Critical Masculinities in Lady Audley’s Secret

Abstract

Recent work on gender in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's lady Audky's Secret (1862) generally neglects the novel's dynamic p rtrayal of mid-Victorian masculinities, emphasizing either the characterization of Lady Audley or that of Robert Audley Critics preoccupied with Lady Audley highlight the limitations of mid-nineteenth-century patriarchal conceptions of femininity.1 More recently, queer theorists have examined Robert Audley's sexuality and relationship to George Talboys while considering masculinity only as a point of reference against which to measure Robert's effeminacy and homosexuality.2 Critical inquiry thus calls attention to the novel's masculine identities frequently but only tangentially. However, recent studies of nineteenth-century masculinities, in particular James Eli Adams's Dandies and Desert Saints ( 1995), enable a reassess ment of Robert Audley as well as his much-overlooked double, Luke Marks, in relation to mid-Victorian ideals of manliness, namely the dandy and the gentleman. Braddon articulates the tensions of this transitional moment in the forma