I.

For the first half of Dombey and Son , Mr. Paul Dombey has his own metonymic relationship with things: he resembles creaking boots, fire-irons, and even the exterior of his dreary mansion. There is no question that these objects are his exclusive property. Yet, when he invites Edith into his life and house, he inevitably relinquishes some of the authority of this material ownership – and he does so intentionally, extensively remodeling the mansion in an almost feminine style, adding rose wallpaper, massive mirrors, and gilded decor. Of course, the new additions give the equally-new wife an opportunity to stake her own claims to her husband's property from the beginning of their shared history. Now, Edith is the one who resembles the family possessions: “in every scrap of gold so dazzling to the eye, she saw some hateful atom of her purchase-money” (404; ch. 30). However, she cultivates a more complex attitude to Dombey's property in her dressing-room, where she can despise her fellow possessions even as she desires them. Edith does not simply gather these hated things about her to inflict psychic injuries upon herself; she's no clear-cut masochist.Footnote ⁵ Though “she spurned [the wealth that provides these luxuries]. . .she claimed its utmost power as her right, her bargain – as the base and worthless recompense for which she had become his wife” (478; ch. 35).Footnote ⁶ Believing that she has earned the right to buy these things through her mercenary marriage, Edith can simultaneously expect and detest them and, ultimately, as their custodian or caretaker, control the rights to them.

Yet, despite how Edith asserts her independence by buying, using, and abusing her luxuries, she does not consciously draw on it to overpower her husband. Indeed, she mostly fails to recognize the psychic mayhem her things cause in Dombey's mind when he visits her dressing-room for the first time, months after their wedding. In this scene, described almost wholly from his perspective, Dombey is the one to register and respond to the altered power dynamics between his wife and himself. Having come to Edith's room to, ironically, censure both her financial extravagance and frequent excursions with undesirable (perhaps male?) company, Dombey imagines that she further defies his authority in her disdain for possessions “scattered here and there, and disregarded” (536; ch. 40).Footnote ⁷ Unlike the inflexible and immobile decor in Dombey's own private space, Edith's “[c]haplets of flowers, plumes of feathers, jewels, laces, silks and satins” (536; ch. 40) spill chaotically from drawers and onto the floor, a feminine material incontinence that functions as a psychological assault on Dombey and in which even Edith's face and body participate. Speechless, he watches as these expensive and sensual possessions steal his economic and sexual authority.Footnote ⁸ Although the man's penetration of the boudoir (carried out in other nineteenth-century novels, most famously The Moonstone) should ensure Dombey's power, it infantilizes him as an impotent schoolboy “conscious of embarrassment and awkwardness” (536; ch. 40).Footnote ⁹ The desire he should feel in his wife's dressing-room, where she has gone to disrobe, stalls when he “fe[els] his disadvantage” (536; ch. 40). Edith's possessions more closely approximate the role of the lover than Dombey in this scene, caressing her skin, mirroring her emotions, showing off her beauty, and antagonizing her husband. Indeed, magically enlivened by Dombey's paranoia, her diamonds “rose and fell impatiently upon her bosom, seemed to pant to break the chain that clasped them round her neck, and roll down on the floor where she might tread upon them” (536; ch. 40). Rather than understanding that the diamonds only appear alive because of the natural rise and fall of Edith's chest, Dombey endows them with life and intentionality, eroticizing them as his enemies to explain his own impotence. Though Edith scorns such luxuries as much as she scorns her husband, they are obviously her preferred company. In this gothic-erotic den of material femininity, Dombey simply cannot compete.

When Edith sides with things, transforming herself into a statuesque mirror image as Dombey leaves her room, she takes on their threat: “[S]he had the power, and he felt it keenly” (536; ch. 40). As an objectified image frozen in her looking-glass – he notes “the shape of Edith,” “the face of Edith” – she threatens Dombey's self-worth more than as a moving, speaking subject: “[h]e saw no more expression of any heed of him, in the mirror, than if he had been an unseen spider on the wall, or beetle on the floor” (542; ch. 40).Footnote ¹⁰ Turning away from their intersubjective moment, Edith claims the agency of an object that does not recognize another subjectivity and renders Dombey “unseen” (542; ch. 40). Roger B. Henkle observes, “[a]s his own fear of what ‘the world’ will think of him implies, Dombey does not exist except in the observation of other people” (102). Unseen, but still seeing, he matters little. The narrator does not even grant him the temporary power Edith gains, instead lessening him until he is the lowest form of sentient life that can be trampled or ignored; if she resembles the beautiful, vicious diamonds around her neck, then he most resembles a reviled insect she can crush underfoot. Though he may still legally own this property, Dombey intuits his lack of authority over it: these things are, quite literally, in Edith's hands.

Since Dombey decides, after this first unsettling visit to his wife's boudoir, to send his business manager Carker to convey his orders in the future, rather than reprimanding her himself in this daunting space, he temporarily avoids the renewal of these self-conscious emotions. Dombey trusts his proxy will now bear the brunt of Edith's material power, but his message and messenger actually sends his wife into a psychic tailspin, resulting in his triple property loss of money, wife, and luxuries.Footnote ¹¹ In her meetings with Carker, Edith loses the dressing-room's intimidating power not only because Carker is not her husband – and therefore has no claim whatsoever to her “disregarded” possessions – but also because they meet in the mansion's more neutral territory – the morning-room, the drawing-room – where she has no unique claims and, indeed, where Florence's habitual presence and sentimental materialism obscure Edith's material authority.Footnote ¹² Later, when Carker steals into Edith's dressing-room to make a case for their elopement, she cannot regain the control she has lost, even if she were fully aware of the power of her feminine ownership. Carker comes to her not as another object she can own and control, but as a man with specific intentions to own and, unlike Dombey, nothing to lose. The fact that this scene is not directly narrated, but related from Edith's memory one hundred pages later, underscores the insignificance of the space; the same scene set in a completely different place would have unfolded identically.Footnote ¹³ Thus, though Edith partially controls the terms of Dombey's legal ownership of her by presiding over his property, she fails to enact the same power dynamics with Carker because they share no competing claims.

Having lost her domestic power because Carker is not affected by it and Dombey refuses to witness it, Edith decides to cut her losses and elope with Carker. If she cannot enjoy the fruits of marriage – scorning her husband by controlling his property – why stick around? In this first, critical step in her path to relative independence, she destroys her luxurious possessions in an attempt to declare her material power. Replicating and even exaggerating Dombey's first visit to her room, this tableau grotesquely replays Dombey's previous experience of the room, as he sees, “[piled in a] costly mass. . .every ornament she had had. . .every dress she had worn; and everything she had possessed” (631; ch. 47). Notwithstanding his earlier moment of unease in her dressing-room, Dombey approaches the room still believing that he is the buyer, seller, and owner of things in his world, then watches in shock as he morphs into yet another object to be owned, circulated, and discarded – a settlement or a carriage.Footnote ¹⁴ When Edith “discard[s] him” (631; ch. 47) along with her destroyed things, she underlines his material impotence, a disempowerment that resonates later when neither Dombey nor the smashed belongings can save him from financial ruin. The debt-collectors who divvy up Dombey's property no doubt cast aside Edith's torn dresses and tarnished ornaments, just as they ignore the broken man hiding in his study. As nothing but rubbish, Edith's destroyed luxuries are only valuable to the scavengers that appear elsewhere in the novel who can repurpose the scraps of her belongings for a profit. In Dombey's carefully organized world of money, masculine ownership, and marriage settlements, after all, trash is just trash. But, as Dickens illustrates famously in Our Mutual Friend, waste is always more complicated. Just as Edith's former possessions – destroyed though they are – can potentially be refashioned and redeemed by the text's scavengers, so can the people who are, in a sense, also damaged – Edith, yes, but more importantly for Dickens, Dombey himself.Footnote ¹⁵

To make Dombey's eventual change in perspective plausible, Dickens must first show what happens when a man is unable to accept his own lack of material and sexual power, especially when it is contrasted with a woman's apparent power. Appropriately, Dickens illustrates this example with Dombey's proxy, John Carker. In a strikingly resonant scene, Dickens recreates the material circumstances of Edith's dressing-room in the Dijon hotel where she has come to rendezvous with Carker. In this hybrid domestic-commercial space, where the two are supposed to share their first night together, Edith finally benefits from some of the power of feminine ownership she enjoyed with Dombey. The chapter begins with a detailed description of the French apartment Carker has handpicked for their assignation, which is as ornate as Edith's London dressing-room except “traces were discernible among this finery, of wear and tear and dust, of sun and damp and smoke” (716; ch. 54). Edith, sitting alone “[i]n the heart of its radiance” (717; ch. 54) and unconsciously replaying the beginning of the first dressing-room scene with Dombey, meditates on the hated man who will soon appear, utterly unaware that the tainted splendor of her surroundings mirrors her in this moment, just as her luxurious possessions once did. When he arrives, she scorns and diminishes him until he is a “creeping thing” (720; ch. 54), a “worm,” a “loathsome creature” (722; ch. 54), and a “parasite” (724; ch. 54), living entities as insignificant as the spider or beetle Dombey once felt himself to be. Like Dombey, Carker “could not look at her, and not be afraid of her” (725; ch. 54). Leaving the hotel, his newfound unease with objects pursues him until he is “[conscious] of being bewildered by them, and having their images all crowded in his hot brain after they were gone” (733; ch. 55). Things assume “a diseased importance in his thoughts” (736; ch. 55) because the feverish Carker can no longer distinguish them from his own body or mind. He no longer understands his relation to them: if he is not the manager, owner, renter, or thief of objects, who is he? In an interesting reversal of power relations that echoes Dombey's experience, Carker's position as owner is just as fragile and contingent as that of the object or person being owned. Like Dombey, he is shocked by his own insignificance, which is only revealed by Edith's unexpected and temporary authority.

But, before Carker can come to terms with his own objectification and re-imagine a new way of valuing and owning property, as Dombey will do, he is scared to death (literally) by things: the train's “red eyes. . .close upon him. . .and [lick] his stream of life up with its fiery heat” (738; ch. 55). The animated train is, in the end, more alive than Carker, who is rendered a mere mess of “mutilated fragments” (738; ch. 55). This is a pivotal moment for Dombey, who watches Carker torn into a series of inanimate pieces and gives into a corpse-like swoon himself. Carker's death brings Dombey's vengeful pursuit to a grinding halt and replaces it with the fear that, like Carker's body and Edith's things, Dombey will also, inevitably, become a pile of “mutilated fragments” himself. It is at this point that Dickens offers Dombey the reprieve he denies Carker, allowing him to return to his home to begin re-imagining his relationship with property, including how he values his possessions, other people, and himself.

Discovering that his previous ways of organizing his property have led to isolation, self-objectification, and a bankrupt, possessionless existence, Dombey finds that he must restructure his values and relinquish his belief in the infallibility of legal and marital ownership. As Laura Berry explains, he must “embrac[e] a positive (female and middle-class) value of ‘influence’” (88), transferring his emotional investment from the (purportedly) self-gratifying image of his wife among luxuries to Florence who “is elevated from a useless currency that can never be invested to the embodiment of the true value of the novel” (92). Significantly, however, Dombey must revalue both Florence and property. After his house is disemboweled by creditors and auctioneers, Dombey drifts ghost-like through the mansion to the rooms he rarely ventured in before, redirecting his steps from Edith's dressing-room to Florence's childhood chamber. During his visits to Edith's room, his main concern was her deference to his wealth and power, and he believed a lecture or a hasty clean-up could strengthen or at least sustain his authority. Now, his thoughts and footsteps instead drift towards Florence who, Dombey senses, embodies an alternative method of object relations. Thus, though Lisa Surridge argues that Dombey can only be healed when Florence returns to forgive him, I suggest this healing starts even earlier, when Dombey's steps move away from Edith's room towards Florence's: “Abundance of associations were here, connected with his false wife, his false friend and servant, his false grounds of pride; but he put them all by now, and only recalled miserably, weakly, fondly, his two children. . . .Here, thrown upon the bare boards, in the dead of night, he wept, alone” (797; ch. 59). When Florence later enters Dombey's study, interrupting his suicidal thoughts and blocking out his own ghastly mirror image, which like Edith's has become a haunting illusion of his powerlessness, he is rewarded for replacing thoughts of his thwarted claims to Edith and her luxuries with a preference for Florence's room and things. Florence removes him from the empty, haunted mansion and takes him back to her idyllic life, concretizing his new perspective by giving him the love of a family to replace his love of economic and social power.

Michael Peled Ginsburg persuasively argues that Dickens does not ensconce the family in a new home at the end, placing them instead at the seashore, because the love of home must be dematerialized (69). Yet, the material does not disappear when Dombey is removed from his haunted mansion. Rather, Dickens shows that his title character has learned to value the equally expensive and sentimental bottle of Madeira that old Sol has saved for such an occasion rather than the luxuries that were only ever important for their price-tags: “‘You are quite right, Mr. Gills,’ says Mr. Dombey. ‘This is a very rare and most delicious wine’” (828; ch. 62). In this last, significant textual object, ownership is dispersed: everyone who raises his or her glass possesses a claim to the wine and the “community of feeling” (269; ch. 20) – an idea Dickens brings up elsewhere in the novel – that the wine symbolizes. In this conclusion, then, Dickens reconceives the ownership of luxuries as something to bring people together in familial bliss rather than dividing and isolating them in a narcissistic relationship with those things. Objects now have the potential to strengthen social relationships, which are deepened as “Mr. Dombey, with a ready hand, holds out his [glass]. The others follow; and there is a blithe and merry ringing, as of a little peal of marriage bells” (828; ch. 62).

The fact that Dickens chooses wine, with its ritualistic connotations, as the object to bond his characters in their closing communion, signifies his intention to recover a possession that, though a luxury like Edith's belongings, is also a symbol of people's nearly-sacred, pre-industrial interactions with things. Unlike Edith's newly-bought dresses, mirrors, and trinkets, the wine has both a sentimental story within the text and a meaningful identity outside of it. It has aged alongside old Sol, an object that has absorbed his good intentions in its careful preservation. The wine, like the man, has only gotten better with age. Age, then, and the potential for emotional depth are two of Dickens's requisites for meaningful, unifying objects. Symbolically, as a product of Madeira, an island renowned by Britons at this time for its primitive beauty, the wine promises to bypass the problems of an industrialized London populated with new and superficial things.Footnote ¹⁶ It serves as a reminder not only of the simplicity of people's relationships to objects before the influences of commodity culture but also of the unifying power of shared investment in those objects. This rich, earthy possession becomes the center point of Dickens's secular last supper, celebrating the material ties that bind his characters to each other. They come together over an object that is neither feminine nor masculine in a family living space that is also neither feminine nor masculine. Yet, in an interesting twist, the toast celebrates the matrimonial union of Florence and her husband, which draws on yet another biblical image, that of the wedding feast of Cana, where gender of course matters greatly.Footnote ¹⁷ In Dombey, the wine similarly unites the couple and their guests under a gender-neutral object that negates gender differences even as it depends on them. Husbands and wives matter, but only as they are responsible for bringing together a larger “community of feeling.”

II.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon emphasizes the affective meanings of objects from the very first chapter of Lady Audley's Secret, when Lucy almost strangles herself with a mysterious necklace. In this scene and the ones that follow, Braddon illuminates Lucy's highly passionate relationships with her possessions which, like the titular secret, are as much hers as her blonde curls and tapered fingers. What Lucy owns is important to this novel, maybe the most important part of it, a fact further underscored by the possessive noun in the title. But, whereas the majority of the characters (and many critics) write off Lucy's relationships with her beloved possessions as proof of her childish or materialist nature, others – including her first husband George and, later, Robert Audley – perceive these objects as psychologically dangerous. Like the other characters, Robert and George are only vaguely aware of Lucy's complex relationships with her possessions, but they do endow Lucy's things with superstitious power that further underscores her claims and, ironically, their own powerlessness.Footnote ¹⁸ During a surreptitious visit to her chambers, George grafts the ghost of his dead wife onto Lucy's possessions and lets himself be unnerved by her intimacy with things another man has given her. Later Robert inscribes those same things with Lucy's “witchery” as he begins to suspect Lucy of injuring his friend and uncle. But, whereas Robert works to fleece Lucy of her material power once it robs him of his male companions, George can never recover from his symbolic castration because he lacks the tools and wherewithal to counteract it. Their encounters with Lucy's material power thus unbalance the men's staid, steady, and rather dull lives, but, significantly, also drive them toward their apparently serene, Lucyless existence at novel's end – with Robert at the helm.

Though the knowledge of Lucy's material power accrues only gradually for the male characters, Braddon clues her readers in much earlier.Footnote ¹⁹ Through the many exhaustive descriptions of Lucy's possessions, we are made to see the complexity of her object relations. She has endowed her dresses, paintings, furniture, and jewels with magic – something close to fetishism – which is fueled by narcissism. Lucy herself, it turns out, is just a series of things that function as material appendages of her body and render her, in a sense, a part-human, part-commodity hybrid whose life depends as much on her glittering rings as on the delicate fingers that wear them: indeed, peeling Lucy's shawl from her shoulders would injure her as much as cutting her curls from her head. The fact that Lucy's garments swaddle her body so closely that she nearly disappears into them only reinforces the continuity between that body and its coverings. During one stormy night, “with the heavy [bed] curtains drawn tightly round her, she lay with her face buried in the pillows. . .in the handsome silk dress in which she had travelled, huddled together, amongst the bed-clothes” (77-78; vol. 1, ch. 9). Such descriptions stress her dependence on things even as they attest to her independence from social relationships, one with her husband most pointedly. It is, after all, to her bedclothes and not Sir Michael that she turns in her anxiety about the storm. Though Edith Dombey is also strongly associated with her possessions, she never loses herself in them to the same degree Lucy does – Edith declares her independence from her things even as she secures them as a reward for her miserable marriage. Lucy, in contrast, works relentlessly to erase any distinction between herself and her things, giving them the same superstitious, totemic power others give her beauty. Indeed, the “great looking-glasses that stretch from the ceiling to the floor” (31; vol. 1, ch. 3) in her chambers ensure that looking at her luxuries is no different than looking at her own reflection.

Because Lucy objectifies herself as another beautiful artefact on display, many characters fail to see her possessions as anything but trinkets or trash.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, the man who has the strongest claims to her things blinds himself to her unique relationships with them. Content to live the fiction of a companionate marriage, Sir Michael temporarily buries the knowledge that, “like other men of his age, [he is] married for his fortune and his position” (17; vol. 1, ch. 1).Footnote ²¹ By suppressing his knowledge of Lucy's material desires for the majority of the novel, Sir Michael expunges Lucy's mercenary reasons for marrying by transforming the narrative of her consumption into the story of his own generosity, heading off her materialistic nature by giving her the treasures she desires as gifts of love. To bestow on Lucy the fairy-tale life she desires, Sir Michael completely transforms his ancestral home into “a little palace” (55; vol. 1, ch. 7) with a “fairy boudoir” for Lucy. Without being aware of it, then, Sir Michael endows Lucy's things with a sentimental magic that reinforces her power over them and his own status at the bottom of her totem pole.

Since Sir Michael's age and ill health – not to mention naivety – render him incapable of fulfilling the husband role, Braddon provides two proxies for him. Unlike Carker, who is sent to lay down Dombey's law, George and Robert take it upon themselves to steal into Lucy's chambers on a lark, almost like a pair of exploring boys – a buoyant Robert leading a passive George through a secret trap-door into Lucy's rooms. In a scene that functions symbolically as sexual invasion or penetration, Robert moves through Lucy's rooms voyeuristically, even saving her portrait “for a bonne bouche” (71; vol. 1, ch. 8).Footnote ²² Utterly unsuspicious this early in the narrative, Robert does not imagine Lucy's things capable of any animation, perfidy, or even significance except as they represent her inimitable and untouchable beauty – nor does he credit any superstition. Even before the men cross the threshold into Lucy's rooms, Robert explains to his friend that “all ghosts. . .[are] the result of damp [or indigestion]” (69; vol. 1, ch. 8). He's only impressed with Lucy's possessions as he can evoke the absent woman by creeping around, touching, smelling, and in general spying on her rooms and possessions. They have little power independent of his own power as voyeur.

George's experience is quite the opposite because he and Robert have vastly different relationships with the boudoir's owner: George has experienced the physical, emotional, financial, and (perhaps paradoxically) legal intimacy of a husband while Robert can only claim, at this point, to be an acquaintance (and, unpalatably, a nephew) attracted to Lucy's beauty and manner. Following Robert's lead “submissively” (70; vol. 1, ch. 8), in a scene told through free indirect discourse, George is rendered nearly impotent by the overwhelming femininity of his physical surroundings that pushes bodily and psychically against him:

Though the narrator explains George “very seldom observed anything” (68; vol. 1, ch. 8), here he “[sees] his bearded face and tall gaunt figure reflected in the cheval-glass, and wonder[s] to see how out of place he seem[s] among all these womanly luxuries” (71; vol. 1, ch. 8). Rather than arousing George, this feminine paraphernalia unsettles him, as if its owner lounges hidden among these objects, waiting for a chance to pounce. Ironically, though, George is responsible for his own trauma as he (almost masochistically) fashions the threat of Lucy's material power based on the way she has arranged and rearranged her possessions. Indeed, he is made uncomfortable even before he realizes that this is his dead wife's chamber because of the power he ascribes to her possessions. The overpowering sexuality enfolded in the “[t]wo or three handsome dresses [that] lay in a heap upon the ground” (70; vol. 1, ch. 8) is too much for the widower. Lucy's dresses dramatically multiply and gothicize the absent female body, simultaneously capturing its deathly stillness and gesturing to its potential for animatedness. Like the empty glove Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass analyze in Renaissance portraiture, the dresses are “no longer structured by flesh and bone, collapsed in on [themselves]” (183). Simultaneously familiar to George because he has sexual knowledge of Lucy's body and strange because he has been living as a celibate bachelor, these things enact a “material haunting” (Jones and Stallybrass 186) on him as he drifts through the rooms like a ghost himself. Like Dombey, George endows these luxuries with a power he can never access; but, at this point, they do not threaten, only unsettle and unnerve him.

However, the last object George sees in his tour of Lucy's rooms reanimates those he has already seen and utterly incapacitates him. Having just barely recognized himself in Lucy's mirror, George's uncanny experience climaxes when he recognizes the wife he believed to be dead in Lucy Audley's portrait. Picking up where the bundled dresses left off, the portrait embodies the corpse-like stillness of his dead wife as well as the activity of the woman yet living.Footnote ²³ For fifteen minutes he “star[es] blankly at the painted canvas. . .his left arm hanging loosely by his side” (72-73; vol. 1, ch. 8) while his dead wife comes back to life, marries someone else, and imbues these apartments with her ghostly presence. Throughout his circuit of Lucy's rooms and even in this moment of passivity, George actively generates and reifies his own powerlessness through his perception of the violent, erotic power of Lady Audley's possessions.Footnote ²⁴ The narrator's ironic description of George as he looks at the portrait, notably not told through indirect discourse, signals the depth of his shock: “But strange as the picture was, it could not have made any great impression on George Talboys, for he sat before it for about a quarter of an hour without uttering a word” (72; vol. 1, ch. 8). When he finally does “utter. . .a word” (72; vol. 1, ch. 8), it is minimal – “I had almost” (73; vol. 1, ch. 8), in response to Robert's question if he had fallen asleep – and, again, ironic: the reader and Robert both know that something has changed for George.Footnote ²⁵ Robert admonishes him, “Mark my words, George Talboys, you've caught a cold; you're as hoarse as a raven” (73; vol. 1, ch. 8). Later we discover that George has dropped one of his gloves during this quarter-hour, and thus conspicuously left the apartment wearing only one. True to the mystery genre, the physical circumstances of the scene – George's change in voice, the dropped glove – serve as clues to his psychological reaction: first unsettled by Lucy's “womanly luxuries,” then silenced and undone by her portrait, George is obviously at their mercy. At the end of the scene, he is “le[d] passive[ly]. . .away with [Robert]” (73; vol. 1, ch. 8). He does not appear again (excepting a brief appearance in the following chapter) until the very end of the book, after Lucy has been stripped of her material power.

Unwittingly, however, George has his revenge on Lucy soon after his tour of her apartment. Upon her return to Audley Court, she is dismayed to find “a great man's glove” left accidentally in her room; “It was George's, which he had dropped while looking at the picture” (79; vol. 1, ch. 9). For a woman whose experience is shaped by things, this glove is a slap in the face. Just as Lucy's dresses stand in for the absent woman in George's eyes, his glove points to the absent hand it should be covering.Footnote ²⁶ The fact that the left object is a glove – simultaneously a symbol of the intimate touch of a husband as well as the “strong hand” with which he was said to rule his wife – underscores its erotic violence for her.Footnote ²⁷ Lucy can only eradicate the glove's power by eliminating the threat of the hand itself, so the next day, when George grabs her wrist with this “powerful hand” (91; vol. 1, ch. 11) in the lime-walk during a temporary return of his power (significantly, away from her rooms and outside of the narrative), she pushes him down a well, breaking his right arm to purge the threat of his right-hand glove.Footnote ²⁸ His right arm now mirrors the left arm that hung impotently at his side as he stared at her portrait. By breaking his arm and throwing out his glove, Lucy saps George's material revenge of its threat and fortifies her own claims to things. After this clash, he has no choice but to flee because he knows he cannot compete with the intimacy, strength, and violence of her relationships with her beloved luxuries – nor can his material power, emblematized by the glove, contend with hers.

By silencing George, Lucy trusts she has destroyed the only evidence of the secret that would deprive her of her beloved possessions. But, surprising for a woman so invested in the material, she underestimates the power of other objects to uncover her secret: as Eva Badowska notes, “[e]ven Lady Audley, the radical makeover maven, is not exempt from the compulsion to leave traces [behind her]” (168). Lucy fails to see how such “traces” from her past can be used to rob her of her possessions in the present. Ironically, it is George's short-sighted friend, Robert, who is spurred by his friend's disappearance to begin noticing for the first time “the outward apparatus of existence” (206; vol. 2, ch. 6). In fact, his first suspicion of Lucy arises when he notices how she uses her possessions – a “broad, flat, gold bracelet” that covers her bruised wrist (90; vol. 1, ch. 11) – to construct the narrative she desires.Footnote ²⁹ Though Robert initially fails to perceive the threatening power of Lucy's possessions, so obvious to George, he now starts noticing that Lucy's luxuries are somehow connected to every conflict his friend and uncle face: his thoughts in this scene vacillate between worry about George and growing suspicion of Lucy's “white lies” (91; vol. 1, ch. 11). From here, his misgivings escalate until he realizes that he must fight things with things.

Continuing the work George's glove has already begun – threatening Lucy in the language of materiality she understands – Robert methodically hunts for and collects samples of her handwriting, an old trunk label, locks of hair, and letters and notes, slowly and systematically counteracting her material magic with the logic of empiricism. In a culture concerned with scientific progress, what is Lucy's boudoir magic to Robert's circumstantial evidence, to “[a] scrap of paper; a shred of some torn garment; the button off a coat. . .the fragment of a letter. . .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 officer” (123; vol. 1, ch. 15)? Later, when Robert re-enters Lucy's chambers at her invitation, he finally recognizes the feminine power Lucy has in this space, particularly over her tea-table, but believes he knows how little that power is worth. Like Dombey and George, Robert can never draw on the agency embedded in women's private spaces, but he really has no need of it. What power could the “social fairy, weaving potent spells with Gunpowder and Bohea” (222; vol. 2, ch. 7), have when Robert's pockets are full of evidence that will rob her of those magical things?

However, in a reversal of the other men's experiences, Robert's confidence in his control of people and things weakens when he is away from Lucy's rooms. Momentarily frustrated with his investigation, he airs his grievances with objects that fail to behave as he expects, feeling “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” (206; vol. 2, ch. 6).Footnote ³⁰ And, though he does not articulate the connection, he is nettled that both objects and women – who, he has made clear, are objects to him – possess the power to disrupt the smooth order of things. Robert's thoughts move seamlessly from a rant against the “mute propriety of chairs” (206; vol.2, ch. 6), to a tirade against women who “make. . .social storms in household teacups” (208; vol. 2, ch. 6). Domestic objects – here teacups – serve as the unwitting vessels of women's small, but troublesome and even dangerous, passions that disturb men's erstwhile peaceful lives. Robert's anger towards objects thus develops in tandem with his growing suspicion of women. Recognizing that Lucy Audley's love of things is responsible for disrupting the male bonds most important in his life, Robert turns to women and objects in the abstract to vent his frustration, complaining that they resist his expectations of who they should be and what they should do.

Unlike Dombey, Carker, and George, Robert thus experiences his material assault gradually, which, though related to Lucy's particular attachment to things, is not directly caused by them. Although he ultimately remains impervious to its threat because he has no claim to Lucy or her possessions, he fails to inoculate others against her power. Not only has his closest friend disappeared hours after witnessing firsthand Lucy's metonymic intimacy with her luxuries, but his beloved uncle has also been enslaved by the fantasy of showering her with love-gifts. Though pleased with his clue-gathering, then, Robert is increasingly disenchanted with the everyday material world around him which, for the first time in his life, frustrates his plans and expectations. Rather than giving in to this vexation, however, Robert turns the instability of objects’ meanings against Lucy, reshaping her past possessions by masculinizing them as detective clues. He dulls their femininity by enclosing them within masculine pigeon-holes and pocketbooks, reclaiming them as his property in the hopes of reviving his friend and preserving his uncle.Footnote ³¹

In the process of converting Lucy's past possessions into threats against her, Robert robs Lucy of the power, ease, and security she has cultivated in her chambers. Indeed, though these past belongings ultimately banish her to an asylum in Belgium by exposing her first marriage, her other possessions begin turning against her even earlier, almost immediately after Robert discloses his evidence to her. Sitting alone in her beautiful rooms, Lucy realizes that “she had strayed far away into a desolate labyrinth of guilt and treachery, terror and crime, and all the treasures that had been collected for her. . .[gave] her no pleasure” (293; vol. 2, ch. 13).Footnote ³² Replaying, but exaggerating, George's visit to these apartments, the narrator exhaustively catalogs Lucy's possessions as she wanders disconsolately through her rooms searching for a reprieve from her misery, just as George did a year earlier.Footnote ³³ Like George's mirror image, Lucy's trinkets reflect her – “the most beautiful object in the enchanted chamber” (291; vol. 2, ch. 13) – but she no longer recognizes herself in them just as George failed to recognize his own reflected image. Looking into the very same mirror that startled George, “[s]he. . .tried to smile away that statue-like immobility; but to-night the rosy lips refused to obey her: they were firmly locked, and were no longer the slaves of her will and pleasure” (307; vol. 3, ch. 1). Lucy can no longer find sanctuary in her bedclothes or retreat into her beautiful reflection because even her own body resists her expectations. The only solace she can imagine is “the pleasure of flinging them into a heap beneath her feet, and trampling upon them” (293; vol. 2, ch. 13) – destroying them to reflect her own destroyed mind. In an unexpected reversal, it is the female character who is temporarily unhinged by her own belongings because she has lost the power they promised.

Only when Lucy's forced confession frees her from that temporary “labyrinth of guilt and treachery” (293; vol. 2, ch. 13) does she recant these destructive fantasies and seek out her beloved possessions in a last gasp at the agency she believes they can still give her. Unlike Edith, who demolishes her possessions when they turn against her, Lucy returns adoringly to hers – again blurring the boundaries between her body and possessions when she secretes teacups and vases among the folds of her dresses and linen when she leaves Audley Court. But her unique ownership is ultimately meaningless in the foreign madhouse, where her beautiful body and possessions are as “out of place” as the gaunt George Talboys was in her fairy boudoir (71; vol. 1, ch. 8). Like the corpse-like piles of dinner dresses, Lucy is only a simulacrum of her former, animated self in this space. She can neither thrive nor survive here, even with her fur sables around her shoulders, because she has no audience to impress (or intimidate) with her material magic. Her rings, teacups, and vases lose their clout in the face of yet another relic from her past that Robert resurrects to corner her – the madhouse.Footnote ³⁴ Lucy's prized metonymic bond with things thus betrays her when she is imprisoned in a material world she abhors. Though her body and possessions continue to blur into each other here – her white hands and diamonds “glittered [indistinguishably] in the dimly-lighted chamber” (382; vol. 3, ch. 6) – this connection no longer satisfies her because it is enclosed within a house and chamber that render her a mere shadow that will dissolve into the floors, walls, and tapestries of her new ghostly home. However, it is ultimately appropriate that the woman who has championed her own union with things fades into the fabric of the sanatorium, a dissolution that is emphasized by her last appearance in the novel – a black-edged letter that announces her death. Unsurprisingly, Lady Audley makes her final bow through things.

Towards the end of Braddon's novel, Lucy is the one who sees her property resist her control, forcing her to modify her relationships to her possessions. Realizing she can never be their legal owner, she steals them when no one is looking. But even this change in her ownership status does not significantly alter the ways she values objects. Instead, like Dickens, Braddon is more interested in the men's reconfiguration of object-value. Just as Dombey had to confront his own material powerlessness and reconstitute his object relations when he discovered that his perspective was unsustainable, Robert and George must also rethink the ways they value things – though Braddon is less interested in George who, by the novel's end, is no longer a husband and whose ownership no longer matters; the narrator only muses, “He is a young man yet, remember, and it is not quite impossible that he may by-and-by find some one who will be able to console him for the past” (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). Robert, in contrast, is both newly married and newly wealthy. In the early chapters, Robert prizes objects only as they contribute to his own comfort. His favorite things are inexpensive novels, cigars, and stray dogs because these things allow him to pursue his lazy, harmless, but still quite self-absorbed life; even Lucy's belongings and portrait are captivating only insofar as they please him. When his indolent world is disturbed by George's disappearance and Sir Michael's illness, Robert begins seeing how things can have significance beyond his comfort level or his experience of damp and indigestion. He enters Lucy's boudoir and traces her past life with a new sensitivity to detail and new way of ascribing value. Finally, at the novel's close, with his best friend recovered and his uncle recovering, Robert's material interests coalesce in the property he buys on the Thames, the ownership of which Braddon attempts to disperse amongst Robert's family members, emotionally if not legally. Unlike Lucy's solitary and solipsistic enjoyment of her luxuries, the Audleys and their extended family now appear to share material pleasures of “drink[ing] tea, and eat[ing] strawberries and cream upon the lawn” (436; vol. 3, ch. 10).Footnote ³⁵

Yet, the Braddonian “community of feeling” on the Thames is nevertheless still marred by material divisions – between men and women, on the one hand, and between Robert and other men, on the other – that Braddon cannot, or chooses not to, reconcile: “There is a pretty rustic smoking-room over the Swiss boat-house, in which the gentlemen sit and smoke in the summer evenings, and whence they are summoned by Clara and Alicia” (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). Braddon selects masculine objects – the rowboats, cigars, smoking-room – to symbolize the rustic pleasure of her community, thus excluding Robert's wife Clara and his cousin Alicia, at least from these male pleasures. In this way, gendered possessions, whether primarily feminine or masculine, still retain the potential to alienate spouses from each other. Yet, even the male characters’ smoking-room intimacy is disrupted by Robert's indisputable authority and officious patronage at the novel's end. Moreover, George is still dejected, and Sir Michael is still debilitated – both men are just as objectified by Robert as Lucy Audley was. Despite Braddon's attempts to disperse ownership among this community, then, she only strengthens Robert's claim to everyone and everything in it. On a symbolic level, Robert is the paterfamilias at the end of the novel. Indeed, because none of the other men are married (even Sir Harry Towers, though apparently courting Alicia, is still a bachelor), Robert is the only person who can claim the authority and power of coverture. If the implications of Lucy's ownership mattered most for the majority of the novel, the implications for Robert's matters most at its end.

III.

In the same issue of the London Journal that published an 1863 installment of Lady Audley's Secret, the editors conceded the authority women exercised in marriage. “Women have more strength in their looks than we have in our laws, and more power in their tears than we have in our arguments” (415), it explained, acknowledging that men's laws – those detailing property ownership in marriage, among others – were mitigated by women's physical presence. Law, in other words, was beholden to women's tears. Whether this aphorism had ironic intentions or not, alongside Braddon's novel, it points to the complexity of the laws that determined Victorian marital ownership. Anticipating or participating in the debates about marriage that helped characterize the third quarter of the nineteenth century, both Braddon and Dickens complicate the issue of marital property in Dombey and Lady Audley by depicting competing spousal ownerships. Husbands possess legal claims to property, wives circumstantial claims. Still others – heirs, scavengers, thieves – repackage things as theirs.

By illustrating the fluidity of claims to married women's property, Dickens and Braddon thus gently tease apart the accepted pattern of men's exclusive legal ownership, casting an unflattering light on men's need for material power. In fact, it is through the male characters’ reactions that we see women's temporary agency only matters inasmuch as it reveals the men's psychic discomfort. Not only do the men perceive that material intimacy is more satisfying to these women than marital intimacy, but they also recognize how such intimacy threatens their own power over people and things. Though Edith and Lucy are ultimately expunged, neutered, or overshadowed like so many inanimate objects, they nonetheless wield a material agency in certain scenes in order to illuminate men's lack of marital, social, and economic power at the moments when those men feel most secure in it. By reversing the usual way we think about the distribution of gendered power in the nineteenth century – showing that the position of the typically empowered (and masculine) owner of things could be just as insubstantial and conditional as that of the typically disempowered (and feminine) object or person being owned – Dickens and Braddon interrogate the politics of marital ownership in a time when pretty pictures of domestic ideology and fierce debates about married women's property were either building or resounding around them.

But, though the novels emphasize the tenuousness of men's ownership by juxtaposing it with the unexpected (and also tenuous) ownership by women, they nonetheless moderate this threat through the wives’ less-than-ideal endings. That Edith and Lucy do not have the hopeful ends of the male characters gestures to the ambivalence-teetering-towards-unease that Dickens and Braddon felt about these dangerously materialistic women. Though Edith achieves the small reward of self-ownership or self-government when she refuses Dombey's and Carker's claims to her, she must destroy her belongings, renounce traditional family structures, and flee England to cash it in. Lucy also leaves family and country at the end of her story, but she does so empty-handed: the teacups and vases she steals from Audley Court lose their value when she loses hers. Even the novels’ angelic housewives are absorbed into a genderless community of owners, as Florence is, or isolated from men's homosocial bonds, as Clara and Alicia are. However, not even all the male characters have the rosiest of endings: though Dombey redeems himself and Robert salvages his most cherished bonds, the decapitated Carker, depressed George, and enfeebled Sir Michael linger on the edges of these narratives, evidence of the novelists’ ambivalence about rewarding men to echo their ambivalence about persecuting women. The duel of marital ownerships thus continues to unfold.

Yet, though all these characters occupy specific geographic places at the ends of the novels, women's personal belongings are situated in a literal and figurative “no man's land.” Having been destroyed, disposed of, divided, or draped, these things are lost (or sufficiently hidden) in the narrative action. This impermanence suggests that such objects cannot be fully or safely owned by married women or men, and never by them together. These “possessions” are too volatile and dangerous to not be contained after they have accomplished their task of regulating the object relations of the men who supplied them in the first place. Yet, in the diamonds, dresses, and dressing-rooms of other Victorian novels, things nonetheless continue to insist that they too have a role to play as the innocent vessels of destruction and rehabilitation.