Victorian Literature and Culture (2009), 37, 157175. Printed in the United States of America.

Copyright C 2009 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/09 $15.00 doi:10.1017/S106015030909010X

ON THE TRACK OF THINGS: SENSATION AND MODERNITY IN MARY ELIZABETH BRADDONS LADY AUDLEYS SECRET
By Eva Badowska

The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale of our own times. H. L. Mansel, Sensation Novels The other side of mass cultures hellish repetition of the new is the mortication of matter which is fashionable no longer. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

NINETEENTH-CENTURY REVIEWERS, THOUGH they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in Modern England the England of to-days newspaper and featured protagonists who were English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph (593). Like Bram Stokers Dracula some four decades later, Braddons Lady Audleys Secret (1862) represented nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance (Stoker 67; ch. 3).1 But Braddons novel was also a sign of the times because it betokened the rising awareness of modernitys tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (Our Female Sensation Novelists 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty. Sensation ctions modernity, despite its marked similarity to sensation journalism or its obvious predilection for the latest in current affairs, cannot be reduced to the nineteenthcentury equivalent of ambulance (carriage) chasing.2 In fact, sensation novels create the very modernity that they represent. According to Nicholas Daly, sensation ction brings the modern subject literally up to speed and prompts a reorientation of the subject towards modernity by exposing the human body to the thrills of narrative suspense (Literature 37). Sensation novels offer readers a kind of temporal training that helps them acclimatize to certain historical shifts in social organization, imperial power, and commodity culture (Literature 37, 3).3 157

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If the sensation novel modernizes the subject, it also trains it to apprehend its inevitable historical passage and incipient obsolescence. Though today it is something of a critical commonplace to discuss the sensation novel in terms of the cultural fears and anxieties that it (unconsciously) expresses, Lady Audleys Secret gives an interesting new cast to anxiety about the up-to-dateness of the genre that so enraged its critics.4 Typically, as in Dracula, the fear concerns the possibility that modernity may founder because the past (the East) threatens to arrest and even avert modernitys (the Wests) triumphant progress; the old centuries act as a revenant whose ghostly haunting mere modernity cannot kill (67; ch. 3). But Braddons novel indicates a different temporal anxiety. Paradoxically, modernity is here imperiled by modernitys own passage and inevitable, impending obsolescence. In other words, Lady Audleys Secret epitomizes what Richard Sieburth (writing on Benjamin) calls the uncanny passage of modernity into instant antiquity, instant ruins (16). The novel is alarmed not so much about the destruction of modernity by the past, but rather by the possibility that modernity itself will keep on crumbling, falling rapidly to ruins, leaving us (at best) in a land of museums or (at worst) in a wasteland of discarded toys.
I.

CRITICS OF THE 1860S IMAGINED that the entire sensation genre constituted a craze whose unhealthy popularity guaranteed its premature obsolescence. The 1860s witnessed a late ourishing of anti-novel discourse directed specically against such morbid phenomena of literature (Mansel 252).5 Sensation ction, it was feared, was both repulsively modern and inevitably ephemeral. Reviews penned by conservative detractors, though fueled by offended sensibilities only imperfectly disguised as moral and aesthetic censures, offer a rich resource for readers seeking to gain insight into what was perceived to be the genres morbid or moribund nature. As Ann Cvetkovich shows, the reviewers hostility forms part of a longer history of attacks on popular culture and indicates concern about literatures status as a commodity (16, 17). Reviewers also express dismay at the loss of cultural capital attached to authorship. Margaret Oliphant complains, for example, that the era when an author was a natural curiosity, recognized and stared at as became the rarity of the phenomenon was irretrievably lost now that most people have been in print one way or other when stains of ink lingered on the prettiest of ngers (qtd. in Cvetkovich 19). But such dilution of cultural capital is only half the story; the other half, as Patrick Brantlinger makes clear in The Reading Lesson, is its unprecedented expansion. Oliphant admits that the extraordinary ood of novels . . . now pouring over the land has fertilizing results, so far as the manufacture itself is concerned (qtd. in Cvetkovich 19). But she shrinks not just from the idea of literature as fertilizer manufactured by stained hands but also from the fragmentation and commodication of persons she detects under the blots. Peeling away layers of anxiety surrounding the vogue for sensation ction resembles, in essence, the work of an archeologist. Stratum after stratum is brought to light with no promise of a rock-bottom cause of the critical hullabaloo the sensation phenomenon occasioned. But worries about commodication undoubtedly form part of the novels larger concern about the new, and, ultimately, about modernity. Sensation novels are decried as indications of a wide-spread corruption . . . the ravenous appetite for carrion, this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty

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before the scent has evaporated (Mansel 252). In other words, these novels do more than chase the new: they constitute the new. As Mansel indicates, they are corrupt for the very reason that they are (too) new. Sensation novels recall the Veneerings in Charles Dickenss Our Mutual Friend (1865) bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London who are condemned precisely because they are spick and span new. And just as the Veneerings, who smel[l], like their furniture, a little too much of the workshop and [are] a trie sticky (8; vol. 1, ch. 2), so the commercial atmosphere surrounding sensation novels affronts critics because it is redolent of the manufactory and the shop (Mansel 252). How do these books, then, offend the critics noses? In Time, Desire, and Horror, Alain Corbin explains that modern sensory experience in the city, beginning at the end of the ancien r egime in France, centered around a new model of anxiety and olfactory vigilance directed against industrial pollution (14647). The language of foul odors may reveal a dread of labor and the laboring classes, which may in turn be associated with the manufacturing aspects of the book trade. It marks, for instance, the reduction of Sigismund, a sensation author in Braddons The Doctors Wife (1864), who is not exactly pleasant to the sense of smell (11), to the status of a perishable good; it puts a litt erateur on a par with a shopkeeper. Stench, we could say, brings to light his literary labor, which tends to remain veiled by notions of inspiration and genius. It also exposes commodities, including sensation novels, as products of labor and threatens to destroy their fetish character. But why smell? The most primitive of the senses, the olfactory sense works on the most visceral and unconscious levels; it deals with affects as irrational as attraction and revulsion; it connects us to our animal past. In one of his most fanciful footnotes in Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wildly hypothesizes that the decline of the olfactory stimuli, which took place when human beings assumed an erect posture, paved the way for civilization (41 42). Apart from the causal links that Freud builds, smell often symbolizes and is experienced as civilizations arch nemesis. Mansels representation of sensation novels as foul-smelling carrion similarly insinuates that attraction to such literature is no more dignied than the coprophilic pleasure in smelling that, according to Freud, is repressed in the state of civilization and exhibited only by primitives and perverts (Three Essays 155). But as we will see, it is not only unpleasant odors that cause offense to nineteenth-century critics. Equally repulsive are smells that announce excessive newness. While in Freud the olfactory stands for the uncivilized, in Mansel and others like him it also stands for the modern, if precisely not the civilized. Mansel goes so far as to propose a sort of program for the elimination of malodorous literary upstarts. He imagines a lending library where No book should be admitted under twenty years old, a very liberal allowance for the life of a modern novel (267). Such a library, kept deliberately out of date, would foster a real competition between old favourites and new, an increased struggle for existence among modern novels (268). Darwinian rhetoric aside, his proposal to force the patina of age by articial means can be read as an attempt to preserve that aura which withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art (Benjamin, Art in the Age 10304). Benjamin writes that the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be is vital to the works aura (10405). Disgusting odor, on the other hand, can be said to denote an offensive nearness and destroy auratic distancing. To noses like Mansels, modernity gives off a bad smell because it is too proximate. While we are waiting for it to mature, we might save ourselves energy and money: in twenty years time,

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Mansel predicts, the sensation novel will become a mere dilapidated relic of a forgotten craze, an entertainment displaced by the escalating signicance of the new. Nostalgically invested in the idea of culture tested and perfected by time, Mansel is concerned that attempts to keep up with the modern will eventually create libraries that resemble confused natural history museums, stuffed chock full of bizarre fossils (naturally, he would prefer libraries built on the model of the National Portrait Gallery). The rage against the sensation novel may, then, be read as articulating the critics growing concern that modern cultural production, by attacking the readers senses with the carrion stench of the new, dulls the ner discriminations of taste but also leaves readers helpless to choose among novel-commodities asking to be perused. The lively arena of cultural production looks to Mansel, and others like him, ironically like a graveyard in the making; the life of a sensation novel is a sputter, a icker on historys horizons. A sensation novel offends because, as Mansel intuits, it is always on the brink of tumbling into ruins and littering the landscape with unusable carcasses of outdated literary trends. That is where the paradox of modern cultural production is located: to read the sensation novel as the embodiment of the new is simultaneously to discern in it the initial outlines of its impending obsolescence.
II.

PARADOXICALLY, THE SENSATION NOVEL shares in the very concerns its critics voice against it. Lady Audleys Secret opens with an arresting and enigmatic image of a clock-tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand; and which jumped straight from one hour to the next, and was therefore always in extremes (7; vol. 1, ch. 1). Whether originally so conceived or now broken, the Audley Court clock is behind the times and out of touch with the modernity whose paradigm is the Swiss movement of the railroad clock.6 According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, before the railroads annihilate[d] space and time, space consisted in a patchwork of varying local times; but in the mid-nineteenth century, regions of the country los[t] their temporal identity in an entirely concrete sense: the railroads deprive[d] them of their local time (4243, 48). By the early 1860s, the standardization of time, which began with individual railway companies in the 1840s, was well under way, until in 1880, railroad time [became] general standard time in England (50). The Audley Court clock is, then, like the sensation novel itself, in extremes: an epitome of modernity the clock is its image par excellence it also constitutes an obsolete relic of ages past, when the difference of an hour was no difference at all. It forms what Benjamin calls a dialectical image or dialectics at a standstill (Arcades 10), that is, in the words of one commentator, an instant of illumination in which the dreary newsreel of history suddenly snaps [and] freezes into a frame (Sieburth 19).7 The enigmatic clock turns its face, Janus-like, in two directions at once: towards the past and towards the future, revealing modernitys principal icon to be already belated. In terms of the plot, the clock can offer only the promise of a future, also belated, signication: it appears before any action takes place, before the enigma is posed and before the principal characters are introduced. The temporality of its meanings doubles the clocks own game with time: the image, like the clock it portrays, may be precise or inaccurate we can never know. But in its position at the outset of the novel, the clock signies at least its own obdurate materiality, if only because it precludes a clearer interpretation. The refuse of modernity modern but already superseded the clock is no longer a desirable object; it is now slowly

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turning into a mere dilapidated thing, a sorry travesty of modernity, soon to be housed in a curiosity cabinet or museum. The narrators sense that the second hand is somehow missing, that the clock is stupid, highlights its thing-like nature. In Thing Theory, Bill Brown argues that we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get lthy, when their ow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily (4). The Audley Court clock reveals its thingness because its mechanism fails to perform up to modern standards, on which the plot depends at crucial moments. But the underlying catachresis of clock hands draws attention to another facet of the novels modernity: the clock as the locus of machine culture connects with anxieties about the mechanization of persons. Because this catachresis does not appear in many European languages, the semantic eld of clocks in English includes the mechanization of persons more directly than do other languages.8 The clock at Audley Court is, then, not just a broken thing but a fragmented body, the body in pieces, something Victorian culture, with its fresh experience of railway disasters and industrial accidents, was particularly concerned about (Schivelbusch 12745; Daly, Literature 3455). Lady Audleys Secrets anxiety about modernity manifests itself also as a concern about lineage. Recalling the Veneerings once again, the most derogatory remark Dickens makes about them involves their ancestry: if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French-polished to the crown of his head. The Veneerings have no pedigree they fail to set [it] up with the rest of their parlor but if they did, it would be a bran-new commodity camouaged as a historical object, a faux antique (8; vol. 1, ch. 2). We could say that Lady Audley is also a Veneering, her aristocratic status acquired by marriage, in addition to several changes of name and the soft wrappings of satin and fur with which she packages herself (61; vol. 1, ch. 7).9 The sensation novel is another Veneering, its relation to the literary tradition a complex masquerade. The genre combines various generic inuences, mixing the Gothic with the Newgate novel (Taylor xii) and violent[ly] yoking . . . romance and realism (Hughes 16). Like the Veneerings, Lady Audleys Secret sets up a faux literary lineage, camouaging its newness in a Gothic carapace. Such generic play may speak to an anxiety about its own status as a passing convention. An analysis of the novels forays into Gothic territory and the picturesque aesthetic often associated with it will show how the novel reects on the nature of literary modernity. The Audley Court clock integrally belongs to the physiognomy of the estate, which is cast, as Aeron Haynie explains, in a picturesque mold and relies on signiers of nature and the passage of time (6670).10 The description undoubtedly implies a veiled critique of the system of the country estate (Haynie 64). But the representation of Audley Court also evokes the sublime (it is a place where you incontinently lost yourself) and winks at Gothic tropes, such as secret chambers (Of course, in such a house, there were secret chambers) or sentient buildings possessed of a sense of agency (the house wished to keep itself secret and issued a sort of siren call to visitors who were struck there with a yearning wish to have done with life). Audley Court, then, makes reference to the locus classicus of the Gothic mode, a ruined castle or abandoned mansion of the type that can be found in Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe; its picturesque appearance has a whiff of Gothic possibility about it. Nonetheless, Audley Court is only incompletely Gothicized, though it boasts a genuine gothic past. The novels rhetoric gestures as much toward the mansions venerable history as it does toward

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modernity. Its architecture comprises an impossible jumble of styles, from the Plantagents to the Hanoverians, from a Norman refectory to a dining room in the style of George I. But the broken ruin of a wall incongruously escorts windows so modern that they might have been added only yesterday (79; vol. 1, ch. 1). In this way, Audley Court constitutes a larger instance of the principle represented by its tower clock. It expresses a broad notion of history as an accumulation of ruinous fragments reaching up to the present. History so conceived moves in an arbitrary fashion, with no plan or progress in view, shaking down a bit of Saxon wall there, and allowing a Norman arch to stand here. It quickly turns modern additions into a sort of chaotic archive, but the nal outcome is entirely unpredictable, its effect such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex (79; vol. 1, ch. 1). Audley Court is caught in the midst of its passage, not yet totally ruined, but becoming obsolete despite indifferent attempts at keeping it up to date. The house seems never to have been modern but it is also not wholly antiquated. Its ruin is neither already accomplished (and therefore entirely picturesque) nor an effect of a supernatural (and therefore sublime) occurrence. Audley Court is mundanely dilapidated, and in this way it succeeds in portraying a simpler, if not less poignant, anxiety: here modernity inevitably crumbles to dust, with no aesthetic or moral justication whatsoever.11 The fate of Audley Court as an index of cultural transformations is tied to the fate of Lady Audley, the beautiful imposter, as well as to the novels key paradox: the uncovering of Lady Audleys crimes is promptly covered up by the very amateur detective who initially exposed them. Lady Audley concludes her adventures at Villebrumeuse, a maison de sant e or reformed asylum, the kind of place where threatened patriarchs stash away odd and inconvenient personages under the modern pretense of health. She is placed there by the legal cunning of Robert Audley, who goes to great lengths to avoid a scandal and preserve picturesque appearances. Lady Audley eventually passes away in forced retirement after a long illness, which Monsieur Val described as a maladie de langueur (436, vol. 3, ch. 10). Robert, the novels gure for anxieties associated with the threat to a great country estate, early on experiences troubling dreams in which he sees
Audley Court, rooted up from amidst the green pastures and the shady hedgerows of Essex, standing bare and unprotected upon that desolate northern shore, threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea, whose waves seemed gathering upward to descend and crush the house he loved. As the hurrying waves rolled nearer and nearer to the stately mansion, the sleeper saw a pale, starry face looking out of the silvery foam, and knew that it was my lady, transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to destruction. (244; vol. 2, ch. 9)

This is a wish-fulllment dream designed not just to articulate but also to abate Roberts fear that Lady Audley, the illegitimate imposter, should inltrate and debase his patrimony. At the center of the plot there lies, as in many Gothic novels earlier in the century, a struggle for the legitimate possession of a landed property. But whereas the walls of the castle of Otranto, for example, are eventually thrown down with a mighty force so that even the legitimate owner cannot inhabit it again (162; ch. 5), Roberts dream rehearses the possibility of such a supernatural catastrophe only to transmute it into a picturesque vision of the old mansion safe and rmly rooted on the shore (244; vol. 2, ch. 9). Roberts nightmare of the sublimely superannuated Audley Court is not realized. But the estate undergoes a subtler,

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and less sublime, form of destruction. Audley Court is shut up, while the great cultural achievements it houses succumb to an eminently natural process of decay: the blue mold which artists dread gathers upon the Wouvermanns and Poussins, the Cuyps and Tintorettos (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). But the estate is not entirely abandoned and its fate illustrates how the past can be both defused and recycled: in Sir Audleys absence, Audley Court is often shown to inquisitive visitors and attracts tourists who come to admire my ladys rooms, and ask many questions about the pretty, fair-haired woman, who died abroad (436). In the meantime, Robert, who manages to appease his Gothic anxiety about property and place by purging the danger that pollute[d] his patrimony (340; vol. 3, ch. 3), does something very modern indeed: he moves house. His incongruous new bourgeois family, which includes his new wife Clara and her brother (Roberts friend and Lady Audleys rst husband, George Talboys), is installed in a fairy cottage . . . where, amid a little forest of foliage, there is a fantastical dwelling-place of rustic woodwork, complete with a little Swiss boat-house (435; vol. 3, ch. 10).12 Haynie points out that even though the picturesque movement was no longer at its height of popularity in the 1860s, it continued to be used as a signier of aristocratic taste and gentility (69). This is certainly the case in Lady Audleys Secret, but I would argue that the novels self-conscious application of an outmoded aesthetic, no longer dominant in literature or other arts, is deviously signicant and begs further questions. If the picturesque in Lady Audleys Secret constitutes a signier of gentility, it is a second-order one, placed, as it were, in quotation marks. It points not just to aristocratic tastes but also to literary conventions within which such tastes are often captured. Audley Court is picturesque not because it is found in what Haynie describes as a fashionable state of disrepair (70). It is the other way around: in 1862, Audley Court appears pass e because it is picturesque. Its picturesque appearance is, then, an effect as well as a cause of its obsolescence. Similarly, Gothic tropes, though certainly legible in the 1860s, mean in two different ways at once: they invoke both a (faux) Gothic past and the recent past in which such sham Gothic references were the height of fashion. The novel toys with the picturesque but prohibits it from being read as too earnest a mode of representation. To be sure, both discourses and to a large extent they are one have always been fundamentally concerned with (false) appearances. Picturesque nostalgia is carefully mediated by highly coded cultural references, while the Gothic is devoted to revealing troubling truths that the picturesque sentimentalizes or covers over. For instance, Walpoles labor of love, Strawberry Hill, is, as Susan Stewart points out, a form of trompe-loeil, a triumph of surface over materiality and time (274).13 But even though [a]ll representations of the past foreground their representational aspects (Stewart 274), a Gothic ruin in Walpole performs different cultural work from a picturesque country estate in Braddon. Walpole may have covered Strawberry Hill with faux Gothic wallpaper (Kalter), but his investment in the past had the urgency of a collectors mania for antiquities and represented medievalism reconstituted as fashionable novelty. In contrast, the sensation novels use of the picturesque aesthetic has none of that nostalgia for all things medieval (not even the kind that nds fulllment in Gothic simulacra). In Lady Audleys Secret Gothic tropes have become last years fashions, easily readable but no longer invested with the sheen of desire. For example, when Alicia Audley, Sir Michaels rambunctious daughter, discovers a hiding-place so small . . . and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest half lled with priests vestments under the oor of her nursery, her discovery is entirely

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gratuitous (9; vol. 1, ch. 1). This subterranean vault will never serve as a haven to some lady persecuted by a lecherous tyrant; in fact, it will never be mentioned again. Alicia, a jolly girl, with no nonsense about her (36; vol. 1, ch. 4), especially not of the Gothic kind, prefers to spen[d] most of her time out of doors, riding about the green lanes (10; vol. 1, ch. 1). The only secret passage actually made serviceable is that which allows Robert and George to gain entry into Lady Audleys dressing room later in the novel (6970; vol. 1, ch. 8). But even this Gothic passage (pun intended) is contained by Roberts ironic self-consciousness about his position as heir presumptive to an old country estate: Indeed I believe all ghosts to be the result of damp. You sleep in a damp bed you awake suddenly in the dead of the night with a cold shiver, and see an old lady . . . sitting at the foot of the bed. The old lady is indigestion, and the cold shiver is a damp sheet (69; vol. 1, ch. 8). The picturesque and Gothic modes as they appear in Lady Audleys Secret in the 1860s are best thought of as fossil remains of a bygone socio-cultural order (Benjamin, Arcades 540). Writing about Benjamins interest in the Paris Arcades at a time when they were already past their prime, Susan Buck-Morss comments: Because these decaying structures no longer hold sway over the collective imagination, it is possible to recognize them as the illusory dream images they always were. Precisely the fact that their original aura has disintegrated makes them invaluable didactically (159). So it is with Lady Audleys Secret. Much more is at stake than the realization that the picturesque is now clich e. At the outset of the novel, Audley Court appears, in proper Gothic fashion, as a spot in which Peace seemed to have taken up her abode (8; vol. 1, ch. 1; emphasis added). A typically Gothic mirage, this peace should be dismantled in the course of the plot and revealed as a thin veneer barely containing an explosive mixture of ambition, deceit, and violence. But the ending of Lady Audleys Secret dees the complete fulllment of such Gothic expectations. The picturesque is neither reconstituted on apparently more solid sentimental grounds (as it often is in, for instance, Radcliffe), nor is it ultimately deconstruct[ed], as Haynie suggests (72). The fairy cottage notwithstanding, the last few pages remain ambivalent about the scene they paint. Though the last chapter is entitled At Peace, Braddon makes an Austen-like, ironic disclaimer about leaving the good people all happy and at peace (437; vol. 3, ch. 10). The novel appears to fall into an ahistorical nostalgic mise-en-ab me of rusticity, but it betrays a self-consciousness about recycling these nostalgic visions as pure simulacra, so that their status as phantasmagoric dream images is uncovered. Lady Audleys Secret has previously taught us not to fall for precisely such apparitions as that presented at the end, of Clara and Alicia summon[ing] . . . [the men] to drink tea, and eat strawberries and cream upon the lawn (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). The idea of the tea-table as womans legitimate empire has been exposed as Roberts misogynistic delusion; it originally led him to be seduced into believing Lady Audley a domestic angel: The starry diamond upon her white ngers ashed hither and thither amongst the tea-things, and she bent her pretty head over the marvellous Indian tea-caddy of sandal-wood and silver, with as much earnestness as if life held no higher purpose than the infusion of Bohea (22223; vol. 2, ch. 7). Read as a self-conscious narrative, Lady Audleys Secret offers a distinctly campy possibility: estates like Audley Court are on the way to becoming picturesque theme parks, while new country residences are nothing but empty, supercial stylizations, holding no Gothic potential. The inauthentic peace of Roberts fairy cottage certainly entails profound ideological obfuscation, but it is not simply a more impenetrable version of the peace that enveloped Audley Court before Lady Audley came to disturb it.14 Fairy cottage, rustic

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woodwork, latticed windows, pretty baby, smooth lawn, slender wherries, little Swiss boat-house, pretty rustic smoking room (43536; vol. 3, ch. 10) this catalogue of superlative stylistic features reveals Roberts new abode to be a veneer without depth, a surface that has become the thing itself. His rustic seat is a frozen imago, mythologized and taken out of history, and, consequently, impossible to interrogate as a misrepresentation of some putative Gothic depth. The fairy cottage amounts to a travesty of the picturesque style, its intense miniaturization and beautication implying an ironic distance. Whereas the picturesque ruin of the old Audley Court could still produce a Gothic frisson, the new rusticity is too bogus to smack even of nostalgia. What Braddons novel demonstrates is that the new regime of bucolic cottages cannot answer to the anxieties the novel articulates. The ending is strangely affectless; it sanitizes the Audleys family history and transforms it into a sentimental tale t for a tourist. The image of Lady Audleys prett[iness] is apparently all that remains of the narrative when it is offered for consumption by visitors; the memory of the disturbing deeds of the beautiful devil (383; vol. 3, ch. 6), the demoniac incarnation of some evil principle (340; vol. 3, ch. 3), is slowly being obliterated. In this way, the novel avoids succumbing to the ideology of progress, or the mythic theory of history sternly critiqued by Benjamin (Arcades 857). Things are not better at the end and Peace is no more authentic than it was at the start. It is at our peril that we forget, by the novels conclusion, its early warning: No crime has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not been also done in the face of that sweet rustic calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with peace (57; vol. 1, ch. 7). The endings self-consciousness suggests, rather, that the passage of (narrative) time may yield no signicant advancement over the original situation of disequilibrium between semblance and truth, an imbalance which propelled the detective plot because it seemed to necessitate the dismantling of such appearances. Braddons play with literary conventions is, then, a way of acting out a much larger anxiety about the transience of literary and other fashions. Superannuated conventions represent all the other disaffected fetishes that litter the history of modernity. A picturesque cottage, for example, may reference the sentimental idyll but it may also constitute a fashion fad of yesteryear, captured on its way toward becoming an obsolete empty vessel. Lady Audleys Secret is savvy about temporal passage: it indulges neither in retrogressive nostalgia about auld lang syne (when Audley Court was proof against mermaids) nor in triumphant visions of the coming utopia (when All losses are restored, and sorrows end). It speaks, instead, to an anxious feeling of uncertainty about the reality of apparent progress and the meaning of the present moment.

III.

THE NOVELS ENDING CONSTITUTES the scene of a peculiar and puzzling kind of vanish[ing]: That dark story of the past fades little by little every day, and there may come a time in which the shadow my ladys wickedness has cast upon [George Talboys] life, will utterly vanish away (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). The sensation novel as a genre exhibits an interest in acts and events that leave no trace, quite apart from Georges prospects for future happiness or even the detective plots dependence on clues and traces. In a passage that many commentators regard as the paradigm not just of Lady Audleys Secret but of sensation ction in general, Braddon writes:

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What do we know of the mysteries that may hang about the houses we enter? If I were to go tomorrow into that common-place, plebeian, eight-roomed house in which Maria Manning and her husband murdered their guest, I should have no awful prescience of that bygone horror. Foul deeds have been done under the most hospitable roofs, terrible crimes have been committed amid the fairest scenes, and have left no trace upon the spot where they were done. I do not believe in mandrake, or in blood-stains that no time can efface. I believe rather that we may walk unconsciously in an atmosphere of crime, and breathe none the less freely. I believe that we may look into the smiling face of a murderer, and admire its tranquil beauty. (14344; vol. 1, ch. 18)15

Henry James recognized the signicance of this paradigm already in 1865 when he wrote in The Nation that the sensation novel exposes us to the most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. . . . Instead of the terrors of Udolpho, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were innitely the more terrible (593). In Braddon, the home becomes positively uncanny (unhomely), in the sense given to the concept by Friedrich Schelling and emphasized by Freud: Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open (qtd in Freud 132). In fact, Freud could have been describing the structure of the sensation novel when he said about the movement of the uncanny that it start[s] from the homely and the domestic and develop[s] towards the notion of something removed from the eyes of strangers, hidden, secret (133). Braddons idea of the mysteries that may hang about the houses we enter follows a similar logic, surmising that the hearth may be haunted by criminal secrets. But the novel forcefully articulates another mode of uncanniness one rejected by Freud which Jentsch thought was an effect of intellectual uncertainty (Freud 125). For instance, Braddons paradigmatic passage achieves its effects largely through the deployment of the word may: homes may or may not be unhomely; mysteries may or may not be found there. The sense of intellectual uncertainty follows from the distressing realization that certain historical, even traumatic, events may be traceless or invisible, or leave only oblique traces. The narrative questions the readers faulty assumption that historical events radically mark their actors and scorch the very ground upon which they take place. Nothing, we are led to believe, could be further from the truth. Instead, the novel challenges the readers belief in the existence of indelible stains by what amounts to an invitation to life in the modern uncanny.16 According to Braddon, to live in the modern world is to be deprived of the certainty provided by mandrake and blood stains; it is to live in a state of perpetual suspension or what Daly calls low-level anxiety (Literature 39). The novel warns us that signiers and signieds may not function according to the principle of resemblance, or in other words, that fairest scenes may well denote foul deeds. Critics often point out that, in this way, the sensation novel teaches readers to see the peacefulness of the bourgeois dwelling as a masquerade (Taylor xiv) and to resist seduction by beautiful fac ades (Showalter 3). The novels pleasurable paranoia about empirical observation requires, Brantlinger argues, the professional services of a skilled detective, who has the expertise to read beyond the surfaces of straightforward empiricism (14647). But Braddon may be going even further by not going to the other extreme of believing every scene of peace a mask of violence. Brantlinger suggests that [i]in such a world . . . everything threatens to become a clue (161), but Braddon is at least as anxious about the possibility that everything is never one way or another: that some clues might be missed, some misinterpreted, and some non-clues mistakenly read as clues. For Braddon,

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the reader of a novel or the observer of a picturesque landscape may never ultimately know if what they perceive is mimesis or masquerade. It is much more disturbing to have to remain in uncertainty about appearances than to have to come to terms with an uncomfortable but certain truth. Braddons modern subjects are, I believe, consigned to intellectual ambivalence, with or without the help of professional detectives or readers. At rst glance, Lady Audleys Secret seems to go against Benjamins idea that modern subjects are characterized by a compulsive need to preserve the traces of their material existence (Charles Baudelaire 46). But the sensation novels key anxiety, which, as we have seen, has to do with the possibility that traces may be impossible to preserve, represents a more fundamental modern preoccupation with the ruination and impermanence of such human traces. Trace is a keyword in the writings of Walter Benjamin, where it articulates the problem of relations between persons and things in modernity. Benjamins German word, Spur, actually condenses all the meanings that the sensation novel evokes in the concept: pointing to abstract traces (as in nicht die Spur einer Ahnung haben), marks people leave on objects (and vice versa), clues that put a detective on a criminals trail (as in jemandem auf der Spur sein), and even marks such as physical train tracks. Benjamin, who proclaims himself less on the trail of the psyche than on the track of things (Arcades 212), shows throughout The Arcades Project that the nineteenth-century phantasmagorias of the interior are vital to the modern subject who makes up for the absence of any trace of private life in modernity by leaving such traces in his own cocoon-like space (216): Indefatigably, he takes the impression of a host of objects; for his slippers and his watches, his blankets and his umbrellas, he devises coverlets and cases. He has a marked preference for velour and plush, which preserve the imprint of all contact (20). But the modern subject is not only fond of casings. He or she is dened by them: The interior is not just the universe of the tui (Arcades 20). In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in private individual; it is also his e the Era of High Capitalism, a book that many commentators regard as condensing the major preoccupations of The Arcades Project, Benjamin suggests that the bourgeois dwelling in the style of the Second Empire is a kind of case for a person and embeds him in it together with all his appurtenances, tending his traces as nature tends dead fauna embedded in granite (46). The compulsion to leave traces is here more explicitly read as a compensation for the inconsequential nature of life in modernity and the impermanent nature of life in general: Even if a bourgeois is unable to give his earthly being permanence, it seems to be a matter of honour with him to preserve the traces of his articles and requisites of daily use in perpetuity (46). Finding in things a sort of carapace for the psyche, Benjamins modern subject suspends the separation of materiality and psychology and confounds the distinction between person and thing on which modernity is founded.17 Though Benjamin stringently resists the reduction of person to thing, he nonetheless articulates human subjectivity as a function of their complex dialectics. The compulsive need to leave traces is, unsurprisingly, a symptom of the gradual annihilation of individual subjectivity under the modern regime. Benjamin argues, in fact, that the detective story came into being in the nineteenth century precisely as a way of tracking the obliteration of the individuals traces in the big-city crowd (Charles Baudelaire 43). For Braddon, too, relations between persons and places, persons and things, may be deceptive or inconclusive, and more is at stake than a critique of bourgeois domesticity as a kind of subterfuge. In other words, Lady Audleys criminal identity depends on the possibility of tracelessness on the obliteration Benjamin speaks of but even she cannot, will not,

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disappear completely: No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations . . . every trace of the old life melted away every clue to identity buried and forgotten except these, except these (17; vol. 1, ch. 1; emphasis added). Evidently, then, a delight in the destruction of traces she can remake herself because traces are not permanent demands an exception (a double exception). The exclusion pertains to a narrow black ribbon round her neck with which Lucy is perpetually dgeting, a trinket hidden under her dress, a ring wrapped up in an oblong piece of paper the paper partly printed, partly written, yellow with age, and crumpled with much folding (17; vol. 1, ch. 1). Even Lady Audley, the radical makeover maven, is not exempt from the compulsion to leave traces and refuses to put everything behind. Hidden in the innermost sanctum of her apartments at Audley Court, in the secret drawer of her jewelry cabinet, is another stash of odd material fragments. The servants, Phoebe and Luke, through whose eyes we apprehend these treasures, at rst believe them to be queer rubbish, without mercantile value and out of place in the company of the diamonds, rubies, pearls, and emeralds piled there (34; vol. 1, ch. 3). Phoebe, well versed in the exchange value of a secret if not in her ladys actual past, immediately turns these hieroglyphics into currency by blackmailing her mistress. But in themselves these memorabilia of Lucys abandoned child a babys little worsted shoe rolled up in a piece of paper, and a tiny lock of pale and silky yellow hair (34) have value only because Lucy cannot let go of them, even though she knows how destructive their discovery could be to her position as the Lady of Audley Court. These souvenirs constitute material traces of the past but are eventually transmuted into secret fetishes, a distinction that Lady Audleys Secret makes hard to sustain. Once Lady Audley hides and protects her memorabilia, they begin to resemble fetishes: powerful, even magical objects, shreds of the childs body and clothing, which substitute for the childs real presence and connect Lady Audley to her past.18 Traces, the novel seems to be saying, will be left even by a character who exploits the obliteration of traces in order to remake herself. It is in Robert Audleys musings on detective science that we nd the novels most accurate image of the nature of the trace. Robert, who likes to indulge in theorizing whenever an opportunity presents itself, explains that circumstantial evidence is like
that wonderful fabric which is built out of straws collected at every point of the compass, and which is yet strong enough to hang a man. Upon what . . . tries may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery . . . ! A scrap of paper; a shred of some torn garment; the button off a coat; a word dropped incautiously from the over-cautious lips of guilt; the fragment of a letter; the shutting or opening of a door; a shadow on a window-blind; the accuracy of a moment; a thousand circumstances so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of steel in the wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective ofcer. (123; vol. 1, ch. 15)

A trace can be thought of as an innitesimal material fragment but, to begin with, it is a fragment without meaning (or, rather, its meaning does not inhere in the trace). A button may be inexplicable in and of itself, even though it provides a solid piece of physical evidence; in a network of other such shreds and fragments, however, it becomes readable and potent as one of the links of steel. The novel, in fact, likes to compare the detective to a monomaniacal collector in pursuit of some elusive but highly prized piece whose primary meaning is that it somehow completes the collection. Benjamin also sees the Paris Arcades as a world of secret afnities, where palm tree and feather duster, hair dryer and Venus de Milo, prosthesis and

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letter-writing manual come together . . . as after a long separation (Arcades 874). But the detective, just like Benjamins aneur, can never escape the niggling fear that his fabric of traces is a mere collection of crochets the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor (Braddon, Lady Audleys Secret 252; vol. 2, ch. 10). Likewise, the surreal arrangement of objects Benjamin encounters is a rebus to be solved only in so far as nothing of the lot appears to be new but other than that, no secret plot conjoins the goldsh, the revolver, and the musical scores (Arcades 87475). Ultimately, Lady Audley, her working-class background, august title, and aristocratic residence notwithstanding, is only a more exaggerated but still accurate representation of the modern subjects complex affair with material odds and ends. She is most herself amid the veritable profusion of luxurious objects in a boudoir that resembles a little Aladdins palace (292; vol. 2, ch. 13).19 The description of her rooms takes the form of a phantasmagoric listing, as in a museum catalogue or curiosity cabinet:
Drinking-cups of gold and ivory, chiselled by Benvenuto Cellini; cabinets of buhl and porcelain, bearing the cipher of Austrian Marie Antoinette, amid devices of rosebuds and true lovers knots, birds and butteries, cupidons and shepherdesses, goddesses, courtiers, cottagers and milkmaids; statuettes of Parian marble and biscuit china; gilded baskets of hothouse owers; fantastical caskets of Indian lagree [sic] work; fragile teacups of turquoise china, adorned by medallion miniatures of Louis the Great and Louis the Well-beloved, Louise de la Valli` ere, and Jeanne Marie du Barry; cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and diaphanous lace; all that gold can buy or art devise had been gathered together for the beautication of this quiet chamber . . . (292; vol. 2, ch. 13)

Even though, as Katherine Montwieler has argued, Braddon relishes the power of commodities to show poor women how to affect gentility, and once they have accomplished this goal, how to perfect it (43), the sensation novel does not stay in the connes of any such didactic agenda. Braddon, in fact, seems more interested in moments when the peaceful coexistence of persons and things breaks down. Seen in this light, the boudoir is a place where Lady Audleys identity is both constituted and exposed as a ruse. The passage begins with Lady Audley reclining among her things and becoming fantastically fused with them: she is the most beautiful object in the enchanted chamber, made bewilderingly [more] beautiful by the gorgeous surroundings which adorn the shrine of her loveliness (29192; vol. 2, ch. 13). The phantasmagoric sense that this is the moment when Lady Audleys identity comes into its own is strengthened by the presence of numerous mirrors, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners, in a way that not only multiplie[s] her image but also congeals it into a concrete object (291). But the scene concludes with the surprise revelation that all the treasures that had been collected for her could have given her no pleasure but one, the pleasure of inging them into a heap beneath her feet, and trampling upon them and destroying them in her cruel despair (293; vol. 2, ch. 13). This is an important, but ultimately idle, comment. Lady Audley does no such thing; on the contrary, when she has to depart from Audley Court, she merges with her things even more closely, attempting to transform them into intimate layers of her dress. She hides fragile teacups and covered vases of S` evres and Dresden among the folds of her silken dinner dresses and secrete[s] jewelled and golden drinking cups amongst her delicate linen; she does not overlook her favourite Russian sables even in this last hour of shame and misery (376; vol. 3, ch. 6). Lady Audley is clearly

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a mercenary soul (376). But still the narrator rhetorically justies such hanker[ing] after objects by, paradoxically, throwing into doubt such symbiotic couplings between persons and things, such foldings of things into skirts and linings: Who has not felt, in the rst madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence? . . . the utmost that we can do for the relief of our passion is to knock over an easy chair, or smash a few shillings-worth of Mr. Copelands manufacture (206; vol. 2, ch. 6). In fact, too symbiotic a relationship with ones dwelling is, in Braddon, only a simpletons dream. Harcourt Talboys, Georges father, was like his own square-built, northern-fronted, shelterless house, and consequently [saw] no softening shadows that might alter the sharp outlines of cruel facts (18384; vol. 2, ch. 4). This is not to say that the sensation novel escapes the logic Benjamin outlines, but rather that it registers the excesses of pleasure and rage that constitute the traces of distinction between persons and things. Though she hordes her treasures with a textbook fetishists dedication, Lady Audley is, in fact, bored in the midst of her veritable porcelain museum and sits listening to the moaning of the shrill March wind and the apping of the ivy leaves against the casements, and looking into the red chasms in the burning coals (292; vol. 2, ch. 13). The narrator is careful to caution readers that Lady Audleys misery amid her possessions cannot be construed as a critique of opulence (292). Rather, what the narrator intimates again and again is that things, even though they are imbued with the glitter of desire, are never in perfect congruence with the persons for whom they serve as etui.20 Breaches between persons and things revealed in moments of rage against the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence (206; vol. 2, ch. 6) are the other side of the bourgeois subjects preference for objects he can imprint with his traces; clearly, objects cannot fulll the promise of compensation that they hold out. The novels fascination with the possibility of tracelessness does not protect it from ambivalence about it, and Lady Audleys Secret vacillates between the idea that (some) acts leave no traces and the idea that a trace always remains. We could say that the novel believes in a perfect crime but simultaneously shows its impossibility. The detective narrative requires a faith in traces (that is, criminal evidence); consequently, at the climax of the novels detective plot, it asserts that marks will be made and traces will be left irrespective of conscious intention. Lady Audley cannot but leave behind a trail of physical evidence, which only needs the gaze of a committed reader to be deciphered. Conversely, Lady Audley herself is marked by her deeds, her body becoming a piece of evidence. After the attempted murder of her rst husband, George Talboys Lady Audley cheerfully stuffs him down an abandoned well, not far from her bedroom window Robert detects a bruise upon her delicate skin, four slender, purple marks on her wrist, which she tries to veil by means of a strategically placed bracelet (9091; vol. 1, ch. 11). But even the glitter of a splendid gold cuff fails to obscure the telltale marks. In fact, the jewelry has the opposite effect, attracting an inquiring gaze: He looked at her pretty ngers one by one; this one glittering with a ruby heart; that encoiled by an emerald serpent; and about them all a starry glitter of diamonds. From the ngers his eyes wandered to the rounded wrists (90). The bruise is an interesting gure for the trace in several respects. First, its occurrence has nothing to do with the conscious intention of the crimes perpetrator; the sensitivity of ones blood vessels cannot tally in the calculus of even the most perfect crime. The bruise thus represents a sort of excess inevitably generated when an act is committed; we can surmise that even insignicant events mark the

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world in exactly this way. But, secondly, the bruise also suggests that marks of this sort are rarely permanent; in a few days, the bracelet will mask nothing but smooth skin. The novel anxiously raises but also suppresses the possibility that a trace is inherently impermanent (lest the foundations of its detective plot begin to founder). The fad[ing] whose possibility the narrator entertains in the last chapter thus constitutes a return to the idea of tracelessness at a moment when we would most expect an exultant celebration of the triumphs of detective science. Lady Audleys Secret surmises that all traces are like bruises, eeting marks whose meanings quickly disappear. Like picturesque buildings, and discourses about them, marks eventually succumb to the passage of time. Even crimes whose detection requires the greatest discernment may not be simply covered up again but fully erased and forgotten. Ultimately, the end of the novel resists dispelling the anxiety the narrator voices that we may walk unconsciously in an atmosphere of crime (144; vol. 1, ch. 18). The vanishing in question pertains not just to the inuence of Lady Audley on George Talboys life, but to the broader cultural memory already shown to be forming at the end of the novel. As Brantlinger and Taylor show, the sensation novel may be interpreted as a sort of literacy program, an education in reading beyond appearances. But I would argue that Braddons novel suggests that there is no reading practice capable of counteracting the transience of traces or withstanding the pull of ideology, which encourages the restoration, not destruction, of the touristy vision of the pretty, fair-haired woman, who died abroad (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). The pre-Raphaelite portrait of Lady Audley whose minutely-painted details are instrumental in uncovering the beautiful end hiding behind the soft and melting blue eyes of a mere child (72, 12, 55; all vol. 1, ch. 8; 1, 7) is, at the novels conclusion, veiled by a curtain (436). But soon there will be no need for such superstitious protection against the images sinister power: there is no reason to believe that the ominous portrait will escape the fate of the other paintings in the gallery, which are being consumed by damaging blue mold (436). Even though Lady Audleys crimes have been brought to light and the guilty party punished by exile, visitors at Audley Court still walk unconsciously through a scene of crime, while the growing legend of Lady Audley retains no trace of her guilty desires and evil deeds. Traces, the novel shows, vanish like bruises or become puzzling curios or museum objects, whose subjective meanings cannot be reconstructed except as signifying the passage of modernity into aborted and broken-down matter (Arcades 874). Audley Court now appears to readers (and visitors alike) as the remnant of a world just now superseded but already falling into ruin. The fairy cottages that arrive to replace it are only more phantasmagoric images, fated to appear obsolete even before the novels nal sentence comes to an end.
Fordham University

NOTES
1. Today most critics recognize the modernity of the genre. See Boyle; Cvetkovich; Daly; Fahnestock; Gilbert; Hughes; Showalter; and Taylor. Daly concludes that sensation was, in fact, a keyword of modernity (Literature 45). 2. The sensation novel actively participates in creating the modernity that it represents (Daly, Literature 37).

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3. This line of argumentation follows Walter Benjamin, who argues in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility that human subjectivity is not transhistorical but instead varies with the movements of history: Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception (104). My thinking about time, history, and modernity is fundamentally inuenced by Walter Benjamin, especially The Arcades Project and Buck-Morsss The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Writing about Benjamins work on the Paris Arcades, Buck-Morss observes that the rapid turnover in style and fashion was, in the nineteenth century, experienced as extreme temporal attenuation (6465). In a chapter exploring the concept of historical ruin, Buck-Morss explains: Transitoriness is the key to Benjamins afrmation of the mythic element in cultural objects, redeeming the wish-images attached to the transitional, too-early ur-forms of modern technology as momentary anticipations of utopia. But in the process of commodication, wish image congeals into fetish; the mythic lays claim to eternity. Petried nature (erstarrte Natur) characterizes those commodities that comprise the modern phantasmagoria which in turn freezes the history of humanity as if enchanted under a magic spell. But this fetishized nature, too, is transitory. The other side of mass cultures hellish repetition of the new is the mortication of matter which is fashionable no longer (159). 4. Taylor also writes that Lady Audleys Secret plays on many of the fears that accompanied the rapid growth of consumer culture at the turn of the 1860s and embodie[s] both the perils of modernity and the fear of degeneration (Introduction xvi, xii). But Daly cautions against such anxious readings of popular novels as possibly obscuring the particular cultural work a novel performs in its historical moment (Modernism 1516). 5. Taylor writes that the sensation novel was seen as the embodiment of the inherently morbid nature of mass culture (Introduction xiii). For accounts of the critical hysteria surrounding the vogue for sensation, see Brantlinger and Cvetkovich. 6. Up until the seventeenth century clocks had only one hand. Minute and second hands appeared rst on late seventeenth-century watches. But even one-hand clocks were more accurate than the Audley Court clock: they had quarter-hour markers that allowed time to be told with greater precision. In other words, the Audley Court clock is in extremes in more ways than one. As to Swiss precision, Switzerland was already a major watch-making center by the 1850s, responsible for many advancements in relevant technologies. 7. Benjamin writes that Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image (Arcades 10). Rolf Tiedemann comments that the temporal core of history cannot be grasped as really happening, stretching forth in the real dimension of time; rather it is where evolution halts for a moment, where the dynamis of what is happening coagulates into stasis . . . (Arcades 942). 8. French, German, Russian, and Polish, for example, use nouns that have nothing to do with body parts owka respectively). My point is that in English the connection (aiguille, Zeiger, cTpe Ka, and wskaz between bodies and clocks is particularly close. 9. Lady Audley is Lucy Maldon, an orphan. She becomes Lucy Talboys by marriage; she dubs herself Lucy Graham, when she becomes a governess after her husbands sudden departure to Australia. She enters a bigamous second marriage, and as Lady Audley attempts to murder her rst husband, George Talboys. At the end of the narrative she is placed in an insane asylum under the name Madame Taylor, an invented moniker that conceals her as effectively as her exile to Belgium. Taylor notes that Braddons ction is permeated by the notion that identity itself is built on masquerade (Introduction viii). 10. Haynie writes that In her descriptions of Audley Court, Braddon uses coded language that would be recognized as designating the picturesque: the emphasis on old architecture; the pleasing prospect; the lack of productivity. In keeping with the rhetoric of the picturesque, the design of the landscape is agentless; it is the handiwork of . . . Time and thus encoded as natural (69). 11. Brantlinger suggests that the sensation novel upset its critics as much as it did, because unlike the Gothic novel, it could not be given a dose of quasi-philosophical cultural capital through the theory of

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12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

the sublime. The sensation novel thus had few if any philosophically, socially, or morally redeeming features (142). On the transgressive sexuality of this arrangement, see Nemesvari and Petch. Stewart quotes a longish but very helpful fragment from E. F. Bleiler: [Walpole] never seems to have realized that Gothic was an art of construction, and not simply decoration, and his interpretation of the form was peculiarly limited to surfaces and visibilities. He could not afford groining or fretwork for the stairways, but he felt they were necessary. According to his practice he might have made them out of plaster and lath; he might have made them out of carved cardboard; but what he actually did was simply paste up wallpaper with groining painted on it. For battlements he nailed cardboard on the framework of the cottage. One of the quips of the day was that Horrie had outlived four sets of battlements (Bleiler viiiix; quoted in Stewart 274). See also Kalter. Haynie reads the novels idyll of the fairy cottage as a retreat into an even more remote and unrealistic vision of rural, preindustrial England (72). Brantlinger calls this passage a microcosm of the sensation novel indeed, of all mystery-detective novels not just in its content, but in its structure of abrupt revelation (153). He later reads it as a scene of trauma (16165). Royle argues that Freuds essay on the uncanny is a crucial text for an understanding of contemporary culture in general (12). This seemingly immodest claim follows, actually, from the nature of the uncanny: for Royle, as for Freud, nothing escapes being haunted and no intellectual enterprise can claim freedom from ghosts. For complementary articulations of the problem see Brown and Daly, Literature, Introduction. My remark here relies primarily on the anthropological meaning of the term fetish (see Pietz). But in The Arcades Project as a whole, it is hard to keep terms like (commodity) fetish and trace apart. Clearly, traces are not reducible to fetishes, but Benjamins thinking about material culture is suffused with the sense that all objects under capitalism acquire an aura of the commodity fetish. On Benjamin and Marxs concept of commodity fetishism, see Tiedemann (93741). Tiedemann concludes that what Benjamin proposes is not strictly a critique of commodity fetishism but rather a kind of materialist physiognomics, which he probably understood as a complement, or an extension, of Marxist theory (940). On Lady Audleys boudoir see Reynolds. Brown describes one reason for this misalignment: things always seem to be belated because we want things to come before ideas, before theory, before the word, whereas they seem to persist in coming after (16).

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