A Masculinizing Investigation: the Detective and the Problem of Female Reticence in the Sensational Detective Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins

A MASCULINIZING INVESTIGATION: THE DETECTIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE RETICENCE IN THE SENSATIONAL DETECTIVE FICTION OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON AND WILKIE COLLINS

BRITTANY L. PARKHURST

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2007

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people who have contributed to the success of this project and who

deserve acknowledgement. My sincere gratitude is given to Dr. Chris Snodgrass and my

director, Dr. Pamela Gilbert, whose enthusiasm, intelligence, patience, and guidance have made

this thesis possible. Their meaningful questions, shrewd suggestions, and overall expertise

significantly impacted the way I conceived of this project. Further thanks is given to the friends who supported my work by way of advice, a willing ear, or a cup of coffee. I lastly thank my fiancé, Kyle Roberts, for his candid opinions and love. His willingness to set aside his own work

to help me develop my ideas prevented (almost all) mental breakdowns. Sometimes you need

the confidence of others to take over when yours starts to drop off—all of these people provided

that confidence to me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 3

ABSTRACT...... 5

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 7

2 LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET...... 12

3 THE MOONSTONE...... 28

LIST OF REFERENCES...... 44

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 47

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

A MASCULINIZING INVESTIGATION: THE DETECTIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE RETICENCE IN THE SENSATIONAL DETECTIVE FICTION OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON AND WILKIE COLLINS

Brittany L. Parkhurst

May 2007

Chair: Pamela K. Gilbert Major: English

This project seeks to trace the process by which bourgeois men come of age in Mary

Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. In each novel,

this process is one, I argue, that develops alongside the process of detection. That each novel

belongs to the sensation genre of the 1860s distinguishes each from other more traditional detective novels insofar as the mystery of the sensation novel is one that is largely concerned with the enigma of femininity. In the novels considered here, the process of detection is complicated by women who withhold information from the “amateur” detectives who seek it.

Silent women consistently threaten to unman the detective and jeopardize the empirical virility of the detective plot as a whole. Yet, the challenge posed by this silence is actually crucial to the narrative of detection, and the coming-of-age of the detective, in that it creates the central mystery of the text that tests its detective’s ability to expose, contain, and control the “truth” of the novel, which for the sensation novel is a “truth” about femininity. Thus, learning to “know” women becomes part of the process by which these detectives become men. Ultimately, in this project, I seek to continue the work of Lyn Pykett, Ann Cvetkovich, Winifred Hughes, and

others who have sought to emphasize and problematize the role of women in sensation fiction, while also removing the veil that has covered the male body from critical inquiry.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Both Lady Audley’s Secret (1861) and The Moonstone (1868) can dually fit into the genres of sensation and detective fiction. Although both novels are by and large universally accepted as belonging to the sensation “fad” of the 1860s, their status as detective novels is generally seen as more tenuous. A.D. Hutter, however, has indeed called The Moonstone a “prototypical” detective novel (175), while T.S. Eliot has identified it as “the first and greatest of English detective novels” (377). Similar claims are often made about Lady Audley’s Secret. What largely seems to distinguish these works from more canonical detective stories is the detective’s amateur status as a member of the family involved in the crime. The central detective figures of these sensational detective novels are not hired like the outsider “Sherlock Holmes” characters of the latter part of the century, nor should they be as they really aren’t very good at what they do; instead, they are themselves profoundly implicated in the mysteries that surround them given their position in the family and are thus as much a part of the larger puzzle as any “trifle” of a clue.

The sensation novels are often identified as such due to their reputation of bringing the frightening mysteries of the gothic into modern British society as well as their ability to evoke physical sensations in the body of their readers. The plot of the sensation novel works gradually to restore the order to the family these strange circumstances have compromised. Typically, all is considered well when there is a marriage or a child (of course only at the end of the novel or else it is quite likely that neither the marriage nor the child will turn out to be legitimate, thus causing even more problems). But significantly, in each novel considered here, the mystery itself is not divisible from the courtship narrative. For the detectives of both Lady Audley’s Secret and The

Moonstone, solving the crime means making the circumstances of their own marriages possible.

And crucially, as John Tosh has observed, marriage articulates for middle-class Victorian men the achievement of masculinity:

The complete transition to manhood depended on marriage. A fondness for female society could be indulged as a bachelor among the demi-monde; only marriage could yield the full privileges of masculinity. To form a household, to exercise authority over dependents, and to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining and protecting them—these things set the seal on a man’s gender identity. (108)

Marriage, though, is only possible for these young detectives when their investigation succeeds and the case at hand is solved. To achieve success in the investigation requires both detectives to learn what it means to be a man.

While Andrew Dowling emphasizes the roles of “active sexuality, rigid duty, proud nationality, and straightforward speech” in allowing the individual man to become part of the hegemonic idea of manhood (3), both James Eli Adams and Herbert Sussman suggest that it is emphatic self-disciplining that authorizes a man’s status as a gentleman. As Robert Audley and

Franklin Blake learn how to become detectives, they likewise learn how to practice self-control, something neither one is very good at before their mutual investigations begin (the former is lazy and indulgent while the latter is a debtor and philanderer). Ascertaining the right time to speak, act, finesse, or simply keep quiet is crucial to solving their case. Performing these acts of self- control through their performance as detectives is a way, Adams would argue, of “performing” masculinity. The success of which, evidently, facilitates marriage, which in turn serves to solidify their masculine identity. Ultimately, through the process of the detection—a process, I will show, that is significantly complicated by women—these “amateur” detectives are able to come of age, to become men.

Largely, this project participates in the ongoing discussion generated by the scholarship of

Peter Brooks in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, which posits the body as an

“epistemophilic project” (5). In Body Work, Brooks explores the nexus of “desire, the body, the

drive to know, and narrative” (5). He observes that in modern literary works (which he defines

as beginning during the mid-eighteenth century), a central protagonist will generally desire a

body—either his or her own or, more often than not, the body of another—that he or she feels

will provide the “key to satisfaction, power, and meaning” (8). Crucially, Brooks finds that, “on

a plane of reading, desire for knowledge of that body and its secrets becomes the desire to master

the text’s symbolic system, its key to knowledge, pleasure, and the very creation of significance”

(8). In the works discussed here, which are in this respect representative of the larger pool of sensation fiction, the body desired is the female body. The mystery, according to Lyn Pykett’s work, is always one involving the enigma of femininity.

With the sensational detective novel, then, the “key to satisfaction, power, and meaning” for the detective is tracking down and “knowing” women, which I suggest becomes part of the process that allows them to come of age. So while the detectives in these novels might, on one hand, be looking to solve the mystery of a missing George Talboys or the theft of a Moonstone, they are also, on the other hand, trying to make woman’s body into a signifying text that can be read and deciphered through the process of their investigation.

The women of both Lady Audley’s Secret and The Moonstone seem to resist decoding, however, as they are noticeably, indeed tenaciously, silent. But, evidently indebted to Foucault’s study of sexuality, Brooks points out that “when the body becomes more secret, hidden, covered, it becomes all the more intensely the object of curiosity” (15). Thus, the more reticent the woman, the more intense need the detectives have to get her to break her silence, as their manhood, I argue, does depend upon it.

Tamar Heller has suggested that the “battle to break women’s silence is […] a battle over the control of knowledge,” and that the role of detective “reinforces the control over women that

Victorian gender ideology gave to men within courtship and marriage” (253). If in the sensation

novel “masculinity occupies the position of empirical observation and truth-seeking,” as Anna

Jones suggests (198), then the willfully silent woman challenges the authority of not only the

process of knowing, but also the authority of masculinity by trying to undermine the

investigation of the detective. In the novels examined here, silent women consistently threaten

to unman the detective and jeopardize the empirical virility of the detective plot as a whole. Yet,

the challenge posed by this silence is actually crucial to the narrative of detection insofar as it

creates the central mystery of the text that tests its detective’s ability to expose, contain, and

control the “truth” of novel. This challenge, I suggest, must always be answered for the plot to

work.

Silence of course is never simply a “lack” or an “absence.” The view of silence

foregrounded in the first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, one which posits it as an

equally important component of discourse as that which is said, has now been largely accepted:

Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies. (27)

But, silence has still remained a vexed concept in feminist studies, especially, as Ann Cvetkovich points out, in how it relates to power.

Although we typically equate silence with submission while we consider speaking out as liberating and worthwhile, silence can be as much about resistance as it is compliance. Heather

Milton, for instance, has argued that women’s silence can actually be quite empowering. In her work on female confession and bourgeois subjectivity, Milton finds that women often equivocate

or simply remain silent to destabilize the power-knowledge dynamic of the confessional

exchange. Doing so, she argues, allows women to avoid being subjected to and positioned

within an existing discourse of “sex, sin, and shame” (11). Thus, when the detectives in these works encourage women to break their silence, they do so with the intention of “setting things right,” of restoring the order to both the family and the social world that this silence has interrupted.

That each woman must break her silence in order to resolve the text’s central mystery and reassert the masculine process of truth-seeking is, I argue, necessary for the sensational detection plot to work. How each woman breaks her silence and the reasons she has for, or the stake she has in, keeping her silence will determine how these disclosures implicate the confessant in discourses of acceptable femininity when they are read, deciphered, and contained by the masculine detective. Through the elicitation of women’s secrets, the detective, as agent of social policing, acquires the power to redeem or condemn, which in turn affirms his masculinity.

Ultimately, in this project, I seek to continue the work of Lyn Pykett, Ann Cvetkovich, Winifred

Hughes, and others who have sought to emphasize and problematize the role of women in sensation fiction, while also removing the veil that has covered the male body from critical inquiry.1

1 Peter Brooks has argued that the male body is ostensibly “deproblematized, decathected as an object of curiosity or of representation, and concomitantly more thoroughly hidden [than the female body]” (15). Furthermore, because the male body is the “norm,” the body upon which otherness is measured, it tends to be veiled from inquiry; the male body is, according to Brooks, “taken as the agent and not the object of knowing” (15).

CHAPTER 2 LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET

I will confess anything—everything! What do I care? God knows I have struggled hard enough against you, and fought the battle patiently enough; but you have conquered, Mr. Robert Audley. --Lady Audley to Robert Audley, Lady Audley’s Secret

[T]he truth did not reside solely in the subject who, by confessing, would reveal it wholly formed […] the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said. The one who listened was not simply the forgiving master, the judge who condemned or acquitted; he was the master of truth. --Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

With Robert Audley’s near death at the hand of his aunt’s murderous impulses and malicious midnight pyrotechnics, the stakes of the “battle” waged between the two are serious enough. As a matter of life and death, the import of this struggle has been a subject of critical inquiry for some time now and is perhaps most often used in generating discussions concerning the frightening Victorian meta-realities that converge in Lady Audley when the logic of Angel-in the-House femininity is laid bare. Indeed, Robert’s investigation and ultimate exposure of the

“monster” at Audley court is of one who, by the novel’s end, testifies to the ability of marriage to

provide women with a legitimate means to climb socially and, in doing so, more (or less) subtly

critiques the concept of the marriage market when she exploits this method of exchange as a

bigamist and would-be murderer.1

But, this kind of behavior is ostensibly wrong, so when Robert Audley bears witness to his

aunt’s confession of her misdeeds, he becomes not only personally concerned in her crime and

the execution of her treatment (punishment?), but socially responsible for appropriating both as

well. In this role, according to Foucault, Robert becomes importantly implicated in creating a

discourse of truth that posits the confessional exchange as a sign rather than a “test,” which thus

1 For more information on how Lady Audley abides by and yet subverts the structure of the marriage market, see Lyn Pykett’s The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992.

serves to make him the “master or truth” in his unique position (67). His responsibility is therefore not only to “forgive, console, and direct” Lady Audley (Foucault 66), but also to make her sinful behavior definably, indeed scientifically, aberrant through this hermeneutic process.

The diagnosis: “latent insanity” (372).

The process by which Robert becomes a “master of truth,” or how his investigation ultimately gains him the confessions of both Lady Audley and Phœbe Marks and transforms him into a powerful, masculine detective, is key in this analysis. Significantly, the story of Lucy

Graham’s rise to the mistress of Audley Court and eventual death in the madhouse is only one of three distinct narratives in the novel, though it typically receives the most critical attention.

Pamela Gilbert has pointed out that along with Lady Audley’s narrative there is a clear coming- of-age story for Robert Audley as well as a detective narrative that connects the stories of the two main characters. Recent scholarship on Lady Audley’s Secret has undergone, as Simon

Petch has observed, a noticeable shift in focus from Lady Audley’s narrative to Robert Audley’s developing masculinity. Robert’s transformation from what Vicki A. Pallo calls a “ne’er-do-well aristocrat with no ambitions or respect for societal expectations” to a “model citizen [who] embod[ies] the social institutions he had heretofore rejected” (466), seems to be a site of productive critical exploration in the reading of this novel and, as I argue, the larger configuring of the role of the “amateur” sensation detective as a stabilizing agent of social order.

Because what is at stake in the sensation novel depends as much upon the investigation and the process of knowing as it does the final exposure of the secret (the confession), this shift in focus to Robert Audley’s developing masculinity is not too surprising. Be Lady Audley’s madness feigned or real, the question of what socio-economic dynamics make a “monster” out of a golden-haired Angel in the House has been asked—how this silent she-monster makes a man

out of a barrister given these dynamics is a question that still needs to be considered. The

profound effort both Lady Audley and her lady’s maid, Phœbe Marks, take to impede Robert’s

investigation serves, I suggest, not only to protect themselves, but also to challenge the authority

of masculine empiricism in general—a challenge that Robert Audley must overcome in order for

the detective plot to work and, as an agent of this plot, to affirm his masculinity.

Crucially, how these women evade Robert’s inquiries time and time again is by remaining silent, which seems to serve as an immense source of power for them throughout the novel. As

Ann Cvetkovich points out, the relationship between silence and power is one that has received

mixed opinions in the field of feminist studies; typically, we equate silence with submission

while we consider speaking out as liberating and worthwhile. Janis P. Stout, however, warns

against conflating women’s silence with compliance, as silence can work as “consciously or

unconsciously chosen strategies for effect” (viii), in the case of Lady Audley to avoid complying

with Robert’s investigation. Heather Milton furthermore argues in her extensive study of women

and confession that women’s silence can actually be quite empowering: “evasion and equivocation are strategies for finessing the power-knowledge relationship. […] Opting out of the economy of confession, these women attempt to evade being positioned into a pre-existing discourse of sex, sin, and shame by remaining silent” (11). Pressuring women to break their silence, to confess freely and openly to the knowledge they hold, is then a way for Robert to subvert the power of silence while affirming the potency of patient masculine empiricism. As a detective—even if only an amateur one—Robert becomes an embodiment of this investigative, masculine force. Through the success of his investigation, his ability to penetrate female secrets, and his ostensible restoration of order and stability to both the narrative and the social world it

constructs, Robert Audley is finally able to become a man.

To trace how this transformation happens, it should first be noted that scholars like Simon

Petch, Vicki Pallo, Lynda Hart, Pamela Gilbert and others2 frequently charge Robert Audley’s

investigation as the catalyst that makes him a man and, in doing so, have cast Lady Audley’s

Secret as a terrific novel to consider the detective’s stake in solving the central mystery of the

text. Robert’s transition from a “lazy, care-for nothing fellow” with a “listless, dawdling,

indifferent, irresolute manner” (35) to a mature, married man certainly does seem to testify to the

transformative power of the detective investigation. In her study of this transformation, Vicki

Pallo remarks on the tendency of detectives in their emerging form in both society and fiction at

this time to be typically a much more “productive, determined, and ‘masculine’ lot” than we see

in the character of Robert Audley, which thus necessitates he give up the French novels and the

German pipe of his bachelorhood in order to fulfill the duties this manly role requires (468).

Writing on how this change occurs, Simon Petch compelling argues that Robert’s investigation

of Lady Audley’s past gradually initiates him to the life of a professional man insofar as the

investigation necessarily navigates him through various realms of legal knowledge:

“Specifically, he has to confront the significance of contract, trust, masculine professional

relationship, and inductive reasoning. And, in conjunction with these processes, he must

exorcise the demon of his misogyny” (1).

While I agree with Petch’s observations, it should be noted that the lawyer-in-training is

ironically not a very good detective. In fact, many times it seems as though Robert Audley tries

to avoid solving the mystery at hand. Notably, at one point in his investigation, Robert overtly

offers to “leave England and abandon [his] search for evidence” if Mr. Harcourt Talboys will

2 Petch, Simon. “Robert Audley’s Profession.” Studies in the Novel. 32.1 (2000): 1-13. Pallo, Vicki A. “From Do- Nothing to Detective: The Transformation of Robert Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret.” Journal of Popular Culture. 49.3 (2006): 466-479. Hart, Lynda. “The Victorian Villainess and the Patriarchal Unconscious.” Literature and Psychology. 40.3 (1994): 1-25. Gilbert, Pamela. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

only ask him to do so (194). Furthermore, time and time again, Robert openly refuses valuable information that is crucial to the solving of his case; we are perhaps reminded of Robert’s desire to rid himself of little Georgey Talboys so as to “extort nothing from his innocent simplicity” that might abet the investigation (177), or perhaps his refusal to exploit Mr. Maldon’s “drunken imbecility” (170), though both gentlemen might have easily saved him quite a few steps in the puzzle.

Noting this resistance, Gilbert remarks that Robert may perhaps be “the only detective in fiction who consistently enjoins his informants not to tell him the truth” and argues that this deviation from the standard detective model might thus signify that “Braddon’s detective plot dramatizes less the process of producing knowledge than it does the inability to know”

(“Madness and Civilization” 224). I agree. However, unlike Gilbert, I find that Robert’s decision to avoid taking advantage of certain circumstances that may facilitate his mission are less a direct effect of his “role as a gentleman and member of the ruling class,” which “dictates that truth be subordinated to the appropriateness of the means of producing knowledge,” than it is his desire to solicit the information from women specifically (“Madness and Civilization”

224). If we agree with the observations of Anthea Trodd, Lyn Pykett, and more recently Anna

Jones and find women unavoidably implicated in the mysteries emphasized, produced, and sustained by the sensation genre, then it becomes crucial to consider Robert’s obsession with eliciting “the truth” from women’s own mouths. In other words, we should strive not only to decide what is at stake for women in preserving their “sinister” secrets, but also to imagine what is at stake for the detective who fails to elicit the secret from the woman herself—for the detective who fails to generate a confession.

Of course, getting women to reveal their secrets is particularly challenging for Robert considering how invested the women of Lady Audley’s Secret are in keeping quiet. Both Lady

Audley and Phœbe Marks go to great lengths to avoid confessing and Braddon certainly goes to great lengths to ensure that her readers notice their silence. For instance, it seems as though nearly every time Lady Audley is interrogated by Robert or questioned by her husband she has moments when she becomes temporarily lost for words. Often, Lady Audley answers questions with a shrug of the shoulders rather than an articulated answer (110, 142, 265, 267, 268, 310).

Many times she chooses not to answer at all: “Lady Audley did not answer” (320, 321, 334, 338,

339). Occasionally she decides simply to sit quietly or stare in response (143, 224, 225, 273,

280). Thus, when Robert Audley vents that “women don’t know when to be quiet,” he is perhaps being a bit ironic (208). In this revealing moment of overwhelmed irritation just after his initial meeting with Clara Talboys, Robert disparages what he perceives as women’s power over men:

[Women] are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. […] To call them the weaker sex is a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more preserving, the more self-assertive sex. […] [L]et them be quiet—if they can. […] I hate women. (208, my emphasis)

What is certainly a bit odd about Robert’s description of women’s power is the way in which he associates it with noise. To call women self-assertive or strong seems a more fitting or at least a more typical handling of calling attention to their power; however, to call them the “noisier” sex and remark on the “clamour” thus produced by their riotous and murderous dispositions seems bizarre—especially when compared to Lady Audley’s hitherto conspicuous quietude.

Here, it may be useful to situate this attention to noise within Robert’s larger derision of female authority described in this particular passage. Ann Cvetkovich, for example, points out that “Robert Audley views women as powerful and rebellious in order to contain them” (65).

She argues that while the novel does police illicit female behavior, it also undermines these

“processes of containment” by exposing the limitations of its detective, which would seem to explain the evident frustration Robert conveys in his rant. However, Cvetkovich also contends that Robert Audley’s “marginality,” i.e. his “desire, his homoeroticism, and his asociality,” is able to be “converted into an operation of the law” that ultimately allows him to become a

“guardian of the status quo” (67). Clearly indebted to D.A. Miller’s theories of the novel as a policing mechanism, Ronald Thomas further observes that “the literary detective […] dramatiz[es] the powerful and productive role of the social order” (176); thus, in his role as detective Robert actually has the power to fulfill his fantasies of control when he can generate the articulated confessions he needs in order to contain what he perceives as dangerous femininity. Richard Nemesvari confirms this potential when he asserts that locking Lady Audley up in a maison de santé is an act that “symbolizes both [Robert’s] victory over [his aunt] and his neutralization of the dangerous potential for unrestrained female autonomy she represents” (518).

Calling women the “noisier” sex might then be seen as an attempt to pacify Robert’s own anxieties about the silence he presumably cannot contain or control. As noisy and clamourous murderesses, women make themselves noticeable and their motives known. In fact, it is the

“death” of Helen Talboys—a kind of an eternal silencing that might have forever buried Lady

Audley’s secret—that puts Robert’s investigation into motion and serves as a kind of silent question mark that needs explicating in order to resolve the text. And though Robert certainly has a preoccupation with, if not an outright fear of, being fooled by women—what with their

“womanly trickery” (266), “feminine prevarication” (266, 268), and “woman jugglery” (149)— he becomes “a pitiless embodiment of justice” that will unquestionably prevail in his mission

(268). Indeed, with profound determination, the would-be attorney pulls this mystery out of the

grave with one shovelful of “circumstantial evidence” after another until Lady Audley is shrieking: “[L]et him hear the secret of my life!” (341).

Robert’s ability to finesse confessions seems to testify to his abilities as a detective, a lawyer, and a bourgeois man insofar as all three rely on an ethic of control (and self-control) to reinforce their power. James Eli Adams writes that the authority of the professional man, like that of the gentleman, “depends crucially on strategies of persuasion or charismatic self- presentation” (6). That Robert is able to garner Lady Audley’s confession suggests that his

“strategies of persuasion,” are acute, which foreshadows his success in winning the “great breach of promise case,” Hobbs V. Nobbs and achieving celebrated status in his profession (435). If women’s rhetorical suavity, and importantly their refusal to enter into a dialogue at all, allows them to remain just outside of Robert Audley’s grasp, this silence must be broken if he is to succeed in his investigation and, predictably, “come of age.”

Commenting on Lady Audley’s “soft answers” for “turning away wrath,” the narrator warns that so long as there is silence and secrecy there can never actually be any resolution whatsoever: “There can be no reconciliation where there is no open warfare. There must be a battle, a brave boisterous battle, with pennants waving and cannon roaring, before there can be peaceful treaties and enthusiastic shaking of hands” (289, my emphasis). While being “buried alive” in a maison de santé is a far cry from a “peaceful treaty” or an “enthusiastic shaking of hands,” the relationship between Robert Audley and Phœbe Marks perhaps more visibly illustrates this kind of resolution. It is not too surprising that Lady Audley, as the title character of the novel, frequently dominates discussions of her “secret” and often curtails analyses of other important female characters; however, Phœbe Marks also plays an important role in Robert’s

investigation and Braddon consistently emphasizes the similarities between the infamous heroine and her lady’s companion and confidant, which thus justifies a closer analysis.

While Lady Audley’s motives for keeping her past a secret are perhaps obvious enough,

Phœbe’s stake in avoiding Robert Audley’s probing questions is perhaps less so. Whatever the similarities between these two women may be (there are certainly many parallels to be made), both share a similar ethic of silence that, when adhered to, produces the mystery that protects their social and economic mobility—and both are solicited by Robert to break this silence.

Although Braddon does emphasize a kind of physical sameness between Lady Audley and

Phœbe, the likeness between these women seems to extend beyond mere physicality:

The likeness which the lady’s maid bore to Lucy Audley was, perhaps, a point of sympathy between the two women. It was not to be called a striking likeness; a stranger might have seen them both together, and yet have failed to remark it. But there were certain dim and shadowy lights in which, meeting Phœbe Marks […] you might have easily mistaken her for my lady. (108)

Lynn Voskuil argues that this slight physical resemblance has “the potential to aggravate

Victorian anxieties about class distinctions that were quickly crumbling (according to some

Victorians)” because “physiological resemblance could challenge the belief in transcendent sources of identity that were exteriorized in distinctive gender and class roles” (624-25). From this perspective, the more frightening confusion generated by the appearances of these two women is less one of physical semblance as it is class ambiguity. The women share a “point of sympathy” because of their mutual understanding of a female-coded poverty whose relief is predicated primarily by marriage (even for Phœbe, as I will argue). Indeed, it is not hard to conceive that Phœbe’s fate and Lady Audley’s might have easily been reversed had not circumstances been as they were.

As it is, however, Lucy Graham becomes the wife of Sir Michael and acquires the title of

“Lady”; yet, Phœbe’s marriage to Luke Marks also secures a kind of class mobility that is

perhaps not immediately evident in the shadow of Lady Audley’s grandiose union. This ascent

does not occur because Luke holds a particularly admirable social position as an “under groom”

(although his personality is a merit in itself), but rather because Phœbe’s marriage to him promises his continued protection of Lady’s Audley’s secret past, if only for a time. Although

Lady Audley is “a little capricious in her conduct to [her] maid; sometimes very confidential, sometimes rather reserved,” the narrator stresses that she is “a very liberal mistress, and [Phœbe] had every reason to be satisfied with her situation” (60). Indeed, Braddon repeatedly emphasizes that Phœbe is “treated as a companion by her mistress […] with perquisites such as perhaps no lady’s-maid ever had before” (100); her wages are always described as “liberal” (60, 110, 112).

Lady Audley herself declares to Phœbe: “you are a good industrious girl, and while I live and am prosperous you shall never want a firm friend or a twenty pound note” (81). It is therefore imperative to protect her mistress’s “prosperity” for her own sake. What is more, Phœbe need not ever worry about the discontinuation of these favors as her discovery of a “baby’s little worsted shoe [with] a tiny lock of pale and silky yellow hair” has forever secured them so long as Luke testifies to this discovery as her eye witness (34). Thus, if Lady Audley is discovered to be the late Helen Talboys come back again from the grave, Phœbe, too, would suffer the inevitable fall.

Keeping the details of Lady Audley’s past in a silent grave is then of the utmost importance for both women and breaking this silence can have terrible consequences for each.

When Lady Audley confesses the details of her life to Robert Audley, he immediately “buries

her alive” in an asylum; when Phœbe discloses this same secret to Luke she becomes vividly

aware of his new stronghold over herself as well as her mistress. In this way, Phœbe’s status as a

lady’s esteemed companion—the closest she might come to possessing those great diamonds

hidden away in Lady Audley’s chamber drawers—depends upon her pacifying Luke Marks in the only way that she can. Luke Marks wants to get married.

Unaware of the power Luke holds over both herself and Phœbe, Lady Audley derides the proposed marriage of her companion to the Audley Court groom. While Phœbe, too, detests the idea of a life-long union with her cousin, she is resolute in her decision: “I tell you I must marry him. You don’t know what he is. It will be my ruin, and the ruin of others, if I break my word. I must marry him!” (112). Although Phœbe admits that she was “little better than fifteen” when she agreed to marry Luke, she confides in Lady Audley that she has committed herself to silent acquiescence: “There have been times when I’ve made up the very sentence I meant to say to him, telling him that I couldn’t keep my faith with him; but the words have died upon my lips, and I’ve sat looking at him, with a choking sensation in my throat that wouldn’t let me speak”

(111). Certainly Phœbe fears the physical retribution of crossing Luke; she does after all divulge that he has always been “violent and revengeful” and that she has seen him take a knife to his own mother (111). However, when she says that her marriage will prevent her own ruin and the ruin of “others,” violence can no longer wholly answer for her apprehension. Similarly, as Lady

Audley herself points out, the possibility of violence does not seem to justify a union that would inevitably magnify its threat. The “ruin” will be one of exposure for both Lady Audley and

Phœbe—a fall from social grace like none other.

Thus, when Phœbe takes her bridal walk with Luke in the Audley churchyard, she secures, as her mistress did, a kind of social mobility. A vow of silence is exchanged with each “I do” and the ghost of a secret past is pacified a bit longer. Braddon once again stresses the uncanny similarities between this new bride and she who supposedly lies beneath the headstone of Helen

Talboys in her description of the marriage scene:

A very dim and shadowy lady; vague of outline, and faint of colouring; with eyes, hair, complexion, and dress all melting into such pale and uncertain shades that in the obscure light of the foggy November morning, a superstitious stranger might have mistaken the bride for the ghost of some other bride, dead and buried in the vaults below the church. (114)

Although Harriet Blodgett attributes this description to Braddon’s effort “to underscore the

difference” between Phœbe and Lady Audley, and furthermore casts the maidservant as an

“invisible bride” who has “negated her own preferences” like Helen Talboys (144), I see the

comparison as Braddon’s attempt to underscore the similarities between Lady and maid by

coding the latter as a kind of living apparition of a secret that has been dead and buried in a silent

grave. In other words, in Phœbe, the secret lives just as much as it does in the surviving body of

Lady Audley. Without Phœbe’s silence, and the silence she attempts to secure in Luke through marriage, this secret can be exposed. This is a mistress who truly needs her maid.

Certainly Lady Audley finds an ideal co-conspirator in Phœbe. Robert quickly discovers this fact when he realizes that any attempt to wrest information about his elusive aunt from this silent abettor will undoubtedly fail. Indeed, when he visits Phœbe at the Castle Inn with the hope of acquiring some useful details about Lady Audley’s past with the Dawson family, he encounters a woman who is wholly “silent and contained,” one who “hold[s] herself within herself” entirely (135). Upon this encounter, Robert twice repeats: “this is a woman who can keep a secret” (136-37). He furthermore reflects that Phœbe would be “good in a witness box” and that “it would take a clever lawyer to bother her in a cross-examination” (136); again, “a counsel for the prosecution would get very little help out of her” (137). Of course, it is this silent reserve, this “womanly trickery,” that both interest and vex the barrister. Importantly, he not only observes and mistrusts Phœbe’s silence, he also views it as something that needs to be broken—and what better lawyer to bring out a confession than himself, the self-proclaimed

“embodiment of justice” (268)?

Luke Marks, on the other hand, is decidedly less “silent and contained” than his wife and

often threatens to reveal his share of knowledge of the whole affair when he perceives that Lady

Audley’s “gift” (read: bribe) of seventy-five pounds for the “good-will and fixtures” of the

Castle Inn is actually a great deal less than what he feels this inside information should buy him

(115). While Braddon emphasizes that Luke thought himself “very fortunate in becoming the

landlord of the Castle Inn” at the start of his married life as he was a man who was “by no means

troubled with an eye for the beautiful” (116), she also illustrates how the landlord’s increasing greed makes him more inclined to break the vow of silence that protects those whom he

identifies as “precious stingy” (138). Indeed, Luke himself eloquently articulates this avarice

when reprimanded by his wife for his rudeness towards their benefactor: “Oh, damn her kindness

[…] it ain’t her kindness that we want […] it’s her money” (316). Phœbe, in an effort to protect the assets she and her husband have acquired already, goes to great lengths to insure that Luke

remains silent despite his covetous discontent. For instance, when Robert arrives at the inn and

fails to elicit any information from its mistress, Phœbe has an “expression of anxiety—nay,

rather, of almost terror—as she glance[s] from Mr. Audley to Luke Marks” (138). When Luke

begins to confide in Robert that “my lady” might have easily provided him with a public house where there is “a bit of life in the streets,” such as in Chelmsford, Brentwood, or Romford, his wife immediately tries to remove her loquacious husband from the house on a mission to lock the brew-house door (138). Aware of this ploy, Luke responds boldly to his wife’s attempt:

You’re very anxious about his brewhouse door. I suppose you don’t want me to open my mouth to this gent […] Oh, you needn’t frown at me to stop my speaking! You’re always putting in your tongue and clipping off my words before I’ve half said ‘em; but I won’t stand it. […] No, you’re not going to stop my mouth with all your ‘Luke, Lukes!’ I say again, what’s a hundred pound? (139)

What is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this scenario is the fact that Robert seems

utterly uninterested in any confession Luke might (very willingly) make. Instead of encouraging

Luke in his garrulous rant so that he might expose some clue in the mystery that surrounds Lady

Audley, Robert decides rather to turn his attention to Phœbe: “‘No,’ answered Robert Audley, speaking with wonderful distinctness, and addressing his words to Luke Marks, but fixing his eyes upon Phœbe’s anxious face. ‘What, indeed, is a hundred pounds to a man possessed of the power which you hold, or rather which your wife holds, over the person in question?” (139).

With this final declaration, Robert says goodnight. Later, after the baronet’s nephew has seemingly “solved” the mystery of his aunt’s transgressions by an admission from her own mouth, Robert again devalues Luke’s voluntary confession on his deathbed and tells him explicitly to keep quiet: “Whatever guilty secrets you got possession of, you were paid for keeping your silence. You had better keep silence to the end” (406).

When Robert silences Luke on his deathbed he does so by stressing Lady Audley’s role in her own exposure and thus also hints at the importance of gathering a confession in such a way:

“the worst you can tell me of the woman who was once in your power, has already been revealed to me by her own lips […] You can tell me nothing which I do not already know” (406). As we learn, though, Luke can indeed tell Robert something he does not know—only he can reveal that

Lady Audley’s attempt to kill George Talboys has been unsuccessful. But, Robert insistently codes female confession as the ultimate undoing of the novel’s central mystery, as the piece of the puzzle necessary for the detective to “make his case.” In testifying of his new knowledge and the methods by which it was obtained, Robert likewise hints at his own responsibility in deciphering and constructing the “truth” of the novel, in this case the truth about deviant femininity.

In addition to this infamous confession, we not only discover that Lady Audley has come clean to Robert, but also that the remarkably silent Phœbe Marks has as well. When Lady Audley

sets fire to the Castle Inn in hopes of exterminating Luke Marks and her nephew once and for all,

Phœbe suspects her mistress of the crime and, in a state of severe emotional bewilderment, cries

out: “Say it’s not true, my lady; say it isn’t true. It’s too horrible, it’s too horrible, it’s too horrible” (321). The haunting repetition of this response suggests that something about her mistress’s symbolic gesture has agitated Phœbe’s implicit consent to Lady Audley’s “do- anything” attitude and her “no-regrets” approach—apparently, so much so that Phœbe sacrifices her alliance with her mistress and confesses her suspicions to Robert Audley. Although this information is withheld from the reader’s immediate knowledge, it is revealed when Robert later revisits the Marks’s after acquiring a confession from his aunt. In this visit, Phœbe recollects the night of the fire and indicates that Robert has not only secured a confession from her, but also, in doing so, gained a new kind of confidence with her that illustrates his privileged position: “Oh, sir, I wanted to speak to you so badly […] you know what I told you when I found you safe and well upon the night of the fire? […] I told you what I suspected; what I think still […] I never breathed a word of it to anybody but you, sir” (403). One of the last images of Phœbe is significantly one of her motioning a gesture of silence: “Phœbe put her finger to her lips, and led

Mr. Audley back into the sick room” (404).

Phœbe’s confession to Robert Audley seems to create a kind of friendship between herself and the barrister, one that ostensibly protects her from the madhouse despite her significant role in the scandalous events. Because Phœbe has seemingly internalized the policing gaze of the

detective by turning in the (more wicked) woman in the novel,3 her behavior is somewhat, if not

wholly, redeemable. Braddon does seem to abandon Phœbe in many ways—leaving her without

a husband, without support from the Audleys, and without any real closure of any kind

whatsoever. However, there does indeed seem to be a kind of “peaceful treaty” established

3 Lady Audley’s behavior would presumably be considered far worse than Phœbe’s given her social status.

between the lady’s maid and Robert Audley if not an “enthusiastic shaking of hands” (289). And

though Braddon excludes Phœbe from the final chapter, “At Peace,” and therefore offers a kind

of implied judgment on her when the narrator says, “I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace” (436-37, my emphasis), she is not so sinister that she must die like her mistress.

Having successfully acquired the confessions needed to solve the case, and having exerted

his power to expel Lady Audley’s dangerous femininity from the sanctity of the familial

network, Robert Audley is able to come of age at last. He marries Clara Talboys; he becomes a

“rising man” in his profession; his “dream of a fairy cottage is realized” (435); he has a child.

Virtually all traces of his former self are gone. Through the process and success of detection,

Robert Audley becomes finally becomes a man.

CHAPTER 3 THE MOONSTONE

She must be persuaded to tell us, or she must be forced to tell us on what grounds she believes you have stolen the Moonstone. The chances are, that the whole of this case, serious as it seems now, will tumble to pieces, if we can only break through Rachel’s inveterate reserve, and prevail upon her to speak out. --Mr. Bruff to Franklin Blake, The Moonstone

Is it a manly action, on your part, to find your way to me as you have found it to-day? --Rachel Verinder to Franklin Blake, The Moonstone

If Braddon surprises us with a “lazy, care-for nothing fellow” to investigate and expose

Lady Audley’s secret, we find in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone another somewhat unlikely

detective in the character of Franklin Blake. Although the “universal genius” Mr. Blake has developed as a result of his extensive foreign education does seem to make him more fit than

Robert Audley for the role of detective he will play in locating the stolen moonstone, there are certainly elements of his behavior that indicate a kind of lingering boyishness. Like Audley, who is introduced to us as a twenty-seven-year-old with a problematic love of French novels and

German cigars, Franklin Blake visits the Verinder Estate at age twenty-five with a fondness for the same iniquitous habits.1 Before his arrival, we are warned that Mr. Blake has lived the life of

a notorious spendthrift and has a hole in his pocket that “nothing would sew up”; we are told he

has a “lively, easy way” about him that makes him agreeable to everyone he meets; he has been a

wanderer who has lived “here, there, and everywhere,” to be reached only at his self-proclaimed

address: “Post Office Europe”; worse, he has associated with “unmentionable” women who

1 A footnote included in Broadview edition of The Moonstone indicates that all contemporary French fiction was seen as sexually-explicit by the English (even the “masters,” Flaubert, Dumas, and Zola). The fact that Blake has been caught reading these novels in his bedroom is an “off-hand indication of his bachelor status” (474). Rachel will ultimately “cure” Blake of his bachelor habits. First, she encourages him to give up his cigars by expressing her distaste of their smell, which actually sets the events of the moonstone in motion by causing Blake’s insomnia. And second, Rachel will ultimately eliminate his need for the “sexually-explicit” novels as well by marrying him. Both of Blake’s habits are actually vices that will need to be remedied in order for him to become a man.

prevent him from visiting his relatives in England (68). Here is the case as the trusted Gabriel

Betteredge lays it out before us.

When we actually meet Franklin Blake at the Shivering Sands, we are told by Betteredge

that the “nice boy had grown to be a man” (68). Only the “bright, straightforward look in

[Blake’s] eyes” suggests a shadow of the man’s former self; and, being satisfied with this

observation and indeed finding in that gaze the “nice boy” of earlier times, Betteredge remarks,

“there I concluded to stop in my investigation” (81). But, Betteredge’s willing desire to see good

in Franklin Blake’s character renders his “investigation” somewhat partial. We know Blake

remains a debtor as he is forced to borrow money from Lady Verinder to pay his debts while he

stays at her home. We also know that while his “universal genius” permits him to “dabble in

everything,” it tends to leave him impotent somewhere between the Objective and Subjective

view of the world. Although Blake is very good at showing how “clear-headed” he can be by

taking on the role of investigator and hazarding to “extract the inner meaning” of the strange circumstances surrounding the Moonstone (97), his “foreign gibberish” (as Betteredge calls it)

prevents him from ever being truly assertive. Respecting the Objective view, the Subjective

view, the Objective-Subjective view, and the Subjective-Objective view, leaves poor Blake to

muse bewilderedly, “From all I can see, one interpretation is just as likely to be right as the

other” (98).

T.S. Eliot has called The Moonstone “the first and greatest of English detective novels”

(377),2 but who is doing the detecting and how seems to distinguish Collins’s novel from some

2 It has been pointed out by Steven Farmer, Rob Warden, and others that T.S. Eliot was careful to call The Moonstone the first English detective novel, as there were noticeable elements of detection fiction in American and French works before its publication. Both of these critics see Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders on Rue Morgue” (1841) as being one of, if not the first detective story. Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842-43) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845), as well as Emile Gaboriau’s L’affaire Lerouge (1866) all contain elements of the detective genre and all predate The Moonstone.

of the more canonical works of the genre. Though the prominent Scotland Yard detective,

Sergeant Cuff, does seem to possess the “super vision” D.A. Miller identifies as being vital to the economy of the detection (35), and is perhaps the character whom is most recognizably

“detective-like,” Cuff is notably wrong in many of his theories. Rachel Verinder, for instance, has not stolen her own jewel, neither has Rosanna Spearman plotted with her mistress to sell it.

The “great Cuff” furthermore retires half way through the case to take up the life of a full-time gardener, leaving the Verinder family to figure out (or perhaps cover up?) the mystery themselves.

F.S. Schwarzbach points out that the “figures who solved mysteries in many of the novels of the 1850s and 1860s most often were amateurs pressed into service because they were

participants in the circumstances of the plot” (238). Of course, the “amateur” detectives of The

Moonstone are problematically “pressed into service,” as is Robert Audley in Lady Audley’s

Secret, because of the conflicting need to solve the mystery while keeping their family’s secrets

buried within the family unit itself. Drawing parallels between The Moonstone and the real-life case of the Road-Hill House murders upon which it was based, Elisabeth Rose Gruner argues that the novel is “motivated by an impulse to secrecy, not to tell, to cover up the family’s complicity in the crime” (222). As the commissioner and editor of the narratives that make up the story of stolen moonstone—a job he undertakes “in the interests of truth,” to acquit publicly the “characters of innocent people [whom] have suffered under suspicion” (60)—Franklin Blake becomes directly implicated in constructing a truth designed to this end. In these collected narratives, Blake comes into money (thanks to the death of his father), redeems his good name

(Godfrey really takes the Moonstone), gets married (to the woman who protects him to her own detriment), and has a child (so the whole bizarre sequence of events can start all over). Blake’s

“strange family story” (Collins 60), becomes indeed what Gruner sees as a “mystery and a

courtship novel” (225); it is Franklin Blake’s coming of age story, and one which he can

shamelessly edit.

Importantly, D.A. Miller argues that despite the multiple narrative structure of The

Moonstone, the novel is thoroughly “monological,” to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, in that it

endorses Blake’s view of the events by establishing a “master-voice that corrects, overrides,

subordinates, or sublates all other voices it allows to speak” (54). Tamar Heller, however, has

suggested that the model of the master-voice is not as useful for understanding the novel as is the

theory of the “double voice” endorsed by feminist theorists who have used it to describe the subversive irony that underlies “conventional” nineteenth-century women’s writing.

Significantly, Heller sees The Moonstone as a text written with overt silences, especially female

silences, that work to disrupt the “master-voice” narrative and critique the production of

masculine empiricism in the novel:

Critics have praised The Moonstone as Collin’s most seamless transformation of the Gothic into the detective novel. […] Yet, this critical tradition seems to ignore how the novel that ‘fathered’ detective fiction resembles the female Gothic in thematics of blankness and silence that puncture its narrative of revelation and rational interpretation. (245).

The silences that “puncture” the monological narration of The Moonstone are more or less emphasized by Collins. W. David Shaw, for example, finds that “Collins is a master of the mystifying use of silence” (296), and observes that some of the more memorable conversations that occur in The Moonstone are those we do not hear, such as witnessing Rachel’s angry

conversation with Blake through a window after the gem is stolen. While watching this

confrontation, Betteredge admits that, although “it showed a breach of good manners,” “for the life of me, I couldn’t help looking out of window” (145). Though the meaning of the

conversation is underwrit in silence, it is exceptionally tempting to watch the conversation and

attempt to deduce its meaning.

Although Shaw’s passing remark is useful in considering how silence can be powerful, he

fails to take into consideration the impact of gender in these dynamics. Gruner, however, is

quick to point out that “The plot of The Moonstone is complicated by the silence of women”

(225, my emphasis). Gruner sees Rachel, Rosanna, and even Miss Clack as all acting quite

secretive, each being willing to do whatever it takes to conceal her own motivations and what

she knows of others’ in order to protect her own secrets at any cost. Heller more specifically

posits Rachel’s silence as being the novel’s “central Gothic silence […] around which its

mystery plot is structured” (253). This assertion makes sense considering Rachel’s unique

position as Blake’s—the detective’s—lover and the entanglement of the courtship narrative with

that of the mystery plot. Rachel’s silence, her “belligerent” silence according to Gruner, must be

broken if Blake is to solve the mystery of the Moonstone and wholly exonerate Rachel of the crime in his own eyes and the eyes of the social world. Yet, Blake’s own redemption, indeed his very masculinity, hinges on his ability to get Rachel to confess as well. The struggle for confession is a struggle for knowledge, a struggle for power. Rachel’s silence is a problem, though a necessary one for the mystery plot to work. However, the resolution of the text and a revelation of the “truth” depends upon Blake’s ability to break this silence. A failure to obtain a

confession would mean a failure of masculine empiricism, which the detective plot resists.

Furthermore, Rachel’s “belligerent” silence would ultimately create as much confusion about

Blake’s identity as it would her own. Yes, Rachel might have taken her own jewel, but Blake

might have taken it as well. Without confession, we might never determine whether Blake is

actually a depraved thief or a true Christian gentleman, and the mere possibility of his having

snuck into Rachel’s boudoir in the middle of the night is enough to compromise the masculine

honor his position as a bourgeois man affords him.

On one hand then, Rachel’s silence protects her even as it renders her suspect. So long as

she opts out of confession, her secrets are ostensibly safe. On the other hand however, Blake is

threatened by the silence that jeopardizes his identity as an “honest man” while it jeopardizes his

investigation (413). Sissella Bok has observed that “secrecy guards against unwanted access by

others—against their coming too near, learning too much, observing too closely,” that “Secrecy

guards, then, the central aspects of identity” (13). Considering the capability of secrecy to

protect the “central aspects of identity” of the secret-keeper, the threat of Rachel’s silence is

partially so potent because it tests Blake’s ability to access and appropriate the mind of the

woman he loves. According to Heller, in The Moonstone, the “battle to break women’s silence is […] a battle over the control of knowledge” (253). Heller uses a Foucauldian lens to read this knowledge as a form of power; ultimately, she finds, “Blake’s role as detective, his search to repossess Rachel’s knowledge, reinforces the control over women that Victorian gender ideology gave to men within courtship and marriage” (253). Thus, the failure of the detective plot is understandable as a kind of emasculation given the courtship framework that structures it.

At first, of course, the courtship of Rachel and Blake looks quite promising. Penelope interprets the cousins’ intimacy as a precursor to their marriage and tries to convince her father,

Mr. Betteredge, of Blake’s likely success in winning Miss Rachel’s hand. But, like the

Moonstone itself, Rachel Verinder has a flaw.3 The “saucy” girl who would never tell another’s

3 Many comparisons between Rachel and her Moonstone have been made. Most often, the diamond is read as a metaphor for Rachel’s virginity. That the diamond is “stolen from her boudoir” in the middle of the night, suggests the sexual threat Franklin Blake poses. A whole host of psychoanalytic readings of the Moonstone’s symbolic sexuality have been offered, the most famous study being Albert D. Hutter’s “Dreams, Transformations, and Literature” in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Ed. Glen W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt, 1983. For more on this subject, see also: Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins

secret as a child grows up to be just as strong-willed and self-contained as an adult. Indeed,

Rachel’s “one defect,” according to Betteredge, is that

she was unlike most other girls of her age […] she had ideas of her own, and was stiff- necked enough to set the fashions themselves at defiance, if the fashions didn’t serve her views […] She judged for herself, as few women of twice her age judge in general; never asked your advice; never told you beforehand what she was going to do; never came with secrets and confidences to anybody, from her mother downwards. (109)

Being told of this defect, we come to expect that Rachel’s determination to keep herself within herself will at some point cause problems for the detectives when the Moonstone goes missing, particularly so for Franklin Blake given the cousins’ growing intimacy. When the Moonstone is taken from Rachel’s boudoir the night of her eighteenth birthday, her affection for Franklin presumably dies and readers are able to observe Rachel’s glaring “defect” first hand.

Although Betteredge has warned that Miss Rachel can be “self-willed—devilish self- willed sometimes” (109), her behavior toward Blake seems remarkably odd considering that he has taken the noticeable lead in the recovery process of the gem. With faithful observation,

Betteredge, too, takes note of this peculiarity when he remarks on what seems like Rachel’s incongruous reaction to the police:

I could only conclude that [Rachel] was mortally offended by our sending for the police, and that Mr. Franklin’s astonishment on the terrace was caused by her having expressed herself to him (as the person chiefly instrumental in fetching the police) to that effect. […] Why—having lost her Diamond—should she object to the presence in the house of the very people whose business it was to recover it for her?” (146).

Instead of explicating her reasoning, Rachel immediately locks herself up in her room after the theft of the diamond, making herself available for questioning by neither Blake nor the

Superintendent he calls to the scene. Remarking on her daughter’s behavior, Mrs. Verinder acknowledges that Rachel is “odd” and reminds Betteredge of how “different she acts from other

and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Lonoff, Sue. Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship. New York: AMS, 1982.

girls,” but apprehensively admits that she has never seen her daughter “so strange and so reserved” as now (140, my emphasis). No one, according to Betteredge, could extract a word from the girl apart from a decided refusal to speak on the subject, and so: “Here we are, then, at a deadlock about Miss Rachel—and at a deadlock about the Moonstone” (146).

The loss of the Moonstone affects not only Rachel, however. Betteredge observes that

“Circumstances try the metal a man is really made of” (140), and Franklin Blake is certainly tried. When he encounters Rachel’s cold, silent reception, Blake fails to realize the extent of the problems her reserve will pose. Unaffected, he makes what seems like a rational assumption given the situation and enthusiastically asserts, “The Indians have certainly stolen the diamond”

(138). After leaving the estate to see a magistrate at Frizinghall to substantiate his theory, he returns remarkably changed: “The resolute side of him had, to all appearance, given way, in the interval since his departure. […] He had left us at a gallop; he came back to us at a walk. When he went away, he was made of iron. When he returned, he was stuffed with cotton, as limp as limp could be” (140, my emphasis). Evidently the metal Franklin Blake is made of is not really of a manly, steely sort. Indeed, when he greets Superintendent Seegrave on the terrace he does so “warning the police, as they went by, that the investigation was hopeless, before the investigation had begun” (142). Without Rachel’s cooperation, and without the culpability of the

Indians, Blake loses his detective furor and becomes as “limp as limp could be.”

Before long though, Blake begins to view Rachel’s “inveterate silence” as the reason to carry on the investigation: “I have tried to speak to her, and she won’t see me. I have tried to write to her, and she won’t answer me. How, in Heaven’s name, am I to clear the matter up? The chance of searching into the loss of the Moonstone, is the one chance of inquiry that Rachel herself as left me” (367). Perhaps somewhat tired of being a man of cotton, Blake decides to

resume active participation in the investigation and exclaims, “I won’t accept that position! I am determined to find out the secret of her silence” (360).

While Jenny Bourne Taylor is quite right when she acknowledges that “there would be no mystery if Rachel had not suppressed her knowledge of the theft” (179), Blake’s developing

“monomania” (to borrow Lady Audley’s terminology), causes him to overlook other valuable resources that might abet his investigation, primarily the confession Rosanna Spearman would very willingly make to him. Rosanna Spearman, a deformed servant girl with a criminal past, is in love with Blake. Like Phœbe Marks’s profound resemblance to Lady Audley, Heller points out that Rosanna is often read as a kind of “double” for Rachel Verinder, though the relationship between The Moonstone women is one of rivalry rather than kinship: “Although Rosanna and

Rachel appear to be rivals for Blake’s affections, these women from vastly different class backgrounds thus are also doubles, linked by a desire to serve the man they love that ensures their silence about his role in the theft” (249). Unlike Phœbe, however, Rosanna is more than willing to share her secrets with the detective (who should be) seeking them. She is willing to keep secrets for Blake (even to her grave), but not from him. In fact, Rosanna tries to confess multiple times that she has evidence implicating Blake as a participant in the theft; he simply refuses to listen to her.

Having found on Blake’s linen the incriminating paint stain that—as Sergeant Cuff concludes—could only be found on the thief’s bedclothes, Rosanna takes her opportunity to form a more intimate relationship with the man she loves. With hopes of executing a kind of amorous blackmail, the girl with the crooked shoulder is poised to tell Blake what she knows. The first confession scene is narrated by Blake to Betteredge retrospectively, revealing to readers only his take on Rosanna’s odd behavior. Blake prefaces his story by firstly warning, “Rosanna

Spearman’s head is not quite right or I am afraid she knows more about the Moonstone than she

ought to know” (150). Because, like Blake, readers are unaware of the incriminating information

Rosanna has to offer at this point in the narrative, the maidservant becomes a figure of suspicion and, taken with her inferior status as a working class woman, a kind of dangerous outsider from the start. The conversation Blake narrates fascinatingly reveals these power dynamics:

She stood opposite to me at the table, looking at me in the oddest manner—half frightened, and half familiar—I couldn’t make it out. ‘This is a strange thing about the Diamond, sir,’ she said, in a curiously sudden, headlong way. I said, ‘Yes, it was,’ and wondered what was coming next. Upon my honour, Betteredge, she must be wrong in the head! She said, ‘They will never find the Diamond, sir, will they? No! nor the person who took it—I’ll answer for that.’ (150)

Although the fact that Rosanna has taken the liberty to enter into a private conversation with

Blake about a matter that concerns the family alone is reason enough to figure she is not “quite

right in the head,” what is perhaps more perplexing is the way in which Blake resists hearing her

confession. Indeed, despite what seems like a very clear indication that she does in fact know

“more about than Moonstone than she ought,” Blake tells Betteredge, “I can’t bear the idea of

getting the poor girl into a scrape, merely because she has a flighty way with her, and talks very

strangely. […] And yet if she had said to the Superintendent what she said to me…” (150). He opts not to articulate this last thought, although it seems safe to assume Blake recognizes the likelihood of Rosanna’s participation in the crime.

Had not Betteredge walked in and interrupted the tête-à-tête before the maidservant could make a full disclosure, we might not have been made fully aware of how actively Blake would resist hearing it. Instead of soliciting Rosanna to finish her “confession,” Blake decides to go to

London to hire a private investigator. When Rosanna tries a second time to approach Blake while he is playing billiards, he admits that he has no desire to hear what she might tell him:

I can’t explain it […] but if the girl is concerned in the loss of the Diamond, I do really believe she was on the point of confessing everything. […] I asked her if she wished to

speak to me. She answered, ‘Yes, if I dare.’ […] I confess it made me uncomfortable. I had no wish to invite the girl’s confidence. […] [S]he was really bent on speaking to me. It was an awkward position. (199-200)

Rosanna tries yet a third time to approach Blake by trying to surprise him during his favorite

walk in the garden, but is yet a third time denied. So, the question is: why does Blake try so hard

to avoid hearing Rosanna’s confession, even when hearing it likely means finding the solution to

(or at least information pertaining to) the mystery of the Moonstone? After all, if the detective

needs the confession of women to assert his masculinity and reaffirm the potency, indeed the

virility, of the detective investigation, why not listen to what Rosanna Spearman has to say?

Here, Heather Milton’s observations about the confessions of working class women might

be useful. According to Milton, “one’s middle-class subjectivity and worthiness of redemption”

was largely realized through, and perhaps even created by, the shame she was capable of feeling

(4). Milton furthermore argues that “middle class women were believed to possess sufficient

self-consciousness to know that they ought to be ashamed of themselves while working class

women needed to be taught to feel shame, […] confession was supposed to produce this self-

conscious subjectivity [in working class women]” (4). What appears to be Rosanna’s

willingness to confess—notably only in private conversations with Blake—suggests that she

already possesses the “self-conscious subjectivity” to feel shame, a quality that was thought to

exist in bourgeois women alone. Asserting her subjectivity in this way threatens to blur class

distinctions in an “awkward” way that Blake admits “makes [him] uncomfortable.” The fear of this subjectivity, coupled with the fact that Rosanna’s love for Blake has become generally well- known in the house by the time of her second confession (thanks to Penelope), seems like a good enough reason to try to subvert her confession.

By refusing to enter into a confessional exchange with Rosanna, Blake denies her access to the bourgeois subjectivity for which she longs. As a working class woman, Rosanna can never

have the romantic courtship she dreams of having with Mr. Franklin Blake. Indeed, she admits to Blake in her confessional letter from the grave that she only wanted to been seen in the light of a potential suitor rather than a mere maidservant: “I felt such a devouring eagerness to see you— to try you with a word or two about the Diamond, and to make you look at me, and speak to me in that way—that I put my hair tidy, and made myself as nice as I could” (387). The desire to form a legitimate romantic connection with the detective-doubling-as-family-member is the primary difference between Rosanna and Phœbe. While Phœbe’s access to gifts and finery comes from her mistress (which thus secures her loyalty to Lady Audley), Rosanna’s access to bourgeois life lies, she thinks, in Mr. Blake. Refusing to listen to Rosanna’s confession is essentially a way for Blake to keep her in her place, a way to avoid confusing the class boundaries that Rosanna’s confession would threaten by clandestinely entering into his confidence with the motives of social climbing. Even in death these distinctions must be maintained and solidified. Rosanna, for instance, voices the fear that Blake might become so angry with her written declarations of love that, acting on that fear, he might “tear [her] letter up and read no more of it,” destroying any chance of intimacy between them (385). Although Blake opts not to tear up the suicide confession, Rosanna’s fears are indeed realized when he decides to quit reading it, telling Betteredge, “Read the rest for yourself. If there’s anything I must look at, you can tell me as you go on” (385).

Even had Blake agreed to enter a confessional exchange with Rosanna, her disclosure could not be trusted given her subordinate position as a maidservant. Milton points out that

“working class women did not have the agency to authorize the truth about themselves—it had to be done for them” (14); furthermore, philanthropists, she observes, would have to talk to friends, family, and coworkers to try to substantiate working class women’s confessions because they

could never be taken at their word. Thus, any kind of confession Rosanna might make is always already tenuous. Blake would ultimately have to go elsewhere to find the truth anyway (as he does when Rosanna’s suicide note reveals his part in the crime, which is apparently the part of the letter Betteredge feels he must hear). Her confession, in Blake’s view, is really not worth hearing.

Rachel’s confession, however, is very much worth hearing, as she does have the agency needed to authorize a truth about the self. Ultimately, only Rachel’s knowledge can wholly exonerate Franklin Blake (or so he hopes), and only through Rachel’s confession can Blake solve the mystery of the Moonstone (which is true). The only problem is that Rachel is far more unwilling to break her silence than Rosanna. But, Blake’s only chance of “ever holding up [his] head again among honest men,” depends upon his “inducing [Rachel] to make her disclosure complete (413). She must break her silence to secure Blake’s identity, to restore his honor and make him a real man. Upon hearing of Blake’s self-suspicion, Mr. Bruff, the Verinder family’s solicitor, lays the case out before him and emphasizes the importance of gaining a confession from Rachel:

[Rachel’s] extraordinary conduct is no mystery now. She believes you have stolen the diamond.” […] “The first step in this investigation […] is to appeal to Rachel. She has been silent all this time from motives which I (who know her character) can readily understand. It is impossible, after what has happened, to submit to that silence any longer. She must be persuaded to tell us, or she must be forced to tell us, on what grounds she bases her belief that you took the Moonstone. The chances are, that the whole of this case, serious as it seems now, will tumble to pieces, if we can only break through Rachel’s inveterate reserve, and prevail upon her to speak out. (402-403)

While both Mr. Bruff and Blake see the importance of breaking through Rachel’s “inveterate reserve,” how she can be persuaded (or forced if need be), is unfortunately not so easily discerned: “The grand difficulty is […] how to make her show her whole mind in this matter, without reserve” (406).

That the romance and the mystery are inexorably intertwined in the novel means that to get

Rachel to open her mind “without reserve” is logically best done by getting her to open her heart without reserve: “I do trust in Rachel’s still preserving, in some remote corner of her heart, a certain perverse weakness for you. Touch that—and trust to the consequences for the fullest disclosure that can flow from a woman’s lips!” (406). For Blake to have success as a detective, he must also have sexual success. The job of the male detective to “penetrate female secrets”

(Heller 253), is a kind of sexual coming-of-age as well that serves to make a man of him. Given that Rachel has slighted Blake’s affections, re-establishing his control is vital not only to the economy of detection, but to the survival of the marriage plot as well.

Deciding to forget both the Objective view and Subjective view of the situation, Blake decides rather to take his lawyer’s advice and approach Rachel with his weaponry of love: “I roused my manhood, and opened the door” (409). His recently inherited fortune from his father’s will puts Blake in a fantastic position to mature from the boyish debtor and philanderer we meet him as to a financially-secure married gentleman, but to make this transition he must solve this mystery. Knowing that Rachel’s silence stands between him and his masculine prospects, he takes her by surprise in the drawing-room and appeals to her in the best way he knows how: “Rachel, you once loved me” (412). When he first sees his cousin, Blake senses an immediate weakness in Rachel: “she trembled; she stood irresolute” (409). Taking advantage of this perceived weakness he admits, “I could resist no longer—I caught her in my arms and covered her face with kisses” (409). His approach certainly works its effect. Although Rachel is initially horrified by his familiarity, before long “her hand lay powerless and trembling in

[Blake’s]” (412).

While the detective does indeed get his confession, it is unfortunately not exactly what he had hoped for: “Suspect you! […] You villain, I saw you take the Diamond with my own eyes!

[…] I spared you, at the time […] I would have spared you now, if you had not forced me to speak. […] My heart’s darling, you are a thief” (412, 418). The more Rachel says, however, the more powerless she becomes even as her accusations incriminate the man who controls her:

“while her hand lay in mine I was her master still! […] Her had sank on my shoulder; and her hand unconsciously closed on mine, at the moment when she asked me to release it. She willingly opened her whole mind to me” (413). So when Rachel asks Blake, “Is it a manly action, on your part, to find your way to me as you have done to-day?” (411), the answer is yes.

Blake gets all the answers to his questions by taking on the role of Rachel’s suitor and is predictably exonerated later in the novel by a scientific experiment the opium-smoking doctor’s assistant, Ezra Jennings, will perform.

Importantly, the confessional exchange between Blake and Rachel works not only to make a man out of the detective, but also to repair the confessant’s feminine identity as well. That

Rachel has remained silent out of love for Blake, makes her transgression redeemable. Unlike

Lady Audley, whose deviant silence warrants the maison de santé, Rachel Verinder has acceptable motivations for keeping quiet and can thus receive the prestigious honor of marriage to the detective for her eventual cooperation, which also implies that she will know better than to hide information next time as she is literally being united with an agent of social policing.

Gruner points out that Rachel’s supposed “growth,” that is, her transition from an unwed girl to a married woman, may actually “look like regression, as […] she must relinquish her ‘unnatural,’ unwomanly, anti-social silence and allow herself to be mastered by the now-wealthy Blake”

(235). However, this is Franklin’s Blake’s story and he can edit as he chooses. He is, after all,

“the master of truth” (Foucault 67).

LIST OF REFERENCES

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Brittany Parkhurst received her BA in English from the University of Central Florida

(Orlando) in 2005. During her undergraduate studies, she developed an interest in language, gender, deceit, and above all, the Victorian novel. As a master’s student at the University of

Florida, she continued to cultivate these interests, ultimately discovering (through the work of

Michel Foucault) that sometimes the words that are not spoken are as rich and interesting as those that are. Her exploration of silence began primarily with questions: what can be meant by

“silence,” what are the implications of “silencing” or being silenced, what kind of power can be wielded in choosing silence? It was with these questions that she began her master’s thesis.

Having so much enjoyed the master’s program at the University of Florida, Brittany has enthusiastically decided to continue on there for her PhD work. She has been awarded the

Kirkland Doctoral Fellowship and plans to continue her studies of language, gender, and the

Victorian novel.