a last autonomous act of its villainess. Furthermore, while Allan and Neelie's conventional marriage is the novel's "happy end,"

this is by no means to be confused with a general or permanent victory of

good over evil, as is affirmed in genuine melodrama. [...] In Armadale the

respectable classes are not merely threatened or infiltrated from below; their

respectable position is squarely founded on the seething underworld of vice

and crime. (Hughes 159-60)

Mirroring the criminal intrusion of the Milroy family by Lydia, in the end of Armadale respectable society is infiltrated by dubious characters like Mrs. Oldershaw and Dr.

Downward. Despite Allan and Neelie's happy ending, society at large is still at risk.

However, as demonstrated by Lydia and Midwinter's violent upbringings, the world of

Armadale produces the very criminals that continuously threaten it. Unlike the moral message of Lady Audley 's Secret and Aurora Floyd, the "truth" that Armadale presents, then, is highly problematic, as criminality and devious femininity are not eliminated through Lydia's death.

Collins's Armadale mirrors contemporary newspaper stories throughout the novel, most explicitly when Collins's depiction of Lydia's murder trial resembles the trials of

Madeleine Smith and Constance Kent. The sensationalism of Armadale, then, is based on the reality of contemporary events and therefore questions the "superior truthfulness"

(Nemesvari Introduction 15) of literary realism. Furthermore, Armadale presents a challenge to sensational and melodramatic conventions in that its readers enter into an

96 intimate relationship with the novel's murderess, Lydia Gwilt. Lydia's diary confirms her status as a murderess, while it simultaneously presents her as a woman whose abusive past has "made [her] who [she is]" (Collins 444) and who is tormented by guilt. This personal access to Lydia's perspective distinguishes Armadale from Vanity Fair. While

Thackeray's narrator repeatedly reveals his heroine's scheming, Becky's perspective is always mediated—even her letters are a part of her public performance rather than private reminiscences. Becky's immorality and unscrupulousness become obvious early in

Vanity Fair, and the readers' fascination with Becky is accordingly problematic.

However, Becky's criminality is never explicitly articulated; the questions "was she guilty or not?", posed twice by the narrator, is never answered. Becky's ambiguous status as criminal heroine, then, becomes crucial in Becky's status as realist heroine. As

Virginia Morris and John Sutherland point out, Victorian morality demanded the interference of poetic justice to punish literary adulterous and murderous characters at the end of their stories. Becky's happy ending as a respectable woman and as a realist heroine is only possible because the narrator never confirms her guilt. It is ironic, however, that Becky's unacknowledged criminality—even though widely assumed by critics—and her escape of poetic justice seems to have minimized the moral threat she embodies. Thackeray's statement that "a polite public will [not] bear to read an authentic description of vice" and that Becky therefore "has been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive [if dishonest] manner" (Thackeray 812) shapes the definition of Vanity Fair's realism. Becky remains a realist rather than sensational heroine because the narrator keeps "everything above the water line [...] proper, agreeable, and decorous" (Thackeray 812-13) throughout the novel.

97 CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

By the time the sensation novel emerged as a distinct literary genre in the early

1860s, critics had determined literary realism as thematically and aesthetically superior to genres such as romance, melodrama, the gothic, and the Newgate novel. Nineteenth- century critics valued realist literature for its truthfulness and its educative value—an unsigned review states that realist fiction consists of "follow[ing] the subtle workings of human nature, [admiring] the play of wit and humour, [studying] homilies on the evils of society, however pleasantly they may be disguised" and that realism is directed at "those who go to a book for [...] instruction" ("Thackeray and Modern Fiction" 77). With the publication of his most celebrated work, Vanity Fair, in 1848 Thackeray became an exceedingly popular representative of Victorian realism; the anonymous writer of

"Thackeray and Modern Fiction" states that "if we compare the works of Thackeray and

Dickens with those which at present win the favour of novel-readers [sensation novels], we cannot fail to be struck with the very marked degeneracy" (77). Richard Nemesvari concludes that "sensation fiction was seen by many [contemporary critics] as a regression, a degrading step backwards which undermined the hard-earned respectability of the Victorian novel" (Introduction 13).

The publication of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth

Braddon's Lady Audley 's Secret, and Ellen Wood's East Lynne established sensationalism as a new literary genre in the early 1860s. Dealing with crimes, secrecy, mystery, and sexual misdemeanours, the sensational genre is often associated with the

98 gothic romances of the late eighteenth century, melodrama, and the Newgate novels of the 1830s. However, as opposed to the gothic, sensation fiction locates secrecy and crime within the proper Victorian middle-class family. From the 1860s to the 1970s the sensation novel was generally considered a "minor, marginal and short-lived [literary] form" that was "so much the product of its particular historical moment that it was unable to survive that moment" (Pykett The Sensation Novel 12). However, in the 1970s and 80s the development of feminist criticism and the works of critics such as Elaine Showalter,

Winifred Hughes, and Nina Auerbach re-established the sensation novel as a noteworthy literary genre that emerges from and contributes to historical developments and ideological debates of the nineteenth century. With the focus on its many female authors and its dominant and transgressive heroines and villainesses, the sensation novel is now considered as consciously participating in the debate about Victorian ideologies and anxieties surrounding "the nature and status of respectable femininity and the domestic ideal" (Pykett The Sensation Novel 10). However, throughout the 1860s these issues contributed majorly to the sceptical, if not outraged, reactions of nineteenth-century literary critics, who considered the genre of sensationalism artistically worthless and morally dangerous.

The insistence on firmly established and distinct genre definitions for realism and sensationalism, then, points to a number of cultural anxieties. First, as W. Fraser Rae points out, before the immense popularity of the sensation novel, "stories of blood and lust, of atrocious crimes and hardened criminals" were associated with a lower-class audience; Rae states that "the class that welcomed [these stories] was the lowest in the social scale, as well as in mental capacity" (qtd. in Nemesvari Introduction 14). The

99 enormous commercial success of the sensation novel threatened these literary class distinctions in that it made "the literature of the Kitchen the favourite reading of the

Drawing Room" (qtd. in Nemesvari Introduction 15). Secondly, the depictions of

sensational and criminal heroines in the novels of Braddon, Collins, Wood, and other

sensation authors challenge cultural ideals and literary conventions of heroine construction. Nineteenth-century critics repeatedly label sensation heroines as

"unnatural" and "unfeminine," indicating the centrality of the feminine ideal to cultural

ideologies and expressing the fear that sensational depictions of femininity might influence the novels' young female readers too strongly. Therefore, another crucial

element of the anxiety surrounding sensation fiction is the assumption that novel-reading

functions as moral instruction and that, if sensationalism is a "contaminated" genre, the morality of the English reading public might become corrupted as well.

However, an analysis of Thackeray's realist Vanity Fair alongside Braddon's

sensational Lady Audley 's Secret and Aurora Floyd, and Collins's Armadale calls into

question the firmly established genre boundaries critics assert between realist and

sensation fiction. As Thackeray's realist Becky Sharp displays various character traits that became characteristic of the sensation villainesses of the 1860s, she can be compared to concepts of sensational femininity in order to challenge traditional genre definitions.

In the second chapter of Vanity Fair Rebecca Sharp announces: "I'm no angel" (15), and immediately establishes herself as transgressing the nineteenth-century ideal of middle- class women as "angels of the house." At the same time, Rebecca establishes her "moral ambiguity" (Hughes 44) and challenges traditional concepts of literary heroines by stating: "revenge may be wicked, but it is natural" (Thackeray 15). Literary depictions of

100 unconventional femininity in realist and sensation fiction, then, contribute to the de- stabilization of genre boundaries. While Becky's unconventionality is "sensational" in that Becky is immoral and criminal, sensation heroines are realistic in that they expose

Victorian ideals of femininity as social constructs rather than truth.

Both Lucy Audley's and Becky's ambitions are spurred by their lower-class origins, and both women exploit their ideally feminine appearances in order to achieve a

"higher place in the world" (Thackeray 105) and to gain social respectability and financial stability. Both characters expose cultural ideals of femininity as elaborate performances, and their ambiguous status as heroines and villainesses challenges literary traditions of heroine construction. Therefore, the women's similar reaction to their social situations, their employment of the same methods to escape those situations, and their display of the same "pitiless" attitudes challenge traditional genre definitions and blur the generic distinctions between realism and sensationalism.

Braddon's sensational Aurora Floyd shifts its focus from women's economic dependence to feminine desires and sexuality. Aurora was considered "unfeminine" by contemporary critics because of her passionate impulsiveness and explicit sexual desires.

Braddon's Aurora Floyd, then, participates in contemporary debates about the nature of femininity in that it challenges assumptions of innate modesty and instinctive feminine propriety. Aurora, like Becky, is motherless and therefore "improperly feminized"

(Pykett Improper Feminine 86). Both Becky and Aurora are contrasted by the ideally feminized Amelia Sedley and Lucy Floyd. Ironically, their too proper feminization cannot protect Amelia and Lucy from either abusive men or unhappiness. On the contrary, unlike Becky and Aurora, Amelia and Lucy, having learned to repress their

101 emotions, suffer silently and passively throughout the major parts of both novels. Becky and Aurora's improper feminization results in their inability to function as moral role models for their (young female) readers. Both the realist Vanity Fair and the sensational

Aurora Floyd lack the approved educative potential that was required of novels by nineteenth-century critics.

Lydia Gwilt, the heroine and villainess of Collins's Armadale, is the most explicitly criminal of the four heroines. As Lydia narrates parts of the novel herself, the reader becomes uncomfortably familiar not only with Lydia's criminal schemes, but also with her memories, thoughts, and emotions. As Collins repeatedly references contemporary events and newspaper stories in his novel, the sensationalism of Armadale questions the "superior truthfulness" (Nemesvari Introduction 15) of literary realism.

While Becky is supposedly just as criminal as Lydia, Thackeray's narrator never explicitly acknowledges Becky's adultery and murder. Ironically, this refusal to admit

Becky's guilt seems to become a key element in the definition of Vanity Fair as a realist novel: Becky escapes narrative justice only because she is not explicitly criminal. Even though the two women display similar criminal potential, the novels' treatment of Becky and Lydia raises questions about a difference in moral attitude between the realist and the sensation novel.

Ultimately, stable genre definitions and strict distinctions between realism and sensationalism emerge as an aspect of elaborate Victorian ideologies; ideologies that supported the supposed "stability of Victorian patriarchal culture" (Maunder xvi).

Nineteenth-century anxieties surrounding the sensation novel are rooted in the genre's immense commercial success and its popularity with a variety of social classes, its

102 unconventional depictions of femininity, and its inability (or unwillingness) to provide its readers with eligible role models. An analysis of Thackeray's realist Vanity Fair in conjunction with Braddon's and Collins's sensation novel, however, undermines the stability of genre definitions. The similarities between Becky Sharp, Lucy Audley,

Aurora Floyd, and Lydia Gwilt point to the cultural significance of Victorian genre definitions and gender ideologies while dissolving generic boundaries.

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