Gender, Religion and Domesticity in the Novels of Rosa Nouchette Carey

Elaine Hartnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351749206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This title was first published in 2000. Rosa Nouchette Carey (1840-1909), the English author of forty-one 'domestic' novels, was continuously in print from 1868 until at least 1924 and yet she is virtually unknown today. This first in-depth study of Carey's work assesses both her immense popularity and her subsequent fall from favour. Organized thematically, it engages with the historical and cultural context of the novels as well as comparing them with the work of Carey's contemporaries. Matters such as Carey's creative response towards spinsterhood, her provision of vicarious male approval and her valorization of housework are perceived as functions of her writing that lie beyond formal literary criticism. This is not to deny the literary value of Carey's work; rather it is to make intelligible its value to a large and enthusiastic readership despite an undoubted lack of appreciation on the part of reviewers.

Chapter 1

The Mad, The Bad and the Morbid

The Lady is Not Mad

‘The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell you what she is, Mr Audley, she is dangerous!’¹

Or is her secret that “insanity” is simply the label that society attaches to female assertion, ambition, self-interest and outrage?²

Imagine Mary Braddon’s novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, which first exploded into the literary market place in 1862, as a Religious Tract Society publication. Needless to say, it is not. It seems a far cry from what might be classified as ‘improving’ literature, dealing as it does with a woman who fakes her own death, abandons her child, commits bigamy and attempts murder, all in order to gain and retain social position and material comfort. However, characters similar to Lady Audley may be met with in several of Rosa Carey’s apparently innocuous tales of domestic life. It is therefore pertinent to begin by examining their apparent paradigm.

Braddon explains Lady Audley’s behaviour in two apparently contradictory ways: criminality, with its attendant religious discourse, and madness, with its discourse of tainted heredity. The tension between the two is maintained virtually until the last. Only in the final chapters does the culpability of criminality overwrite the amorality of insanity. After all, repentance can only be urged upon a woman who is responsible for her actions. Yet if Lady Audley is sane, why is she certified? Somewhat problematically, she is certified on account of one kind of madness but is incarcerated because of another. The doctor signs the certificate on the formally-stated, though dubious, grounds that:

‘There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might only occur once or twice in a life-time … [I]t would be dementia in its worst phase, perhaps: acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only occur under extreme mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her blood.” (LAS, p. 292)

Thus, Lady Audley is ostensibly certified on the grounds of what might happen rather than what has already occurred. However, members of the Audley family wish to incarcerate her for a very different reason. They believe her to be absolutely sane, but the alternative to the asylum – criminal proceedings followed by certain execution – cannot be contemplated because the resultant scandal would punish the innocent along with the guilty. By translating the discourse of criminality into a discourse of insanity the ‘dangerous’ woman may yet be contained, though without the adverse publicity. Notwithstanding his formal diagnosis, the doctor effectively colludes with them. When Robert Audley indicates that the family wishes to lock Lady Audley away, the reply is, ‘ believe that you could do no better service to society than by doing this’ (LAS, p. 294).

It is at this point that Elaine Showalter, as an (albeit twentieth-century) reader of the text, makes an alternative ‘diagnosis’ relating to Lady Audley. She posits that ‘“Insanity” is simply the label that society attaches to female assertion, ambition, self-interest and outrage.’ According to this reading, the doctor’s formal medical diagnosis may be seen as a legal fiction, resorted to because Lady Audley cannot be certified for having ‘the cunning of madness’ and for being ‘dangerous’. Yet even this rhetorical construction of insanity yields a discourse of culpability if not actual criminality. Female ambition is madness but a woman can choose not to be ambitious. Conversely, the act of choosing madness may be construed as wilful wrongdoing. Ultimately, the madwoman is a criminal and the criminal is a madwoman; the closure is no closure.

Arguably, Braddon oscillated between these diagnoses of criminality and madness for two reasons: to create a sensational story which might be enjoyed for its own sake, and to create a discursive space within which to focus upon the late nineteenth-century construction of femininity. Presented with the apparently antithetical positions of criminality and madness in the novel, the reading subject is obliged to negotiate a personal synthesis or closure or, indeed, to construe some alternative reading. The conflicts and confusions which arise out of Braddon’s dual explanation of ‘deviant’ womanhood certainly invite the reader to question the veracity of both discourses. However, there has been debate as to how well she manages to produce or permit viable alternatives to the dominant.

In A Literature of Their Own, Showalter admits that the appeal of the eponymous heroine lies in her transgression: ‘[a]s every woman must have sensed, Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative’.³ As evidence for this conclusion, Showalter cites known patterns of ‘supportive identification’ between middle-class women and such of their peers as are on trial for domestic murder (Showalter 1988, p. 170). However, she ultimately calls Lady Audley’s Secret by its proper name: ‘a carefully controlled female fantasy’ (Showalter 1988, p. 163). Showalter’s emphasis is decidedly upon the word ‘controlled’. Lady Audley’s criminality/ madness must be paid for; the fantasy must come to an end and the ‘real’ world both assert itself and deal with the aberration. Thus, whilst acknowledging the achievements of sensationalists such as Mary Braddon in portraying the female condition, Showalter locates Lady Audley’s Secret outside the explicitly feminist:

even as they recorded their disillusion … frustration … anger [and] … murderous reelings, the[y] could not bring themselves to undertake a radical enquiry into the role of women … Anger is internalized or projected, never confronted, understood or acted upon … Typically, the first volume of a woman’s sensational novel is a gripping analysis of a woman in conflict with male authority … By the second volume guilt has set in. In the third volume we see the heroine punished, repentant and drained of all energy. (Showalter 1988, pp. 162, 180)

According to this reading, the fictional Lady Audley’s defeat simply replicates the power/gender-power relationships that obtained at the time when Braddon was writing. However, Showalter’s assessment hierarchicalizes a twentieth-century reading over an (albeit reconstructed) nineteenth-century reading. That is, she attaches more importance to her twentieth-century feminist project of establishing a theory of women’s writing than she does to understanding the nineteenth-century text and its reader on their own terms. Lyn Pykett, in providing a critique of Showalter, reverses the latter’s priorities and provides an alternative thesis. Beginning with the assertion that interpretation is problematized by ‘concentrating too much on endings at the expense of the complex middles of novels’, Pykett goes on to say that:

Showalter’s … desire to see women and women writers transcend the historical conditions of their oppression left her insufficiently … alert to, the ways in which the women’s sensation novels rework and negotiate, as well as simply reproduce, the contradictions of these conditions … We need to see [the Sensation novel] not simply as either the transgressive or subversive field of the improper feminine, or the contained, conservative domain of the proper feminine. Instead we should explore [it] as a site in which the contradictions, anxieties and opposing ideologies of Victorian culture converge and are put into play …

In this passage, Pykett suggests that the capitulation to a more conventional standard which forms the closure to most Sensational novels is not to be regarded as the major site for investigation. This being the case, attention focuses on the initial assertiveness of the heroine and discussion thereby profitably returns to the stage at which Showalter suggests that ‘“Insanity” is simply the label society attaches to female assertion’. At the same time, it becomes possible to positively rate the nineteenth-century woman reader’s pleasure in identifying with a successful Lady Audley. In gaining, through the fiction, a temporary (and safe) liberation from mundane reality, the reader additionally gained a space within which to try out an alternative female role without fear of the consequences.

Thus Lady Audley’s Secret is not simply about the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’ female psyche. It is also about a woman who is able to pit her wits against the financial, social and legal disabilities suffered by women in the 1860s. Nor yet is the novel simply a humourless tract about the wrongs of women. Whilst the eponymous heroine is ultimately defeated, one must not ignore the appeal, to the reader, of a safely fictional woman who gets her own way most of the time and who is not, in the final reckoning, punished as severely as she might have been. Having identified these areas of potential reader interest relating to the construction of Lady Audley, it is pertinent to move on to a discussion of Rosa Carey’s equivalents.

Although Carey was never perceived to be a Sensationalist novelist, several of her plots contain characters constructed similarly to Lady Audley. For example, Etta, the poor relation in Uncle Max [1887], is, like Lady Audley, culpable at law but never brought to trial. Her function in terms of plot, is that of controller and manipulator of others. One of only two real villainesses in Carey’s writing, she is made to obstruct three marriages, to nearly drive one of the six victims insane and to incriminate an innocent man in the theft that she has herself committed.⁵ Until the very end of the novel, she remains plausible to the male head of the household and so proceeds unchecked. Carey’s creation differs markedly from Lady Audley on only two major counts: that Etta lacks the charm of the original and that she operates under her own name.

As Lady Audley’s mental condition is discussed in one novel, so is Etta’s in the other. The diagnoses differ but, rhetorically at least, the symptoms of the ‘disease’ and its ‘treatment’ are very similar. Though the diagnosis for Carey’s character is supplied by a servant and not by a doctor who is attempting to certify her, the terminology used indicates more than a mere lay opinion:

‘Somehow crooked ways come natural to her: the old mistress knew that, for she once said to me towards the last, “Leah, I am afraid that my poor child has got some warp or twist in her nature; but I hope that my nephew will never find out her want of straightforwardness”.’⁶

In clinical terms, the expression ‘warp or twist in her nature’ connotes a blighted heredity. For the expression gains a kind of medical authority if it is allied to the alienist Henry Maudsley’s comment that

in consequence of evil ancestral influences, individuals are born with such a flaw or warp of nature that all the care in the world will not prevent them from being vicious or criminal, or becoming insane.⁷

If Carey was echoing Maudsley at this point, whether consciously or not, she was writing a diagnosis with multiple possibilities for the fictional Etta’s mental state. For it is possible to find, within the character of Etta, evidence of all three of these outcomes. In spite of ‘all the care in the world’ Etta is, from a legal point of view, a criminal. In addition, she is vicious, meaning that she has a strong tendency towards depraved habits. She has an excessive love of fine clothes (this is the vice that leads her to crime) and she takes drugs for other than purely medical purposes (UM, pp. 442, 440).

As to whether Etta can, strictly speaking, be construed as insane, this is not so straightforward. With much discussion of her ‘sin, – perhaps I should say crime’ and the necessity for her future Obedience and submission’, it seems that, once again, ‘the lady is not mad’ (UM, pp. 141, 142). Yet, as in Lady Audley’s Secret, even where discourses of sin and crime appear to prevail over the discourse of insanity, they do not furnish the novel with an absolute closure. Etta’s ‘hysterical state … bordering] upon frenzy’ which lasts for ‘some hours’ after the discovery of her schemes is hardly emblematic of ‘normal’ feminine behaviour. Nor do the expressions ‘my poor child’ and ‘warp or twist in her nature’ indicate total culpability on Etta’s part. In addition, the reader familiar with Maudsley’s work is able to furnish Etta with a latent insanity commensurate with her criminality and viciousness. She, like Lady Audley, has a ‘hereditary taint in her blood’.

Significantly, Carey uses this same diagnosis of ‘a flaw or warp of nature’ to explain the behaviour of another Lady Audley figure, Mrs Blake in Lover or Friend? [1890]. At point of discovery, Mrs Blake has dissociated herself from her husband, who is serving a prison sentence for fraud, and is passing herself off as a respectable bourgeois widow, under an assumed name.⁸ On this occasion, too, the explanation is expressed in terms of pity as well as condemnation:

Could she help it… if her moral sense were blunted and distorted? There was something defective and warped in her nature – something that seemed to make her less accountable than other people. Truth was not dear to her, or her marriage-vows sacred in her eyes.⁹

It additionally seems to reflect Maudsley’s contention that

many persons … without actually being imbecile or insane, are of a lower moral responsibility than the average of mankind; they have been t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 The Mad, The Bad and the Morbid
• 2 Maiden Ladies
• 3 Women and Children Second
• 4 Hearth and Home
• 5 Sentimental Heresies
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index