A psychical complex of the most intricate possible structure. - a Freudian reading of Lady Audley's Secret - no, not like that, but still Freudian

I will repeat a couple of fragments of Lady Audley’s Secret:

“My lady's portrait stood on an easel, covered with a green baize in the center of the octagonal chamber.” (I.VIII)

“The green-baize covered card-table was adorned with…”  (II.VIII, 130 pages later)

The “green baize” is mentioned several times in the novel, mostly as an accessory of the portrait.  The reader of the novel knows that the portrait plays an important part in the uncovering of Lady Audley’s secret.  In the second passage, an amateur detective is also searching for clues to the secret, and is about to find an important one.  But the presence of a common color and type of cloth is just a coincidence for the detective.  Even if he unconsciously associates that cloth with Lady Audley, its presence in someone else’s house can hardly be meaningful.

 It is only the attentive reader who can perceive the association, who sees the trace of Lady Audley.  What is meaningless in crowded reality is meaningful in spartan fiction.  It is not a coincidence for me, or for the author, who picked these particular descriptive details out of many possibilities.

Or perhaps Braddon did not create this connection purposefully, but only by chance, without thinking about it.  But she might, then, have picked the green baize unconsciously.  After all, she is the one who has been repeatedly associating Lady Audley with the green baize, going so far as to write out the words several times.  So it is no surprise when, casting about for furnishings for this room where Lady Audley had once been, the phrase “green baize” pops into her head.

In Sigmund Freud’s 1901 essay “On Dreams” (a summation of the 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams written for slackers like me), a dream is described as

a psychical complex of the most intricate possible structure.  Its portions stand in the most manifold logical relations to one another: they represent foreground and background, conditions, digressions and illustrations, chains of evidence and counter-arguments.  Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart. (60)

“He is describing fiction,” I thought to myself, not just dream-fiction but all of it.  We use some different vocabulary – replace “contradictory counterpart,” for example, with “ambiguity and irony.”  I want to doctor this one, too:

The restoration of the connections which the dream-work [fiction] has destroyed [concealed] is a task which has to be performed by the work of analysis [reading]. (60)

But this is almost perfect as is:

An immediate transformation of one thing into another in a dream seems to represent the relation of cause and effect.  (61)

Lady Audley is transformed into green felt, just for a moment.  How strange that I, that a good reader of fiction, can follow Braddon’s nonsensical dream-logic.

The Freud quotations are all from the Standard Edition, Volume V, tr. James Strachey.

Lady Audley's Secret, like some demented class of vegetation, whose prickly and spider-like members had a fancy for standing on their heads

I do not have an argument but rather a suspicion.  Lady Audley’s Secret was serialized (in several magazines, oddly), and although the plot is slick enough that I am sure Braddon planned it out ahead of time I am convinced that she ran into a problem with length.  Since the plot frame had already been built, so to speak, she had to pad the book with digressions and strangely detailed descriptive passages that become more frequent in the last third or so.  Near the beginning, the narrator’s intrusions look like this:

If any one could at that moment have told the young barrister that so simple a thing as his cousin's brief letter would one day come to be a link in that terrible chain of evidence afterward to be slowly forged in the only criminal case in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr. Robert Audley would have lifted his eyebrows a little higher than usual.  (I.VII)

Clumsy and unnecessary.  Later,  though:

The floating mists from the boiling liquid in which she infuses the soothing herbs; whose secrets are known to her alone, envelope her in a cloud of scented vapor, through which she seems a social fairy, weaving potent spells with Gunpowder and Bohea.  At the tea-table she reigns omnipotent, unapproachable.  What do men know of the mysterious beverage?  Read how poor Hazlitt made his tea, and shudder at the dreadful barbarism.  (II.VII)

The passage goes on and on and is about nothing but Woman’s superiority at making tea; as far as I can tell it is utterly incidental to the story, and thus is both filler and a place where Braddon felt she could cut loose with the juicy, grapey purple prose.

What I am imagining is a mystery novel written by Tristram Shandy’s great-niece, one in which the commentary eventually subsumes the story.  Braddon did not write that book.  She did write this:

Knitted curtains shaded the windows, in which hung wire baskets of horrible-looking plants of the cactus species, that grew downward, like some demented class of vegetation, whose prickly and spider-like members had a fancy for standing on their heads.

The green-baize covered card-table was adorned with gaudily-bound annuals or books of beauty, placed at right angles; but Robert Audley did not avail himself of these literary distractions.  (II.VIII)

Detective Audley is at a school for girls, looking for the truth about Lady Audley.  If this were a Nabokov novel I would file away the “right angles,” surely a link to another scene, say II.XIII, “the looking-glasses, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners by an artistic upholsterer, multiplied my lady's image, and in that image reflected the most beautiful object in the enchanted chamber,” and the green baize, too, which appears in I. VIII, “My lady's portrait stood on an easel, covered with a green baize in the center of the octagonal chamber.”

When I knock these passages together, they begin to suggest a control of the detail work that I do not believe Braddon really had.  Amazing the patterns our imaginations create.  Note to Googling students of Prof. Maitzen: surely this is a dead end.  Go back before it is too late!  (Hint: follow the pre-Raphaelite theme instead).

Regardless, that cactus is worth seeing, and perhaps even better is the implication that the Audley might possibly be tempted from his purpose by gift books for girls.  That is clearly Shandy’s niece speaking – who else would want to know what is in those tedious books?

I guess what I am doing here is enjoying the passages where Braddon most seemed to be enjoying herself.

Notes on Lady Audley's Secret - How clumsily the wretched creatures attempt to assist the witch president of the tea-tray

Since Rohan Maitzen’s “19th Century Fiction” class is moving on towards Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), I should write up my long-postponed notes.  Professor Maitzen for some reason pointed people towards my little series on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, which is, I admit, an especially good bit of blogging, since it is packed with quotations from Cranford.  Whatever I have to say about Braddon will be approximately a third as good, because Braddon Lady Audley’s Secret is about a third as good as Cranford (which is pretty good).

I said “notes,” yes?

1.  Although the mystery novel had not yet been invented, Braddon’s book is one of them, or is almost one.  A long stretch of the middle has a crime, a detective, clues, the works.  The beginning and end defy my notion of the genre as it normally works, which is pleasing. Any fan of mystery novels who is also comfortable with the language of Austen or Dickens or a Brontë should read Lady Audley’s Secret.  That’s millions of people, right?

2.  The plot is at times exceedingly clever.  I will pick an early example, Chapters VII and VIII.  By this point any reader paying attention has a pretty good idea what the titular secret is, or at least what Braddon wants me to think it is.  One character, George, does not know the secret but will know it instantly if he ever meets Lady Audley.  So the chapters are arranged as a series of near-misses, some of them highly artificial (“but Lady Audley was seated on the side of the carriage furthest from the inn, and he could see nothing of the fair-haired paragon of whom he had heard so much”), but knowingly so, meaning that Braddon knows I know she is toying with the mechanisms of fictional suspense, and I know she knows I know, and so on, clever enough, but the best part is that George never does meet Lady Audley in this section but learns her secret anyway, after which Braddon tosses in another near miss, just to rub it in.

At the end of Chapter VIII, I applauded – well done, Braddon!

3.  The detective, Robert Audley, is an indolent barrister on an independent income.  He spends his days smoking cigars and reading French novels, until he falls in love with the aforementioned George.  When George disappears, Audley takes up sleuthing, determined to discover the fate of the man he loves.

I have over-interpreted a bit here.  It is of course an anachronism to interpret Robert’s effusively homosocial language as homosexuality, but once I saw it, it was hard to unsee, and I am not sure there is any need to unsee.  The novel is no worse for it.  There is a strong streak of camp (another anachronism) in Robert’s character.  Why can’t more than one Lady Audley have a secret?

Robert does eventually fall in love with a woman, which should deflate my theory, except the woman is the absent George’s sister, who looks much like George.

4.  Sometimes Braddon writes the weirdest things, often in digressions that become increasingly frequent as the book progresses.   Maybe it is filler.  Dang curious filler, if so.

I will save this for tomorrow, although I put an example in the title (II.VII).  Do not expect anything Cranford-level.

The Best Books of 1862 - And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.

Emily Dickinson was in the middle of a creative rush that had lasted several years and would last many more.  Or so it looks now – she was having doubts.  In 1862 she sent four poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had just published an article in The Atlantic giving advice to new writers about publishing their work.  Dickinson asked “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”  He said it was, yet Dickinson did not try to publish.

The hidden and lost works of the past, the ones that survive by chance and magic, make for such interesting stories.  But this is not the story of the Best Books of 1862.  1862 was the Year of the Best-seller.

The big bookish events in France were 1) the publication of Victor Hugo’s massive Les Misérables, his first novel in thirty years, and 2) controversial upstart Gustave Flaubert’s followup to Madame Bovary, the gory and insane Salammbô.  Flaubert was understandably nervous that he would be crushed by Hugo, but both novels were hits.  Hugo’s audience was broader, a genuine mass readership, and much more international.  Salammbô has never had much luck outside of France.

Another international hit, albeit with a much smaller audience than Hugo’s, was Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.  I believe this was the novel that really introduced Russian literature to Europe.  It also began within Russian literature a chain of attacks and responses that is unlike anything I know in any other literature, but that story has to wait until 1863.  One of the participants was Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose House of the Dead is from 1862.

Meanwhile the new craze in English fiction was the Sensation Novel: Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, No Name by Wilkie Collins, and even Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope.  The latter two could easily have been titled Lady _____’s Secret, and in the case of the Trollope should have been, since Orley Farm is a crummy title.  Trollope was only a half-hearted Sensationalist, divulging the secret about halfway through the novel, but at least he tried.

Lady Audley’s Secret was a dead book for a while, but scholars interested in women writers and so-called genre fiction resurrected it.  I just finished it and may write about it a bit after the holiday.

If the Collins and Trollope novels feel a bit second-tier compared to their best-known books, as does George Eliot’s Romola (which began serialization in 1862), English poetry was anything but.  Lucky Victorian poetry readers enjoyed, amidst the mound of poetry that now looks tediously unreadable,  George Meredith’s Modern Love, posthumous collections by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough, and the almost shockingly assured debut of Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems.  Here is one of the others, the first half of “Song”:

When I am dead my dearest,
    Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
    Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
    With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
    And if thou wilt, forget.

Édouard Manet’s 1862 “Music in the Tuileries” is in the London National Gallery.