Madness or Doubles?
The Male/Female Distinction in English Literature of the Victorian Age.
MA Thesis
Dr. R..W.H. Glitz
June 2010
Iris van Duren
0604127
English Language and Culture
Table of Contents
Introduction ………………………………………………………………...2
Chapter 1: Male Duality…………………………………………………..4
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde…………………………..…………..8
- Dorian Gray……………………………………...………....13
Chapter 2: Female Duality…………………………………………….....19
- Jane Eyre…………………………………………….……...24
- Lady Audley’s Secret……………………………….……….30
Conclusion:………………………………………………………………...39
Bibliography:……………………………………………………………….41
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Introduction
The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines the word “Victorian” as both
“relating to or coming from the period from 1837-1901 when Victoria was Queen of
England”; and “morally strict in a way that was typical in the time of Queen
Victoria”(Longman, 2005). The fact that a word indicating a time period has received this
second, generally recognized connotation reveals just how essential the subject of morality is
in understanding the Victorian age. Victorian society is generally seen as reserved, prudish,
and repressive when it comes to sexuality, and especially the middle- and upper-classes had to
adhere to certain moral restrictions. Being a gentleman was not merely something one was
born into, it came with certain guidelines and restrictions which sometimes meant that natural
instincts had to be repressed in favour of an accepted norm. Similarly, women had to live up
to an ideal of femininity referred to as ‘the angel in the house’, a term taken from Coventry
Patmore’s narrative poem (1854) which he wrote in praise of his wife, who symbolized the
virtues of obedience, purity, faithfulness and domesticity. The strict, Victorian way of
classifying right and wrong inspired a way of thinking in which everything that diverged from
the norm was considered improper, and should remain unexpressed. It is not surprising,
therefore, that a form of literature arose that focused on the theme of duality; the discrepancy
between the accepted public image and the unaccepted, repressed part of one’s psyche.
The most straightforward expression of duality is discussed in the first chapter: the
figure of the literary double. This figure appeared in many nineteenth century novels, and
what most of these novels have in common is the fact that their main characters are all male.
This gender focus is also reflected in the research that was done on the subject of doubles,
which rarely mentions the subject of female duality. That women are almost completely left
out of novels about doubles has already been observed by Joanne Blum, who writes that “the
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type of double reflected in [these] texts is almost without exception, a single-sexed
one”(Blum 2).
Yet it is unlikely that the feeling of duality was limited to the male gender, and I
would like to propose that it can also be found in several nineteenth century female
characters, albeit in a different way. Feminist critics especially, have looked at the
representation of female characters in the nineteenth century, and the duality that is found in
them can be traced back to the contradictory images that determined femininity in the
Victorian age. Unlike male characters, female characters are rarely portrayed as having a
clearly identifiable double, instead other techniques are used to express her duality. The
Victorian madwoman has often been described as a reaction to the need for female duality,
and chapter two will examine how she is used as an expression thereof.
In both chapters, two novels are discussed to demonstrate the statements made in
them. These novels are R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861). In these chapters I wish to research
the representation of duality, and with the help of these four novels, show the difference in the
portrayal of male and female duality in nineteenth century literature.
3
Male Duality
If ever he were proud of anything it was of being the conqueror of that [pride]
and all other vices. He scorns and is afraid of nothing but sin.
(qtd in The Perfect Gentleman)
- Abram Smythe Palmer
Man is not truly one but two.
(from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde)
- R.L. Stevenson
The literary double has been a recurrent figure throughout literary history. In The Modern
Gothic and Literary Doubles, Linda Dryden writes that “doubling in narratives can be traced
back at least as far as Genesis: the fall of Satan is frequently regarded as the story of an evil
double”(Dryden 38). Over the years, numerous writers have consciously or unconsciously
addressed the subject of duality, and it has appeared in novels in the form of twins, evil
doppelgängers, and cases of mistaken identity. The term ‘doppelgänger’ was coined in 1796
by the German novelist Jean Paul Richter, who explained it as “Leute, die sich selbst sehen”
(qtd. in Zivkovic 122). In the eighteenth century, the theme of duality was frequently used in
gothic novels, which combined stories of romance and adventure with supernatural
appearances and shadow selves. These early gothic novels usually depicted doubles as the evil
counterparts of their better selves, but John Herdman notes that in the late eighteenth century,
“the concept of moral evil became associated with the primitive, the savage, and the untamed
in the human spirit”(Herdman 12), so rather than representing evil as something external it
was now seen as something that existed within man. In the nineteenth century, the emerging
interest in the human unconscious inspired more writers to show duality as something that
could be found in all human beings. In 1866, E.S. Fallas wrote that “it has been shown that
our minds lead a double life – one life in consciousness, another and a vaster life beyond
it”(qtd. in Regan 55). At the same time, the gothic genre was transferred into the domestic
sphere, and rather than being set in the sixteenth century and in far-off places such as Italy,
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the Alps or the Arctic, late gothic novels were often situated in nineteenth century England.
This suggested to readers that the events they read about were not necessarily foreign and
from times past, but could just as well happen in their own country, city, house, and even in
their own mind. In addition, authors started depending less on the thrill of supernatural events
but instead tried to situate their stories in more realistic settings, and with this the figure of the
double came closer to home, as can be shown by Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, both of which were
written in the late nineteenth century and show many similarities in their depiction of the
double.
One of the first nineteenth century examples of the double can be found in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was published in 1818 and can be seen as a bridge between the
literature of the Gothic and literature about doubles. Frankenstein’s monster is brought to life
using scientific techniques, and is now often interpreted as the embodiment of Victor
Frankenstein’s natural instincts. In 1824, James Hogg published his book The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a fictional autobiography that tells the story of
two brothers who grow up separately and act as each other’s doubles. In 1839, Edgar Allan
Poe published his short story William Wilson in which the main character kills his own
conscience which appears as a copy of himself, his virtuous double. Then there are Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846), Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar
Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1890), and the list does not end there. This chapter is concerned with
these last two books, written at the end of the nineteenth century, when the doppelgänger had
changed from being a manifestation of good or evil to an expression of duality within a
person. Arguably, the nineteenth century male double can be seen as an expression of the
dichotomy that was caused by a man’s need to uphold a respectable image before his fellow
countrymen, whilst at the same time having to deal with other feelings that were seen as
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improper and needed to be repressed. If a man wished to be respected by fellow gentlemen he
had to adhere to the moral guidelines and rules of the upper classes, and possible flaws had to
be carefully hidden from the public eye. It is unsurprising, therefore, that many examples of
the double can be found in nineteenth century literature.
In 1970, Robert Rogers published A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature,
one of the more in-depth discussions of the doppelgänger. Rogers discusses different kinds of
doubles, among which are the tempting devil or guardian angel, the dark shadow or mirror
self, and distinguishes the act of dissociation, the creating of a dual personality. According to
Rogers, creating an external character to present internal, instinctual drives is a way of
“[dramatizing the] mental conflict within a single mind”(Rogers 29), and in creating a double,
the character is able to reject any responsibility for these urges. Doubling can then be seen as,
what Otto Rank called, “a basic defence mechanism … by which an individual separates
himself from a part of his self which he wishes to escape”(qtd. in Rogers 64). In addition, “the
reader [is] easily able to shunt off the guilt he unconsciously shares with the evil
protagonist”(33). Milica Živković has described it best in his article “The Double as the
‘Unseen’ of Culture”, in which he writes:
Over the course of the nineteenth century, narratives structured around dualism …
reveal the internal origin of the double. The demonic is not supernatural, but is an
aspect of personal and interpersonal life, a manifestation of unconscious desire. The
text is now structured between self and self as other, articulating the subject’s relation
to cultural laws and established rules. (Živković 125)
The male double, then, is part of man’s psyche, and rather than seeing doubles as supernatural
manifestations outside the control of the character, later nineteenth century novels could
describe doubling as a deliberate act, as a choice of the male character who wished to
eliminate his own feeling of duality. In “The Shadow Within”, Claire Rosenfield explains the
appearance of doubles in the nineteenth century as a side-effect of the time, claiming that it
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was “because the Romantic Movement made the inner life of man – spontaneity of feeling,
imagination, spiritual exploration- fashionable if not respectable”(Rosenfield 327). In A
Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature, Robert Rogers writes that “critics oriented
towards psychology view the diabolical devil, which predominates, as a character
representing unconscious, instinctual drives”(Rogers 2). The renewed emphasis on the
individual and folktales, combined with the beginning interest in psychology and, as
Rosenfield notes, the need for the double, “opposing selves, [to] submit to the canons of
plausibility”(327), left the way wide open for novelists to “juxtapose or duplicate two
characters; the one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other
externalizing the free, uninhibited, often criminal self.”(327) An important word to note here
is ‘externalizing’, because it is this, more than anything else, that separated male and female
examples of duality in the nineteenth century. The male doppelganger is usually a figure that
remains (largely) separate from its counterpart, and as such is able to express the impulses and
desires that the main character had been repressing without bringing him into disrepute. In the
nineteenth century, men were generally seen as scientific and rational and this idea is reflected
in the representation of male doubles as well, who were more often the result of scientific
experiments or simply the conscious choice of the doubled character. For example, Rogers
points out that “Jekyll’s transformation of himself into mr. Hyde is deliberate and depends –
initially, at least – on the drugs which Jekyll has concocted.” (Rogers 93)
As will be shown in the examination of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dorian Gray,
these two novels are strikingly similar in their depiction of the double as an expression of
repressed desires. Both Henry Jekyll and Dorian Gray are gentlemen who feel the need to
repress part of their nature to maintain their respectable public image, thereby creating a
feeling of duality that can only be resolved by dividing themselves and allowing a double the
freedom to express their hidden desires. Tracing this back to the notion of the gentleman and
7
the importance of society in the Victorian age, it can be said that it was the restrictions that
were put on people that gave the double a new impulse in literature.
R.L. Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published in
1886, and it is probably still the best known story about doubles. However, as Robert Mighall
notes, “Stevenson’s story is more known about than actually known” (Stevenson ix). The
story is set in nineteenth century London, and tells the story of Dr Jekyll, a scientist who
believes that “man is not truly one but two”(Stevenson 55). To liberate himself from this
feeling of duality, he finds a scientific way to split himself, and release his shadow in the form
of Mr Hyde. That Robert Louis Stevenson, a gentleman himself, would write such a story is
not surprising. In his “Chapter on Dreams”, he writes that he himself struggled with feelings
of duality, which he wanted to express in his book: “I had long been trying to write a story on
this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must
at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature”(141). Whether he
is talking about duality caused by the difference between his public and private persona or if
he means that every man has a good and evil side remains unclear. However, the episodes
from the novel that will be discussed below make a strong case for the first possibility. While
some critics do indeed see Hyde merely as an embodiment of evil, the book greatly supports
an interpretation that underlines the more natural side of him, the side of unrepressed desires
and emotions.
That there is more to Hyde than evil alone is also observed by Masao Miyoshi, who
writes that “Hyde … looks like the very incarnation of evil, but at the beginning he is in fact
merely Jekyll’s unrepressed spontaneous existence (Miyoshi 473). Similarly, In his Jungian
8
approach to the novel, Matthew Brennan writes that instead of just representing “a buried
capacity for evil”, Hyde “manifests various weaknesses that Jekyll needs to recognize and
correct as well as some positive qualities he has let atrophy”(100), and accordingly, “Hyde
presents Jekyll with a chance to adjust his attitude toward the parts of his psyche that he has
been neglecting: his senses, his instincts, and his natural desires”(Brennan 102). This neglect
can be seen as a direct result of his acting as a gentleman. In his letter of explanation, Jekyll
writes:
I was born in the year 18- to a large fortune, … fond of the respect of the wise and
good among my fellow-men, and thus, as might be supposed, with every guarantee of
an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a
certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as had made the happiness of many, but
such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high,
and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came
about that I concealed my pleasures and that when I reached years of reflection, and
began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I
stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. (Stevenson 55)
Instead of living with his “impatient gaiety of disposition”, Jekyll represses this side of him
and focuses solely on his moral side. Hyde can then be seen as the embodiment of all things
that have to be repressed by Dr Jekyll for him to maintain his appearance of a perfect
Victorian gentleman. The lawyer Utterson, from whose point of view most of the story is
written, is a distinguished gentleman much like Jekyll. Similar to Jekyll, it is insinuated that
he may have had a somewhat dubious private life. First it is said that ”[Utterson] was austere
with himself … and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for
twenty years,” but later, when he believes Dr Jekyll is being blackmailed by Mr Hyde, “the
lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded a while on his own past, groping in all the corners of
memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light
there”(17). His conduct therefore appears to have been less flawless than initially suggested.
That it is Jekyll rather than Utterson or Lanyon who gives way to his darker self, may be
9
ascribed to his social role (Miyoshi 472), or rather his public image as “the very pink of the
proprieties”(Stevenson 9). “Had the Victorian ideal been less hypocritically ideal”, notes
Joyce Carol Oates, “or had Dr. Jekyll been content with a less perfect public reputation, his
tragedy would not have occurred”(Oates 604). This is something that is also emphasized in
the novel itself, when Jekyll writes:
Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from
the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid
sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any
particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was and, with even a deeper
trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill
which divide and compound man’s dual nature. (Stevenson 55)
That a gentleman’s good name was extremely important in Victorian society is underlined
several more times in the novel. For instance, when Mr Enfield recounts his meeting with
Edward Hyde, he says the following:
I saw that Sawbones [the doctor] turn sick and white with the desire to kill him. I knew
that was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the
question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a
scandal out of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the
other. If he had any friends or any credit we undertook that he should lose them.
(Stevenson 8)
It is striking that, in the eyes of these gentlemen, the only thing worse than a scandal is death.
Even in the guise of Mr Hyde, who is supposed to be liberated from society’s constraints,
Jekyll seems to realize the importance of his reputation when he says: “If you choose to make
capital out of this accident … I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a
scene”( 8). The duality that results from repressed instincts, from “the self-denying toils of his
professional life”(64) can only be resolved by splitting his identity and releasing his natural
side. Hyde, when first released, is small and underdeveloped, a direct result of the extent in
which this side of Jekyll’s psyche has been neglected in the past. With Hyde, Jekyll is able to
10
preserve his respectability on the outside, whilst secretly violating society’s system of moral
codes. With this ability, he “could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial
respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off [his] lendings and spring headlong
into the sea of liberty”(60). In this way, Jekyll is able to avoid responsibility for his crimes,
because “whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon
a mirror”(60). In the novel, Jekyll refers to himself as an “ordinary secret sinner”, a sentence
which has led Robert Mighall to conclude that it is “the ‘ordinary’ condition of [t]his society
is for individuals to sin in secret”(xxvii), and indeed, the examples of both Jekyll and Utterson
would suggest it was.
For Jekyll, ‘releasing’ Hyde is a conscious, and even scientific choice. In his final
letter, he starts by claiming that “even before the scientific discoveries had begun to suggest”
that it would be possible to split a psyche, he “had learned to dwell with pleasure … on the
thought of the separation of these elements”(56), and more importantly, he “hesitated long
before [he] put [his] theory to the test of practice”(56). In addition to presenting this
‘dissociation’ (a word used to describe the process of doubling and which in itself has a
scientific connotation) as rational, it may be said that the text even suggests its necessity:
As in Dr Jekyll, the Gothic generally shows the importance of recognizing and
integrating the unknown inner selves of the psyche; specifically, it dramatizes the
psychological damage that results when the conscious personality denies its shadow,
just as Jekyll denies his dark side, Hyde. (Brennan 97)
The reasons Jekyll gives for his desire to split himself are simple: “of the two natures that
contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was
only because I was radically both” (Stevenson 56). He does not see his darker side as ‘other’,
but as part of himself, equally real as the moral, gentlemanlike side of him. “This, too, was
myself,” Jekyll writes after his first transformation, “It seemed natural and human. In my eyes
it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and
11
divided countenance, I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine.”(58) So, not only does he
feel that both sides are inherent parts of him, he goes even further by claiming that Hyde is
more natural, more true to his own spirit than his undivided self had been. However, when
describing the transgressions he made as Hyde, Jekyll is able to see him as a person quite
separate from himself: “the pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I
have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde,
they soon began to turn towards the monstrous”. He claims that he “stood at times aghast
before the acts of Edward Hyde”, but reassures himself by saying that “it was Hyde … and
Hyde alone, that was guilty”(60, my emphasis). Jekyll very clearly tries to distance himself
from his darker side, and he is able to do so because, almost throughout the story, Hyde has
been represented as a separate creature, both mentally and physically. In the end, Jekyll’s
separation from Hyde is complete when he writes “he, I say – I cannot say, I. That child of
Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred”(67). This ability to
distance oneself from a darker side can be seen as one of the greater advantages of using a
literary double:
The double figure showed that it was the nature of every man that the good in him
must struggle in unending battle against the distortions of evil. It did so in a way that
would make the reader accept the terrible certainty that this was true of himself, for it
not only prevented him from rejecting the central character as evil, but, to the extent
that he sympathized with that character, the double became a potential mirror image of
himself as well. (MacAndrew 50-51)
Displaying man’s duality in such a way is typical for novels that use rational doubles. Rather
than being portrayed as a madman, Jekyll is described as a victim of society’s pressure and of
his own strife for moral superiority, and ends up looking virtually blameless even to the
reader.
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Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
In many ways similar to Stevenson’s novel, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was
published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. The novel is set in London in the fin de
siècle, and tells the story of Dorian Gray, a young man who, in a moment of vanity, expresses
the desire that the painting that was made of him “was to grow old”, while he “was to be
always young”(Wilde 28). As the story continues, he forgets about his wish, until the day he
discovers the painting has altered:
In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face
appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would
have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. (87)
This cruelty, which resulted from his abandoning his fiancée, Sibyl Vane, appears on the
painted image rather than on his own face. This double is not a separate character, as it is in
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but rather a painting presented as the embodiment of Dorian’s soul.
Robert Rogers mentions that writers used “the widespread belief that shadows, reflections,
and portraits of the body are the same as souls, or are at least vitally linked with the wellbeing of the body”(Rogers 7). Even though Dorian Gray does not have a double with another
name and a different appearance, it still enables him to break the rules of society, since “even
those who had heard the most evil things against him, and from time to time strange rumours
about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs, could not
believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him … Men who talked grossly became
silent when Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his face that
rebuked them”(Wilde 124). “Sin”, claims Basil Hallward, Dorian’s friend, “is a thing that
writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed”(143). Therefore, Dorian’s innocent
appearance is almost as effective as a physical double such as Hyde.
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Although Dorian’s double does not appear as a response to a repressive society and a
previously existing feeling of duality, as it is in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, it does offer him the
chance to start leading a double life. According to Robert Mighall, Wilde’s novel “suggest[s]
that duplicity is an essential part of existence in late-Victorian society”(xiii), and Dorian is
merely presented as “an extreme version of an unacknowledged norm”(xiii). In the novel, it is
indeed said that they live “in the native land of the hypocrite”(145), in a society where
“manners are of more importance than morals”(136), and great pressure is put on
appearances: “I don’t suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat live correctly”(12), declares
Lord Henry. Robert Mighall accurately observes that “the theme of a double life of outward
respectability, or at least of caring about one’s reputation, while secretly transgressing
society’s moral codes is central to the plot of Dorian Gray”(xii). Oscar Wilde himself was
also a gentleman and, according to Mighall, “acutely aware of what this meant, and defensive
of his right to this title”(x).
Wilde would … have agreed with the words he gave to Basil Hallward in his tale
when the latter asserted that ‘every gentleman is interested in his good name’; and yet,
like Dorian, Wilde had for some time been indulging in activities that were illegal and
vilified by ‘respectable’ society, and which therefore forced him to live a double
life.(xi)
Ironically, it was this book about a double life that would later be used in the trial against him
as proof of ‘gross indecency’, offering a surprising example of blurring boundaries between
art and reality. That Dorian Gray also values his title is shown throughout the novel. First of
all, it is only after he realizes that his double (the painting) is the one that has to bear the
marks of his indiscretions that he begins to feel free from society’s restraints. Though he tries
to see the picture as “the visible emblem of conscience”, something that would help him
“resist temptation”(Wilde 89), it is not long until he succumbs to his desires, realising that
“eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins – he was
to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame”(102). After Sibyl
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Vane has committed suicide, his friend Lord Henry warns him that “there will have to be an
inquest, of course, and you must not be mixed up in it. Things like that make a man
fashionable in Paris. But in London people are so prejudiced. Here, one should never make
one’s debút with a scandal “(95). In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, it is said that when Hyde “had
been too long caged, he came out roaring”(Stevenson 64), suggesting an almost beastlike
appearance caused by a previous containment. Similarly, Dorian wonders if it is not because
man has to ‘cage’ his nature that had made it impossible for it to develop into something
better, that “they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to
starve them into submission or to kill them by pain”(Wilde 126). Still, Dorian hides his
portrait from the world, so “no eye but his would ever see his shame”(119). Even though he
claims to take no interest in the rumours about him, every precaution is taken to prevent the
outside world from finding out his true nature, for “he was not really reckless, at any rate in
his relations to society”(125). Like Utterson in Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian biggest fear is being
blackmailed, for “he had heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some
servant who had read a letter, or overheard a conversation, or picked up a card with an
address, or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a shred of crumpled lace”(120), and
the idea that his picture could be found “made him cold with horror”(136).
Afraid for Dorian’s reputation, Basil, who can be seen as the voice of morality,
confronts him, entreating Dorian to “lead such a life as will make the world respect [him] …
to have a clean name for a fair record [and] to get rid of the dreadful people [he associates]
with”(145). When Dorian finally shows him the painting, exclaiming that “each of us has
heaven and hell in him”(150), Basil urges him to repent in order to save his soul. His inability
to accept the shadow side of the boy he has idealised has him killed as a consequence. If Basil
can be seen as the voice of society and good morals, then Henry is the voice of immorality
and the advocate for freedom of sensibility. “Dorian relishes his ability to indulge in his
15
immoral, illegal or just plain shady activities whilst escaping the consequences”(xii),
something that was first described to him as and ideal of living by Lord Henry:
I believe that if one man were to live out his life full and completely, were to give
form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe
that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the
maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal. … But the bravest man
amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in
the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse
that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.”(21)
These impulses, when strangled, create a feeling of duality, and Henry suggest the advantages
of yielding to them. Dorian is first described as someone who “had kept himself unspotted
from the world”(19), this entices Lord Henry, who attempts to “project [his] soul” on Dorian”
and turn him into the embodiment of all his ideas and dreams. After their first meeting,
Dorian “was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they
seemed to him to have come really from him”(21), suggesting that, although Lord Henry had
influenced him, this duality had always been inside of him.
To Dorian, “man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations”(Wilde 137),
and even though he does not create a double figure like Jekyll did, he makes the conscious
choice of yielding to his duality. When faced with the option of reversing his wish and losing
his double, he chooses to keep it instead:
For a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between
him and the picture might cease. It had changed in answer to a prayer; perhaps in
answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged. An yet, who, that knew anything about
Life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that
chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught? (102)
After rationalizing his decision he concludes that “he would never again tempt by prayer any
terrible power. If the picture was to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too closely
into it?”(103). In this case, the lack of action taken by Dorian to reverse the situation can be
16
seen as an acceptance of his double, and rather than being overwhelmed by his own duality,
he delights in it: “On his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and
himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination
of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden
that should have been his own”(135). This ability to contemplate one’s double as though it
were a thing separate from himself reminds one of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Instead of being
driven to madness by his inner duality, Dorian is able to see his soul as divided from his body
and observe it with nearly scientific interest. Looking at the painting and at the mirror he
keeps next to it, he grows “more and more enamoured of his own beauty”, while at the same
time becoming “more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul”(124). Both his
own features and those of his portrait are examined regularly:
Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that
gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends, or thought that
they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with
the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that
Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the
canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished
glass. (124)
He studies them as two separate entities, which is different from how they are presented in the
beginning. When the picture is first created, it is seen as an inherent part of Dorian who
exclaims: “I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I feel that”(29). Basil initially
agrees, saying “as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed and sent home.
Then you can do what you like with yourself”(29). However, Lord Henry’s influences are
already at work, and it is not long until they are divided. When Basil warns Henry that he
“really must not say things like that before Dorian”, the latter replies: “before which Dorian?
The one who is pouring our tea for us, or the one in the picture?”(30). Shortly afterwards,
when Dorian and Henry are leaving together, Basil declares that he will “stay with the real
17
Dorian”(31), indicating that from that moment on the two can be seen as separate. Over time,
when Dorian’s sins are presumably getting worse, he tries to distance himself from the
painting, and eventually decides to destroy it because he believes that killing the painting
“would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill this monstrous
soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace”(212). However, by
destroying his picture Dorian ends up destroying himself, since one cannot exist without the
other. It is not until the very end that the reader is invited to see him as he would have been
without a double: a “withered, wrinkled [man] … loathsome of visage”(213). The double,
again, has created a distance between the person and his actions, and presents the character as
a victim of society and bad influence rather than an inherently bad, or insane person.
18
Female Duality
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
(from “The Angel in the House”)
- Coventry Patmore
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit.
(from “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind”)
- Emily Dickinson
As can be expected, the portrayal of male and female duality is different in many ways, and in
The Male / Female Double in Women’s Fiction, Joanne Blum has even called the tradition of
doubles “largely a male one”(Blum 2). This does not mean, however, that duality cannot be
found in books by or about women, merely that the representation of it is different. The topic
of female duality in the nineteenth century is one that has received much attention, especially
from feminist critics responding to the Victorian representation of female madness and
sexuality. The most notable works on the subject have probably been Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, which focuses on female writers in the nineteenth
century, and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady, which centres on the topic of female
madness in English culture of the nineteenth and twentieth century, but there have been
various other writers who have discussed the representation of duality in women, or aspects
thereof (see for example Small, 1996 and Mangham, 2007). Blum describes the
“’madwoman’ double motif” as “the female writer’s attempt to unify the fragmented images
of female selfhood”(Blum 1). The fragmented self, or ‘cleaving of the mind’ as Emily
Dickinson calls it, can be seen as a result of the opposing ways in which women were
regarded. Either she was the gentle, passive ‘angel in the house’, or she was its opposite, the
‘fallen’ or sexually dominant (mad)woman. It was these two contrasting images that largely
determined the way femininity was regarded nineteenth century England, and, according to
19
Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble, “the didactic model, which insists that in this period
the only good woman was the passive, fragile, passionless ‘angel of the house’, while any
female who dared to challenge this role was labelled abnormal – insane or immoral – persist.”
(Reynolds and Humble 63)
In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter examines the representation and cultural
significance of nineteenth century madness and its main symbol; the Victorian madwoman.
Halfway through the century, it became an established fact that the majority of people
institutionalized for insanity was female, and according to Showalter “the appealing
madwoman gradually displaced the repulsive madman, both as the prototype of the confined
lunatic and as a cultural icon”(Showalter 8). The central claim that she makes is that madness
was seen as “one of the wrongs of woman … as the essential feminine nature unveiling itself
before scientific and male rationality”(3). On a basic level, madness was seen as a ‘female
malady’ because, in the nineteenth century, more women than men were being committed in
England. However, like other critics before her, Showalter points out that there seems to be an
innate connection between femininity and madness which might have helped bring about this
statistical fact. She writes:
Contemporary feminist philosophers, literary critics, and social theorists … have
shown how women within our dualistic system of language and representation, are
typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are
situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind. (3-4)
This idea was reinforced by the emergence of the male-dominated field of psychiatry, in
which “the prevailing view among Victorian psychiatrists was that the statistics proved what
they had suspected all along: that women were more vulnerable to insanity than men because
the instability of their reproductive systems interfered with their sexual, emotional, and
rational control”(7). With this in mind, Showalter mentions that the claim has often been
20
made that the high rate of women in madhouses and institutions in the Victorian Age was
partially caused by the restrictions put on women at the time, and the fact that women were
limited to the roles that were set out for them by a male-dominated society, in which
everything that diverged from this norm was categorized as ‘other’, and therefore
dangerous.(3) A quote from Lady Audley’s Secret, a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon that is
discussed in more detail later in this chapter, emphasizes this point:
Madhouses are large and only too numerous; yet surely it is strange they are not
larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat their brains against
this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm
and tempest, the riot and confusion within—when we remember how many minds
must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and
sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-day. (Braddon 206)
This ‘narrow boundary-line’ between sanity and insanity suggests that indeed it was not a
matter of absolutes and madness was not so far removed from what was deemed ‘normal’
behaviour. Supported by accounts like these, Showalter argues that the idea of madness being
primarily a female ailment was exploited as a way of “keep[ing] women out of the
professions, to deny them political rights, and to keep them under male control in the family
and the state”(Showalter 73).
It is interesting to look at the way madwomen were represented in literature of the
nineteenth century, because this tells us a great deal about what was seen as unacceptable
behaviour. Showalter traces all figures of female insanity back to one major literary figure,
that of Shakespeare’s Ophelia: “Ophelia is traditionally dressed in white, decked with
‘fantastical garlands’ of wildflowers, and has her hair loose. She sings wistful and bawdy
ballads; her speech is marked by extravagant metaphors, lyrical free associations, and explicit
sexual references”(Showalter 11). In the Victorian age, the image of Ophelia was transformed
into that of the violent madwoman, a picture of female sexuality that was particularly
21
threatening to men. In this, she is similar to the femme fatale, a figure that also appeared often
in Romantic literature and, in the words of Virginia Mae Allen, was a combination of
“danger, death, eros, beauty, demonism – and intent to destroy” (qtd. in Rummel 11). The
combination of appeal and threat that was associated with the femme fatale can often also be
found in the madwoman, the descriptions of which usually centred on her wild hair, torn
clothing and overall dishevelled appearance, a look that Andrew Mangham, writer of Violent
Women and Sensation Fiction, claims “support[ed] the prevailing notion that there was a fine
line between female brutality and women’s carnality”(Mangham 89). Indeed, Showalter
shows that the Victorian way of dealing with madness often meant that psychiatrists
attempted to regulate and control women’s cycles and sexuality, something that she interprets
as “fears of female sexuality”(Showalter 74). If the ideal woman was supposed to be silent,
passive, innocent and generally well-behaved, the madwoman can be seen as her opposite, an
image of everything that women should reject. According to Reynolds and Humble, the
Victorian need to categorise and classify was most apparent in their way of dealing with
sexuality, women were either pure or impure, innocent or fallen, ‘the angel in the house’ or
‘the madwoman in the attic’(Reynolds and Humble 6). In 1857, William Actor, a respected
physician and author of medical texts, wrote that “the majority of women (happily for them)
are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind… The best mothers, wives and
managers of households, know little or nothing of sexual indulgences. Love of home,
children, and domestic duties, are the only passions they feel”(qtd. in Reynolds and Humble
12-13). It was generally believed that only prostitutes enjoyed the experience of sex, which is
why Susan David Bernstein, in her essay on Lady Audley’s Secret, claims that as a
madwoman, the character of lady Audley is not far removed from being a prostitute, and in
the same way, the madwoman in Jane Eyre is described as unchaste, demonstrating again that
madness is intrinsically connected to female sexuality.
22
In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar argue that “for the female artist the
essential process of self-definition is complicated by all those patriarchal definitions that
intervene between herself and herself”(Gilbert and Gubar 17). According to them, the
difficulty of escaping the images of ‘angel’ or ‘monster’ lies in the fact that these images have
been used to such an extend in literature written by men that female writers have internalized
them. The role patterns that were set out even in conduct books throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, instructing women “that they should be angelic”(23), made it difficult to
stray from this norm. Similarly, Reynolds and Humble write that “Victorian woman is either
the sexually passive and angelic wife, sister, and/or mother, or she is the sexually charged and
demonic mad-woman-in-the-attic. The Victorian temper is described as ‘unyieldingly
dualistic’, capable only of understanding sexuality in terms of polarities”(Reynolds and
Humble 2). Gilbert and Gubar suggest that female authors needed to move away from these
extremes of patriarchal convention, and were able to do this by “almost obsessively [creating]
characters who enact their own, covert authorial anger”(Gilbert and Gubar 77), often in the
form of madwoman whose place was already outside respectable society. The madwoman as
a character is not limited by the restrictions that were normally associated with the female
gender. They do point out, however, that the madwoman is often punished in the novels and
poems in which she appears - whether by incarceration or death, in the end the normal order is
restored - and attribute this to the female authors’ “desire both to accept the strictures of
patriarchal society and to reject them”(77). By acting out the heroine’s unconscious desires,
the madwoman can be said to function as her doppelgänger. But whereas male doubles were
usually consciously created and used as a way to indulge in secret passions without facing the
consequences, the female heroine is mostly unaware of her own duality and therefore does not
consciously exploit a possible connection between her and her double. Often, she is also
unable to project her divided psyche on an external double and therefore internalizes her
23
duality, after which madness can be seen as a desperate attempt to escape this inner conflict.
In the end, however, this behaviour is necessarily punished, and the woman either returns to
the control of a male authority figure, or she is imprisoned under the rules of the patriarchal
society she wished to escape. Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar add that the madwoman can be
interpreted as a double for the author herself:
Indeed, much of the poetry and fiction written by women conjures up this mad
creature so that female authors can come to terms with their own uniquely female
feelings of fragmentation, their own keen sense of the discrepancies between what
they are and what they are supposed to be. … In projecting their anger and dis-ease
into dreadful figures, creating dark doubles for themselves and their heroines, women
writers are both identifying with and revising the self-definitions patriarchal culture
has imposed on them.” (78-79)
In other words, the image of the madwoman is used to express the things that female writers
felt they were unable to say themselves, it is their way of dealing with the feeling of duality
that came with being a female writer in a patriarchal society. To examine the portrayal of
female duality in more detail, this chapter will analyse two examples of nineteenth century
novels that address this subject: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861).
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
In October 1847, Charlotte Brontë published her novel Jane Eyre under the pseudonym of
Currer Bell. The novel became an instant best-seller and was widely praised and discussed in
fashionable literary circles, although some also criticized it for its improper, scandalous
nature. Elizabeth Rigny, for example, called it “pre-eminently an anti-Christan
composition”(Allott 71). Contemporary feminist critics read it as a story about a woman’s
quest for independence, trying to free herself from the patriarchal power that tries to dominate
and control her. The genre of the novel is not easily determined because it cannot be placed
24
neatly into a single one, but can be seen as a combination of several. It is partly a romance
novel, narrating the love story of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, partly a Bildungsroman,
describing Jane’s growth from childhood into maturity, and in part a gothic novel. Robert
Heilman explains that in Jane Eyre, the “gothic is used but characteristically is
undercut”(Allott 195). Thornfield Hall can be seen as a Gothic mansion, with its gloomy air
of antiquity, and rooms that “would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of
moonlight”(Brontë 125). The figure of Mr Rochester, too, recalls the dominant gothic villains
of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, with his “dark face, with stern features and a heavy
brow”(134), but when Jane hears a “tragic .... preternatural ... laugh” on the third floor, the
reader is appeased because “it was high noon, and ... no circumstance of ghostliness
accompanied the curious cachination”(127). Instead of a ghost, there is a madwoman in the
attic, a more or less realistic explanation in the 19th century when, Showalter writes, “it was
common for crazy women to be kept hidden in homes … or to behave and be treated like wild
beasts in cruel asylums”(Showalter 67). The figure of the madwoman, Bertha Mason, is seen
by Peter Grudin as “a new twist on the old Gothic motifs of dark secrets, family curses, and
monstrous or unearthly apparitions”(Grudin 145).
Nowadays, critics often see the madwoman as a portrayal of duality in the female subject.
As mentioned before, Gilbert and Gubar argue that the madwoman can be seen as the double
of the female character, and perhaps of the female author; she is the embodiment of their wish
to break away from the restrictions of a patriarchal society. Jane Eyre is a character who
appears to be in control of herself and her emotions, to the extent that she is able to leave the
man she loves when she discovers that staying with him would violate her moral principles. In
spite of this rationality, however, there is another side to her: her passionate nature. In the first
chapter, she is seen rebelling against her cousin John Reed who tries to punish her for hiding
in the library. Her exclamation directly targets his dominant control: “wicked and cruel boy!
25
... You are like a murderer – you are like a slave-driver – you are like the Roman
emperors!”(Brontë 13). This expression of self-authority only ends up getting her locked up in
the red-room, for being “such a picture of passion”(14). When Bessie, the maid of Gateshead,
carries her to this room, Jane admits to being “a trifle beside myself; or rather out of
myself”(15), and indeed describes herself as “a heterogeneous thing”(19). In the red room, a
choice that Barbara Hill Rigney describes as significant because it is a colour “associated with
passion”(Rigney 18), Jane has a “species of fit” that makes her utter a “wild, involuntary
cry”(Brontë 21-22). The first two chapters already paint a picture of a fiery temper, not easily
controlled by the people around her.
Especially when Jane is threatened or oppressed by the dominant men in her life, her
passion shines through. According to Rigney, “all male characters in Jane Eyre, to a greater
or lesser extent depending on their area of influence, are agents of ... a sexually oppressive
system”, which tries to dominate and control her (Rigney 17). When John Reed attempts to
discipline her, he is both verbally and physically rebuked; Reverent Brocklehurst’s accusation
that she is a deceitful child fills her with fury, and she refuses St. John Rivers marriage
proposal in a way that he deems both “violent” and “unfeminine”. Rochester serves as the
Byronic hero of the story, the dominant male who is the master of Thornfield Hall, as well as
Jane’s master. When he refers to her as Jane Rochester she only feels fear, and his wish to buy
her jewellery and costly presents only inspire in her “a sense of annoyance and degradation”,
and make her feel like she is “being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester” (Brontë 309). His
expressed wish to “put a diamond round [her] neck, and the circlet on [her] forehead ... and
...clasp the bracelets on [her] fine wrists” sounds like a desire to bind her in chains, and is
refused by Jane. Later again, when he says “once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold,
I’ll just – figuratively speaking – attach you to a chain like this (touching his watchguard)”(312), he is providing an image of imprisonment that is mirrored in the way in which
26
he binds his mad wife in a later scene: “At last he mastered her arms; Grace Poole gave him a
cord, and he pinioned them behind her: with more rope, which was at hand, he bound her to a
chair”(339). But while these dominant males inspire rebellion and passionate outbreaks in
Jane Eyre, most women in her life have the opposite effect.
Throughout her life, Jane meets women who serve as female role models, by showing her
the acceptable behaviour in a patriarchal society. At Lowood charity school, the
superintendent miss Temple acts as her mentor and friend during the years of her stay, and by
example teaches her the importance of goodness, refinement, serenity, and self-control. Helen
Burns, her only friend at the school, conveys to her the importance of Christian behaviour and
restraint even when faced with unjust behaviour, to “love your enemies; bless them that curse
you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you”(69). This advice, however, is
not enough to repress Jane’s naturally passionate nature, and she admits that unjust behaviour
still causes feelings of rage: “I was no Helen Burns”(78). Even as a governess, the frank way
in which she responds to her master Rochester’s questions leads him to observe that “not three
in three thousand raw schoolgirl-governesses would have answered me as you have just
done”(158), and had some critics comment on the “hardly ‘proper’ conduct between a single
man and a maiden in her teens”(Spectator). When Jane leaves Rochester, by chance she ends
up living with two of her cousins who are intelligent and graceful, and teach her to be
satisfied with a quiet and secluded life. Even when Jane tries to adjust to this peaceful country
life though, her cousin Mr Rivers perceives that she is “impassioned”, and doubts her
willingness to stay there: “human affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on
you. I am sure you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude and to devote your
working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus”(Brontë 409). This turns out
to be true in the end, when Jane rejects his marriage for religious duty and returns to
Thornfield Hall to find Rochester.
27
Basically, Jane Eyre is made up of two opposites: on the one hand, she tries to incorporate
the correct, ladylike behaviour exemplified by the female figures she meets; on the other,
critics have argued that she can be seen to resemble Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first wife and
the madwoman in the attic of Thornfield Hall. Bertha is described as the opposite of the
feminine ideal, in her physique there is nothing of the refined, delicate femininity that was
considered preferable in Victorian culture. She is described as “a woman, tall and large, with
thick and dark hair hanging long down her back”(Brontë 326), a supernatural apparition with
purple skin, dark and swollen lips, and black eyebrows over bloodshot eyes (327), and tries to
suck the blood from her brother’s neck in a manner that is nearly vampiric. Critics have often
described her character as ‘masculine’, or even completely ‘desexualized’(Rigney 15), even
though the novel states that she originally was “the boast of Spanish Town for her
beauty”(Brontë 352). When they visit her in the room that functions as her prison, she is even
portrayed as something less than human: “it grovelled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and
growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of
dark, grizzled hair, wild as a main, hid its head and face”(338). This description significantly
recalls Jane’s outburst in the first chapter, in which she is described as a “bad animal”(11) and
a “mad cat”(15). The only way for Jane to make up for her “virulent passions, mean spirit,
and dangerous duplicity”(22), is to behave in “perfect submission and stillness”(21), which is
regarded as the accepted norm for ladylike behaviour. In the description Rochester gives of
Bertha, he focuses especially on her “gross, impure, depraved” and “unchaste” nature (353),
something that is directly linked to her madness. Adrienne Rich refers to this in her article on
Jane Eyre:
The 19th century loose woman might have sexual feelings, but the 19th century wife did
not and must not. Rochester’s loathing of Bertha is described repeatedly in terms of
her physical strength and her violent will – both unacceptable qualities in the 19th
century female. (qtd. in Rigney 23)
28
The attraction of Jane Eyre might therefore be seen to lie in her inexperience; her virginity.
Rochester’s persistent comments on her otherworldly, angelic or elf-like appearance can be
interpreted as a way of placing her outside the normal, physical world and elevating her to a
flawless, unblemished ideal of femininity, even despite Jane’s assertions that she “is not an
angel ... and will not be one till I die: I will be myself”(Brontë 300). He sees Jane as the
opposite of his Bertha, “that is my wife ... And this is what I wished to have .... This young
girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of
a demon”(Brontë 339).
Rather than reading Jane and Bertha as opposites, however, Sandra M. Gilbert argues
in her article entitled “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress” that “Bertha .... is
Jane’s truest and darkest double: the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self
Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead”(Gilbert and Gubar 360). It is
true that, during her stay at Thornfield Hall, Jane is unconsciously drawn to the third floor: “I
could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then
my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backward and forward, safe in
the silence and solitude of the spot”(Brontë 129). Gilbert’s main argument for claiming
Bertha can be seen as Jane’s doppelgänger is that all Bertha’s actions are things Jane would
like to do, on an unconscious level. First of all, the expensive veil Rochester gives Jane to
wear at their wedding only reminds her of “Fairfax Rochester’s pride”(Brontë 324), and her
reluctance to wear it is resolved when Bertha comes into her room in the middle of the night
and “rent [the veil] in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them”(327).
Secondly, Jane’s desire of not being dominated makes her wish she was able to resist
Rochester mentally as well as physically: “he seemed to devour me with his flaming glance;
physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow of a
furnace; mentally, I still possessed my soul”(365). Unlike Jane, Bertha matches Rochester in
29
both height and strength, “she was a big woman in stature almost equalling her husband, and
corpulent besides”, and she “showed virile force in the contest – more than once she almost
throttled him, athletic as he was”(338). Furthermore, Gilbert points out that “every one of
Bertha’s ... manifestations .... has been associated with an experience (or repression) of anger
on Jane’s part”(360). In her article “the shadow within”, Claire Rosenfield states that “the
novelist who consciously or unconsciously exploits psychological Doubles may either
juxtapose or duplicate two characters; the one representing the socially acceptable or
conventional personality, the other externalizing the free, uninhibited, often criminal
self”(Rosenfield 327). As the embodiment of repressed desires, the double used in Jane Eyre
is similar to the male doubles discussed in the previous chapter, only in this case Jane is not
aware of the link that exists between her and her double, and does not consciously use the
connection to her own advantage. In the end, it is this double figure that prevents Jane and
Rochester from getting married, and it is not until the madwoman is destroyed, by jumping to
her death after setting fire to Thornfield Hall, that they are able to be together. “In order for …
self-integration to occur,” writes Rigney, “the doppelgänger, who has represented the self as
split, must in some way be annihilated or at least relegated to obscurity”(Rigney 123).
Similarly, Elaine Showalter writes that “before Jane Eyre can reach her happy ending, the
madwoman must be purged from the plot, and passion must be purged from Jane herself”(69).
It is only when the duality is annihilated and the self is presented as whole that the normal
order can be restored.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.
Another, lesser known, novel about female madness can be found in Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, which was published in serial form in the magazine Robin
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Goodfellow, starting in September 1861. This novel, which was later published as a onevolume edition, turned Braddon into a well-known writer of ‘sensation’ fiction. As its name
suggests, the Victorian sensation novel gained popularity in the late 19th century. The increase
in the circulation of newspapers and magazines and the corresponding increase in serialised
fiction, combined with cheaper printing, an expanding reading public and the introduction of
the circulating library, created a demand for light, exciting reading material, which focused on
the senses rather than on the mind. As a sensation novel, Lady Audley’s Secret contains
certain aspects that are characteristic for the genre, the most obvious and important being that
he story is based on a mystery, on the secrets of Lucy Audley. Kathleen Tillotson accurately
describes it as “the novel-with-a-secret”(Tillotson xv), which is the fundamental idea behind
the genre as a whole. Another defining characteristic is the setting of the novels; like Dr Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde and Dorian Gray, the mystery takes place in the home environment, behind the
facade of respectability. In the introduction to the Penguin edition of Lady Audley’s Secret,
Jenny Bourne Taylor writes:
Sensation fiction made the familiar world strange by probing what lies beneath the
veneer of the apparently stable upper- or middle-class home. Abandoning explicitly
supernatural devices, it achieved uncanny, unsettling effects by transposing mystery
into the private, enclosed world of the family, peeling away its past secrets, revealing
itself as a masquerade” (Braddon xiv).
Similarly, Henry James describes the genre as one dealing with “those most mysterious of
mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors,” and goes on to say that “instead of the
terrors of Udolpho, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house or the busy
London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible”(qtd. in
Braddon xiv). Audley court is a perfect example of this. The first pages of the novel focus
mainly on the respectable exterior of the house - it is described as “a glorious place ... a place
that visitors fell into raptures with,” and extra emphasis is laid on the fact that it was seen as
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“a noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place”(Braddon 8), but it is behind this dignified
exterior that the novel’s mystery takes place and where it is finally uncovered. With regard to
the characters themselves, there is often a female in the sensation novel who, unlike in the
Gothic novels, is not a passive character, but plays a big part in, and advances the plot itself.
In the Companion to the Victorian Novel, Winifred Hughes writes that “at the center of the
home, inevitably, there was a woman – wife and mother, the proverbial angel in the house. At
the center of the sensation novel was the same woman, who ran the household, often quite
efficiently, while dabbling in bigamy, adultery, or murder on the side”(Hughes 262). In Lady
Audley’s Secret, this role is given to Lucy Audley, who is described as a light-hearted,
childlike woman whose golden curls, soft blue eyes and gentle ways are able to charm
everyone she, but whose many secret necessitate a double life. In some ways, the novel also
resembles a detective story. When George Talboys, who is later discovered to be Lucy’s first
husband, disappears, his friend the lazy, unemployed barrister by the name of Robert Audley
takes it upon himself to gather evidence in order to find him. Hughes writes that “other
characters, and often the reader as well, could no longer tell the difference between the
feminine ideal and the bigamist’s fraudulent imitation of it without the detective’s inside
information”(Hughes 262), and that undoubtedly applies to this novel. In the end, he
discovers that not only was Lucy already married when she became lady Audley, that she
abandoned her child and (as far as she knows) killed her first husband, but that all of this was
done because of one important reason: she is a madwoman.
The duality of the character can once more be found in the distinction that is made
between the feminine ideal of ‘the angel in the house’ and the scheming, lying and secretive
woman underneath. According to Hughes, “Braddon repeatedly suggested [that] ... all women
were forced to be role-players”(Hughes 262), and this is certainly true for lady Audley, whose
duality is often hinted at in the novel, starting with the description of her portrait:
32
It was so like and yet so unlike; it was as if you had burned strange-coloured fires
before my lady’s face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new
expressions never seen in it before. The perfection of feature, the brilliancy of
colouring, were there; but I suppose the painter had copied quaint mediaeval
monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her,
had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. (Braddon 72)
Interestingly, this cruelty in her face is only observed in the portrait, never in her general
appearance, and Taylor remarks that the scene “startlingly anticipat[es] Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray,” in that it “undercuts the distinction between representation and
reality in expressing the ‘truth’ about Lady Audley”(Braddon xxi). As in Dorian Gray, the
point is made that inner duality and secrets in general may be hidden from the outside world,
but the truth is visible in the painted double. Robert Audley remarks: “I believe ... 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”(144).
When asked about the portrait, Robert’s cousin Alicia suggests that “sometimes a painter is in
a manner inspired, and is able to see through the normal expression of the face, another
expression that is equally part of it, though not to be perceived by common eyes”(73). Lady
Audley’s confession more obviously shows her attempts to change her identity. Born as Miss
Helen Maldon, she grew up virtually penniless with a mother in the madhouse and a father in
the navy. After leaving school at seventeen she lived with her father in a remote part of
England where she met George Talboys, “the only son of a rich gentleman”(346). After
marrying George, thus changing her name to Mrs Helen Talboys, she lived in prosperity for
twelve months before their money ran out and George abandoned her and their son in order to
“seek his fortune”(347) in Australia. During his absence she is forced to look for work, and
does so under the name of Miss Lucy Graham, thus abandoning her married name. As Lucy
Graham, she finds a job as the governess in a surgeon’s family where she meets Lord Audley,
who asks her to marry him. Even though she is already married, she agrees to his proposal and
33
takes on her new role as Lady Audley of Audley Court. Eventually, when Robert Audley has
discovered her whole history, she is brought to a madhouse in Belgium, where she is
committed under the name of Madame Taylor. These different identities are not only different
in name, but also require her taking on a different role every time. Jennifer Hedgecock
explains this in a way that brings to mind the accounts of Dr Jekyll and Dorian Gray:
She is never what she seems to be, she enigmatically represents self-control, craving
for an ordered and structured life, coupled with an implicit compulsion to give free
reign to her desires. (Hedgecock 120)
This description is similar to the one given in the books on male doubles, which also deal with
duality and are concerned about conforming to society’s norms. In the case of lady Audley,
however, there is no external double figure to take the blame or hide the effects of her crimes.
The only way for her to conceal her other self is to keep secrets and change her identity, but in
the end she fails to keep them hidden from the male powers that wish to control her and she is
categorized as ‘other’, as a madwoman.
It is a great triumph, is it not? A wonderful victory! You have used your cool,
calculating, frigid, luminous intellect to a noble purpose. You have conquered – a
MADWOMAN! ... I killed him because I AM MAD! Because my intellect is a little
way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary-line between sanity and
insanity (Braddon 340-1).
The distinction that is being made here, between madness and a “cool, calculating, frigid,
luminous intellect” is exactly the difference that Elaine Showalter claims has led
contemporary critics and feminists to argue that “women, within our dualistic systems of
language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature,
and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and
mind”(Showalter 3-4). On one occasion, Robert Audley has a dream in which he sees Audley
Court “ threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea”(Braddon 244), and in the waves of
34
the sea he observes lady Audley, “transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to
destruction”(28). In the nineteenth century, the mermaid was seen as a symbol of female
power and mystery, a possible risk to those who were ensnared by her charms. According to
Nina Auerbach, “the social restrictions that crippled women’s lives, the physical weaknesses
wished on them, were fearful attempts to exorcise a mysterious strength”(Auerbach 8). The
mermaid is also a legendary example of the femme fatale, a figure that Hedgecock describes
as a “woman who exist[s] outside the boundaries of mainstream culture,” and who “shrewdly
use[s] the hegemonic power structure to serve [her] own means”(Hedgecock 192). Like the
madwoman, the femme fatale can be seen as a response to the shifts taking place in the
nineteenth century understanding of gender relations. “Classifying different types of women,”
continues Hedgecock, is “a strategy used to deal with anxieties and the breaking down of
cultural boundaries”(192). Mary Ann Doane adds that the femme fatale is usually killed at the
end of the story (Lady Audley dies after being sent to a madhouse), because “her textual
eradication involves a desperate reassertion of control on the part of the threatened male
subject.”(Doane 2). This again fits in with the idea that both the femme fatale and the
madwoman were products of a changing society, in which the idea of a powerful woman who
uses her feminine qualities to attract and use men to her own advantage could be suggested, so
long as the regular order would be restored at the end.
In 1868, Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a picture of Lady Lilith, the ultimate femme
fatale whose long hair, flowing dress, red lips and detailed scenery with perfume bottles and
flowers are similar to the description given of Lady Audley’s portrait.
Her crimson dress, exaggerated like all the rest in this strange picture, hung about her
in folds that looked like flames, her fair head peeping out of the lurid mass of colour,
as if our of a raging furnace. Indeed, the crimson dress, the sunshine on the face, the
red fold gleaming in the yellow hair, the ripe scarlet of the pouting lips, the glowing
colours of each accessory of the minutely-painted background, all combined to render
the first effect of the painting by no means an agreeably one. (Braddon 72)
35
Taylor adds that the importance of the fact that “the painter must have been a preRaphaelite”(72) lies in their attention to detail, and the way in which they “represented the
body and face through the specific methods of physiognomy, where each feature has both
literal and symbolic significance”(xxii). Since Rossetti belonged to and was a co-founder of
the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this remark underlines the connection between both paintings
and links lady Audley to the tradition of the femme fatale. That duality is an inherent aspect
of the femme fatale, as it is of the madwoman, is emphasized by Adriana Craciun, who
describes the figure as dual because she is “both feminine and fatal”(Craciun 7). One of the
features that appears to play a great part in this is her long, flowing hair. Rossetti’s poem,
which accompanies the painting of Lady Lilith, speaks of “enchanted hair” which “was the
first gold”, and Lady Audley’s hair is mentioned so frequently in the novel that one of her
critics, Margaret Oliphant, referred to Braddon as “the inventor of the fair-haired demon of
modern fiction”(qtd. in Harrison 103). Even the distinction between innocent femininity and
dangerous sexuality can be observed in the descriptions of Lady Audley’s hair, who is
initially described as having “the most wonderful curls in the world – soft and feathery,
always floating away from the face, and making a pale halo round her head when the sunlight
shone through them”(Braddon 13). However, on the occasions that her madness emerges, it
turns from angelic to demonic: “her hair had been blown away from her face, and, being of a
light, feathery quality, had spread itself into a tangled mass that surrounded her forehead like
a yellow flame. There was another flame in her eyes – a greenish light, such as might flash
from the changing hued orbs of an angry mermaid”(316). Her golden hair changes from a sign
of childlike innocence and femininity to a treacherous web that, according to Elizabeth G.
Gitter, can be seen as “a glittering symbolic fusion of the sexual lust and the lust for power
that she embodied”(Gitter 936). Lady Audley’s sexuality is again emphasized after she has set
fire to the inn in which Robert Audley is sleeping. It is said that “the wind had torn her heavy
36
cloak away from her shoulders, and had left her slender figure exposed to the blast”(Braddon
320), so rather than walking away powerful and in control, her criminal act has reduced her to
a trembling, half-naked victim, not an uncommon portrayal of women in Victorian literature
which,
according to Susan David Bernstein, tended to “sexualize and criminalize any
semblance of female power”(Bernstein 79).
The main question that readers are left with after finishing the novel is whether or not
lady Audley actually suffers from insanity. Although she declares herself to be a madwoman,
critics have noted that this might just be a way of solving the problem of having a forceful,
dominant woman as the main character of a Victorian novel.(Braddon xxv) The doctor who is
asked to diagnose her after her confession initially declares that he cannot help Robert
because “there is no evidence of madness in anything that she has done. ... she employed
intelligent means, and she carried out a conspiracy which required coolness and deliberation
in its execution. There is no madness in that”(370). After having seen her he decides that she
is in fact not mad but adds that “she has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of
intelligence”, two qualities that arguably would not have been seen as madness had they been
found in a man, but since they do not coincide with his idea of womanhood he concludes that
she is simply “dangerous”(372). Her guilt then does not appear to lie in the things she has
done, but rather in the threat she poses to the men around her. Robert Audley’s main concern
is “the necessity of any exposure - any disgrace”(Braddon 372), and to prevent this lady
Audley is not prosecuted for her actions in a criminal court, but punished by being locked
away in a Maison de Santé or ‘buried alive’, as the chapter title suggests. In a conference
Paper on the novel, Kendra Atkins writes:
Braddon simultaneously criticizes the social system that created no other choice but
insanity for the women who were unable to accept the limitations placed on them by a
repressive society. Perhaps the only way Braddon could contain a character like Lucy
and restore her readers to their previous security was to banish her. The only way to
hold her, a character who blurred the lines between upper and lower classes and
37
distorted the ideals of femininity, was to relegate her to a living grave, and the
existence of Victorian asylums gave the author a convenient way to do so. (Atkins 12)
So even though lady Audley is originally presented as different from the passive,
powerless heroines of the gothic novel she ends up the same way; controlled by the men
around her and classified as a madwoman. Elaine Showalter has speculated: “is Lady
Audley’s secret that she carries hereditary insanity? Or is the secret that ‘insanity’ is simply
the label society attaches to female assertion, ambition, self-interest, and outrage?”(Showalter
72). In the end, lady Audley’s duality is not something she claims she has chosen, but rather
something that stems from a hereditary taint of insanity. Her eventual demise is also not by
her own doing, as it is in the cases of Dr Jekyll and Dorian Gray, but is described as a return
to the normal order of things, a world in which men are dominant and a woman must either be
the angel of the house or perish.
38
Conclusion
The aim of this thesis has been to examine the portrayal of duality in nineteenth century
literary characters, and show the difference between male and female forms of doubling.
‘Duality’ here is taken to mean the discrepancy between the accepted public image and
repressed natural instincts. A commonly accepted characteristic of Victorian society is its
strict morality, and in nineteenth century novels the consequences of this can be perceived in
the use of double. The four main novels previously discussed all examine the subject of
duality in their own way.
Stevenson’s and Wilde’s texts can be placed neatly in the tradition of the male double,
using rational and even scientific explanations for their characters’ doubling, and presenting it
as a conscious choice. These characters are not only aware of their initial duality, but also
facilitate and sustain their own division which makes it easy for them to express their darker
instinctual drives. Being a gentleman meant having to live by certain guidelines of
gentlemanly behaviour, and a wrong move could ruin even the most respectable title. Both
Jekyll and Dorian find a way around these severe parameters by accepting or consciously
creating an external double that allows them to satisfy their whims without bringing disgrace
to their name. By externalizing the dark side of their nature in a separate character, the double,
rather than the main character is condemned for its devious nature, and the main character is
seen as a victim of scientific experimentation or society’s constraints.
Brontë and Braddon’s texts are different from the previous two novels in that they
never claim any connection to the literature of the double. The writers appear to be as
unaware of their inherent duality as the characters in their novels are. However, critical
interpretations, primarily done by feminist readers, have emphasised the ways in which these
women can be regarded as expressions of duality and rebellion against a patriarchal society
39
that forced them to be either the passive angel in the house, or its opposite: the fallen
prostitute, the femme fatale, or the dominant madwoman. The first two images are often seen
as male responses to a changing society, attempts of turning dominant women into the ‘other’,
which allowed their perception of femininity to remain intact. The madwoman, however, was
a figure used by women, arguably as a way of including a dominant female character in a
story who was able to defy the woman’s traditional role. Both Bertha Mason and Lady
Audley, and even in some ways Jane Eyre, are defined as madwomen, which gives them the
freedom to go beyond the restrictions of femininity, and release their hidden temperaments.
However, when duality is seen as something internal, as it is in these cases, the blame for their
unacceptable behaviour naturally falls on the women themselves, who are eventually
punished for their duality, and again trapped under male control.
The difference between the representation of male and female duality then appears to
stem mainly from nineteenth century interpretations of gender. Men are naturally depicted as
more rational, scientific and objective, while women are seen as irrational, emotional and
threatening when they refuse to accept their proper role. Nineteenth century examples of
duality in literature are numerous, and they offer significant insight into the psyche of the
Victorian author.
40
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