Sensation, Genders, and Identity Politics in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), considered one of the best sensational novels in the Victorian age, offers a new space for re-considering identities, genders, and domestic ideals by demonstrating the transgression of the artificial boundaries established by the Victorian ideals. In doing so, the novel, with its questionings of marriage, home, and being woman and man, focuses on the protagonist Lady Audley’s nonconforming attempt to go beyond the Victorian domestic norms as she wears some masks to hide what she is. In this context, drawing upon gender studies, this article explores how gendered identities are produced and installed as the effects of discursive practices, and how Braddon breaks down the stability of genders in the novel by acknowledging gender performativity and gender fluidity. This destabilization raises broader questions about the female identity and identity politics of the Victorian age. In searching for some answers to these questions, the article scrutinizes how the novel challenges the trenchant patriarchal assumptions about genders and goes beyond hegemonic patriarchy.