Nineteenth-century reviewers, though they disagreed about nearly all aspects of the sensation phenomenon, were united in diagnosing the sensation novel as a symptom of modernity. In a review of novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, Henry James noted that their books were typically set in “Modern England – the England of to-day's newspaper” and featured protagonists who were “English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph” (593). Like Bram Stoker's Dracula some four decades later, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) represented “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance” (Stoker 67; ch. 3).Footnote ¹ But Braddon's novel was also “a sign of the times” because it betokened the rising awareness of modernity's tendency toward rapid obsoleteness (“Our Female Sensation Novelists” 485). The critical hostility directed against it at the moment of its greatest success in the 1860s also had the effect of exposing the seeds of transience that constitute the paradoxical essence of novelty.

Sensation fiction's modernity, despite its marked similarity to sensation journalism or its obvious predilection for the latest in current affairs, cannot be reduced to the nineteenth-century equivalent of ambulance (carriage) chasing.Footnote ² In fact, sensation novels create the very modernity that they represent. According to Nicholas Daly, sensation fiction brings the modern subject literally up to speed and prompts “a reorientation of the subject towards modernity” by exposing the human body to the thrills of narrative suspense (Literature 37). Sensation novels offer readers a kind of “temporal training” that helps them “acclimatize to certain historical shifts in social organization, imperial power, and commodity culture” (Literature 37, 3).Footnote ³

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

I.

Critics of the 1860s imagined that the entire sensation genre constituted a craze whose unhealthy popularity guaranteed its premature obsolescence. The 1860s witnessed a late flourishing of anti-novel discourse directed specifically against such “morbid phenomena of literature” (Mansel 252).Footnote ⁵ Sensation fiction, it was feared, was both repulsively modern and inevitably ephemeral. Reviews penned by conservative detractors, though fueled by offended sensibilities only imperfectly disguised as moral and aesthetic censures, offer a rich resource for readers seeking to gain insight into what was perceived to be the genre's morbid – or moribund – nature. As Ann Cvetkovich shows, the reviewers' hostility forms “part of a longer history of attacks on popular culture” and indicates “concern about literature's status as a commodity” (16, 17). Reviewers also express dismay at the loss of cultural capital attached to authorship. Margaret Oliphant complains, for example, that the era when “an author was a natural curiosity, recognized and stared at as became the rarity of the phenomenon” was irretrievably lost now that “most people have been in print one way or other – when stains of ink lingered on the prettiest of fingers” (qtd. in Cvetkovich 19). But such dilution of cultural capital is only half the story; the other half, as Patrick Brantlinger makes clear in The Reading Lesson, is its unprecedented expansion. Oliphant admits that “the extraordinary flood of novels . . . now pouring over the land” has “fertilizing results, so far as the manufacture itself is concerned” (qtd. in Cvetkovich 19). But she shrinks not just from the idea of literature as fertilizer manufactured by stained hands but also from the fragmentation and commodification of persons she detects under the blots.

Peeling away layers of anxiety surrounding the vogue for sensation fiction resembles, in essence, the work of an archeologist. Stratum after stratum is brought to light with no promise of a rock-bottom cause of the critical hullabaloo the sensation phenomenon occasioned. But worries about commodification undoubtedly form part of the novel's larger concern about the new, and, ultimately, about modernity. Sensation novels are decried as “indications of a wide-spread corruption . . . the ravenous appetite for carrion, this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty before the scent has evaporated” (Mansel 252). In other words, these novels do more than chase the new: they constitute the new. As Mansel indicates, they are corrupt for the very reason that they are (too) new. Sensation novels recall the Veneerings in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) – “bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London” – who are condemned precisely because they are “spick and span new.” And just as the Veneerings, who “smel[l],” like their furniture, “a little too much of the workshop and [are] a trifle sticky” (8; vol. 1, ch. 2), so the “commercial atmosphere” surrounding sensation novels affronts critics because it is “redolent of the manufactory and the shop” (Mansel 252).

How do these books, then, offend the critics' noses? In Time, Desire, and Horror, Alain Corbin explains that modern sensory experience in the city, beginning at the end of the ancien régime in France, centered around a new “model of anxiety” and “olfactory vigilance” directed against industrial pollution (146–47). The language of foul odors may reveal a dread of labor and the laboring classes, which may in turn be associated with the manufacturing aspects of the book trade. It marks, for instance, the reduction of Sigismund, a sensation author in Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864), who is “not exactly pleasant to the sense of smell” (11), to the status of a perishable good; it puts a littérateur on a par with a shopkeeper. Stench, we could say, brings to light his literary labor, which tends to remain veiled by notions of inspiration and genius. It also exposes commodities, including sensation novels, as products of labor and threatens to destroy their fetish character. But why smell? The most primitive of the senses, the olfactory sense works on the most visceral and unconscious levels; it deals with affects as irrational as attraction and revulsion; it connects us to our animal past. In one of his most fanciful footnotes in Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wildly hypothesizes that the “decline of the olfactory stimuli,” which took place when human beings assumed an erect posture, “paved the way for civilization” (41–42). Apart from the causal links that Freud builds, smell often symbolizes and is experienced as civilization's arch nemesis. Mansel's representation of sensation novels as foul-smelling “carrion” similarly insinuates that attraction to such literature is no more dignified than the “coprophilic pleasure in smelling” that, according to Freud, is repressed in the state of civilization and exhibited only by primitives and perverts (Three Essays 155). But as we will see, it is not only unpleasant odors that cause offense to nineteenth-century critics. Equally repulsive are smells that announce excessive newness. While in Freud the olfactory stands for the uncivilized, in Mansel and others like him it also stands for the modern, if precisely not the civilized.

Mansel goes so far as to propose a sort of program for the elimination of malodorous literary upstarts. He imagines a lending library where “No book should be admitted under twenty years old, a very liberal allowance for the life of a modern novel” (267). Such a library, kept deliberately out of date, would foster “a real competition between old favourites and new,” “an increased struggle for existence” among modern novels (268). Darwinian rhetoric aside, his proposal to force the patina of age by artificial means can be read as an attempt to preserve that “aura” which “withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art” (Benjamin, Art in the Age 10304). Benjamin writes that “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” is vital to the work's aura (104–05). Disgusting odor, on the other hand, can be said to denote an offensive nearness and destroy auratic distancing. To noses like Mansel's, modernity gives off a bad smell because it is too proximate. While we are waiting for it to mature, we might save ourselves energy and money: in twenty years' time, Mansel predicts, the sensation novel will become a mere dilapidated relic of a forgotten craze, an entertainment displaced by the escalating significance of the new. Nostalgically invested in the idea of culture tested and perfected by time, Mansel is concerned that attempts to keep up with the modern will eventually create libraries that resemble confused natural history museums, stuffed chock full of bizarre fossils (naturally, he would prefer libraries built on the model of the National Portrait Gallery). The rage against the sensation novel may, then, be read as articulating the critics' growing concern that modern cultural production, by attacking the reader's senses with the carrion stench of the new, dulls the finer discriminations of taste but also leaves readers helpless to choose among novel-commodities asking to be perused. The lively arena of cultural production looks to Mansel, and others like him, ironically like a graveyard in the making; the life of a sensation novel is a sputter, a flicker on history's horizons. A sensation novel offends because, as Mansel intuits, it is always on the brink of tumbling into ruins and littering the landscape with unusable carcasses of outdated literary trends. That is where the paradox of modern cultural production is located: to read the sensation novel as the embodiment of the new is simultaneously to discern in it the initial outlines of its impending obsolescence.

II.

Paradoxically, the sensation novel shares in the very concerns its critics voice against it. Lady Audley's Secret opens with an arresting and enigmatic image of a “clock-tower, with a stupid, bewildering clock, which had only one hand; and which jumped straight from one hour to the next, and was therefore always in extremes” (7; vol. 1, ch. 1). Whether originally so conceived or now broken, the Audley Court clock is behind the times and out of touch with the modernity whose paradigm is the “Swiss” movement of the railroad clock.Footnote ⁶ According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, before the railroads “annihilate[d] space and time,” space consisted in a “patchwork of varying local times”; but in the mid-nineteenth century, regions of the country “los[t] their temporal identity in an entirely concrete sense: the railroads deprive[d] them of their local time” (42–43, 48). By the early 1860s, the standardization of time, which began with individual railway companies in the 1840s, was well under way, until “in 1880, railroad time [became] general standard time in England” (50). The Audley Court clock is, then, like the sensation novel itself, “in extremes”: an epitome of modernity – the clock is its image par excellence – it also constitutes an obsolete relic of ages past, when the difference of an hour was no difference at all. It forms what Benjamin calls a “dialectical image” or “dialectics at a standstill” (Arcades 10), that is, in the words of one commentator, “an instant of illumination in which the dreary newsreel of history suddenly snaps [and] freezes into a frame” (Sieburth 19).Footnote ⁷ The enigmatic clock turns its face, Janus-like, in two directions at once: towards the past and towards the future, revealing modernity's principal icon to be already belated. In terms of the plot, the clock can offer only the promise of a future, also belated, signification: it appears before any action takes place, before the enigma is posed and before the principal characters are introduced. The temporality of its meanings doubles the clock's own game with time: the image, like the clock it portrays, may be precise or inaccurate – we can never know.

But in its position at the outset of the novel, the clock signifies at least its own obdurate materiality, if only because it precludes a clearer interpretation. The refuse of modernity – modern but already superseded – the clock is no longer a desirable object; it is now slowly turning into a mere dilapidated thing, a sorry travesty of modernity, soon to be housed in a curiosity cabinet or museum. The narrator's sense that the second hand is somehow missing, that the clock is “stupid,” highlights its thing-like nature. In “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown argues that we “begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily” (4). The Audley Court clock reveals its thingness because its mechanism fails to perform up to modern standards, on which the plot depends at crucial moments. But the underlying catachresis of clock hands draws attention to another facet of the novel's modernity: the clock as the locus of machine culture connects with anxieties about the mechanization of persons. Because this catachresis does not appear in many European languages, the semantic field of clocks in English includes the mechanization of persons more directly than do other languages.Footnote ⁸ The clock at Audley Court is, then, not just a broken thing but a fragmented body, the body in pieces, something Victorian culture, with its fresh experience of railway disasters and industrial accidents, was particularly concerned about (Schivelbusch 127–45; Daly, Literature 34–55).

Lady Audley's Secret's anxiety about modernity manifests itself also as a concern about lineage. Recalling the Veneerings once again, the most derogatory remark Dickens makes about them involves their ancestry: “if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French-polished to the crown of his head.” The Veneerings have no pedigree – they fail to “set [it] up” with the rest of their parlor – but if they did, it would be a “bran-new” commodity camouflaged as a historical object, a faux antique (8; vol. 1, ch. 2). We could say that Lady Audley is also a Veneering, her aristocratic status acquired by marriage, in addition to several changes of name and the “soft wrappings of satin and fur” with which she packages herself (61; vol. 1, ch. 7).Footnote ⁹ The sensation novel is another Veneering, its relation to the literary tradition a complex masquerade. The genre combines various generic influences, mixing the Gothic with the “Newgate novel” (Taylor xii) and “violent[ly] yoking . . . romance and realism” (Hughes 16). Like the Veneerings, Lady Audley's Secret sets up a faux literary lineage, camouflaging its newness in a Gothic carapace. Such generic play may speak to an anxiety about its own status as a passing convention. An analysis of the novel's forays into Gothic territory and the picturesque aesthetic often associated with it will show how the novel reflects on the nature of literary modernity.

The Audley Court clock integrally belongs to the physiognomy of the estate, which is cast, as Aeron Haynie explains, in a picturesque mold and relies on signifiers of nature and the passage of time (66–70).Footnote ¹⁰ The description undoubtedly implies “a veiled critique of the system of the country estate” (Haynie 64). But the representation of Audley Court also evokes the sublime (it is a place where you “incontinently lost yourself”) and winks at Gothic tropes, such as secret chambers (“Of course, in such a house, there were secret chambers”) or sentient buildings possessed of a sense of agency (the house “wished to keep itself secret” and issued a sort of siren call to visitors who were struck there with “a yearning wish to have done with life”). Audley Court, then, makes reference to the locus classicus of the Gothic mode, a ruined castle or abandoned mansion of the type that can be found in Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe; its picturesque appearance has a whiff of Gothic possibility about it. Nonetheless, Audley Court is only incompletely Gothicized, though it boasts a genuine gothic past. The novel's rhetoric gestures as much toward the mansion's venerable history as it does toward modernity. Its architecture comprises an impossible jumble of styles, from the Plantagents to the Hanoverians, from a Norman refectory to a dining room in the style of George I. But the “broken ruin of a wall” incongruously escorts windows “so modern that they might have been added only yesterday” (7–9; vol. 1, ch. 1). In this way, Audley Court constitutes a larger instance of the principle represented by its tower clock. It expresses a broad notion of history as an accumulation of ruinous fragments reaching up to the present. History so conceived moves in an arbitrary fashion, with no plan or progress in view, “shaking down a bit of Saxon wall there, and allowing a Norman arch to stand here.” It quickly turns modern additions into a sort of chaotic archive, but the final outcome is entirely unpredictable, its effect “such a mansion as was not elsewhere to be met with throughout the county of Essex” (7–9; vol. 1, ch. 1). Audley Court is caught in the midst of its passage, not yet totally ruined, but becoming obsolete despite indifferent attempts at keeping it up to date. The house seems never to have been modern but it is also not wholly antiquated. Its ruin is neither already accomplished (and therefore entirely picturesque) nor an effect of a supernatural (and therefore sublime) occurrence. Audley Court is mundanely dilapidated, and in this way it succeeds in portraying a simpler, if not less poignant, anxiety: here modernity inevitably crumbles to dust, with no aesthetic or moral justification whatsoever.Footnote ¹¹

The fate of Audley Court as an index of cultural transformations is tied to the fate of Lady Audley, the beautiful imposter, as well as to the novel's key paradox: the uncovering of Lady Audley's crimes is promptly covered up by the very amateur detective who initially exposed them. Lady Audley concludes her adventures at Villebrumeuse, a “maison de santé” or reformed asylum, the kind of place where threatened patriarchs stash away odd and inconvenient personages under the modern pretense of “health.” She is placed there by the legal cunning of Robert Audley, who goes to great lengths to avoid a scandal and preserve picturesque appearances. Lady Audley eventually passes away in forced retirement “after a long illness, which Monsieur Val described as a maladie de langueur” (436, vol. 3, ch. 10).

Robert, the novel's figure for anxieties associated with the threat to a great country estate, early on experiences “troubling dreams” in which he sees

This is a wish-fulfillment dream designed not just to articulate but also to abate Robert's fear that Lady Audley, the illegitimate imposter, should infiltrate and debase his patrimony. At the center of the plot there lies, as in many Gothic novels earlier in the century, a struggle for the legitimate possession of a landed property. But whereas the walls of the castle of Otranto, for example, are eventually “thrown down with a mighty force” so that even the legitimate owner cannot inhabit it again (162; ch. 5), Robert's dream rehearses the possibility of such a supernatural catastrophe only to transmute it into a picturesque vision of “the old mansion safe and firmly rooted on the shore” (244; vol. 2, ch. 9). Robert's nightmare of the sublimely superannuated Audley Court is not realized. But the estate undergoes a subtler, and less sublime, form of “destruction.” Audley Court is “shut up,” while the great cultural achievements it houses succumb to an eminently natural process of decay: “the blue mold which artists dread gathers upon the Wouvermanns and Poussins, the Cuyps and Tintorettos” (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). But the estate is not entirely abandoned – and its fate illustrates how the past can be both defused and recycled: in Sir Audley's absence, Audley Court “is often shown to inquisitive visitors” and attracts tourists who come to “admire my lady's rooms, and ask many questions about the pretty, fair-haired woman, who died abroad” (436). In the meantime, Robert, who manages to appease his Gothic anxiety about property and place by purging the danger that “pollute[d]” his patrimony (340; vol. 3, ch. 3), does something very modern indeed: he moves house. His incongruous new bourgeois family, which includes his new wife Clara and her brother (Robert's friend and Lady Audley's first husband, George Talboys), is installed in a “fairy cottage . . . where, amid a little forest of foliage, there is a fantastical dwelling-place of rustic woodwork,” complete with a “little Swiss boat-house” (435; vol. 3, ch. 10).Footnote ¹²

Haynie points out that even though the “picturesque movement was no longer at its height of popularity in the 1860s, it continued to be used as a signifier of aristocratic taste and gentility” (69). This is certainly the case in Lady Audley's Secret, but I would argue that the novel's self-conscious application of an outmoded aesthetic, no longer dominant in literature or other arts, is deviously significant and begs further questions. If the picturesque in Lady Audley's Secret constitutes a signifier of gentility, it is a second-order one, placed, as it were, in quotation marks. It points not just to aristocratic tastes but also to literary conventions within which such tastes are often captured. Audley Court is picturesque not because it is found in what Haynie describes as “a fashionable state of disrepair” (70). It is the other way around: in 1862, Audley Court appears passé because it is picturesque. Its picturesque appearance is, then, an effect as well as a cause of its obsolescence. Similarly, Gothic tropes, though certainly legible in the 1860s, mean in two different ways at once: they invoke both a (faux) Gothic past and the recent past in which such sham Gothic references were the height of fashion.

The novel toys with the picturesque but prohibits it from being read as too earnest a mode of representation. To be sure, both discourses – and to a large extent they are one – have always been fundamentally concerned with (false) appearances. Picturesque nostalgia is carefully mediated by highly coded cultural references, while the Gothic is devoted to revealing troubling truths that the picturesque sentimentalizes or covers over. For instance, Walpole's labor of love, Strawberry Hill, is, as Susan Stewart points out, “a form of trompe-l'oeil, a triumph of surface over materiality and time” (274).Footnote ¹³ But even though “[a]ll representations of the past foreground their representational aspects” (Stewart 274), a Gothic ruin in Walpole performs different cultural work from a picturesque country estate in Braddon. Walpole may have covered Strawberry Hill with faux Gothic wallpaper (Kalter), but his investment in the past had the urgency of a collector's mania for antiquities and represented medievalism reconstituted as fashionable novelty. In contrast, the sensation novel's use of the picturesque aesthetic has none of that nostalgia for all things medieval (not even the kind that finds fulfillment in Gothic simulacra). In Lady Audley's Secret Gothic tropes have become last year's fashions, easily readable but no longer invested with the sheen of desire. For example, when Alicia Audley, Sir Michael's rambunctious daughter, discovers a “hiding-place so small . . . and yet large enough to contain a quaint old carved oak chest half filled with priests' vestments” under the floor of her nursery, her discovery is entirely gratuitous (9; vol. 1, ch. 1). This subterranean vault will never serve as a haven to some lady persecuted by a lecherous tyrant; in fact, it will never be mentioned again. Alicia, a “jolly girl, with no nonsense about her” (36; vol. 1, ch. 4), especially not of the Gothic kind, prefers to “spen[d] most of her time out of doors, riding about the green lanes” (10; vol. 1, ch. 1). The only “secret passage” actually made serviceable is that which allows Robert and George to gain entry into Lady Audley's dressing room later in the novel (69–70; vol. 1, ch. 8). But even this Gothic passage (pun intended) is contained by Robert's ironic self-consciousness about his position as heir presumptive to an old country estate: “Indeed I believe all ghosts to be the result of damp. You sleep in a damp bed – you awake suddenly in the dead of the night with a cold shiver, and see an old lady . . . sitting at the foot of the bed. The old lady is indigestion, and the cold shiver is a damp sheet” (69; vol. 1, ch. 8).

The picturesque and Gothic modes as they appear in Lady Audley's Secret in the 1860s are best thought of as “fossil remains” of a bygone socio-cultural order (Benjamin, Arcades 540). Writing about Benjamin's interest in the Paris Arcades at a time when they were already past their prime, Susan Buck-Morss comments: “Because these decaying structures no longer hold sway over the collective imagination, it is possible to recognize them as the illusory dream images they always were. Precisely the fact that their original aura has disintegrated makes them invaluable didactically” (159). So it is with Lady Audley's Secret. Much more is at stake than the realization that the picturesque is now cliché. At the outset of the novel, Audley Court appears, in proper Gothic fashion, as “a spot in which Peace seemed to have taken up her abode” (8; vol. 1, ch. 1; emphasis added). A typically Gothic mirage, this peace should be dismantled in the course of the plot and revealed as a thin veneer barely containing an explosive mixture of ambition, deceit, and violence. But the ending of Lady Audley's Secret defies the complete fulfillment of such Gothic expectations. The picturesque is neither reconstituted on apparently more solid sentimental grounds (as it often is in, for instance, Radcliffe), nor is it ultimately “deconstruct[ed],” as Haynie suggests (72). The “fairy cottage” notwithstanding, the last few pages remain ambivalent about the scene they paint. Though the last chapter is entitled “At Peace,” Braddon makes an Austen-like, ironic disclaimer about leaving “the good people all happy and at peace” (437; vol. 3, ch. 10). The novel appears to fall into an ahistorical nostalgic mise-en-abîme of rusticity, but it betrays a self-consciousness about recycling these nostalgic visions as pure simulacra, so that their status as phantasmagoric dream images is uncovered. Lady Audley's Secret has previously taught us not to fall for precisely such apparitions as that presented at the end, of Clara and Alicia “summon[ing] . . . [the men] to drink tea, and eat strawberries and cream upon the lawn” (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). The idea of the “tea-table” as woman's “legitimate empire” has been exposed as Robert's misogynistic delusion; it originally led him to be seduced into believing Lady Audley a domestic angel: “The starry diamond upon her white fingers flashed hither and thither amongst the tea-things, and she bent her pretty head over the marvellous Indian tea-caddy of sandal-wood and silver, with as much earnestness as if life held no higher purpose than the infusion of Bohea” (222–23; vol. 2, ch. 7).

Read as a self-conscious narrative, Lady Audley's Secret offers a distinctly campy possibility: estates like Audley Court are on the way to becoming picturesque theme parks, while new country residences are nothing but empty, superficial stylizations, holding no Gothic potential. The inauthentic peace of Robert's fairy cottage certainly entails profound ideological obfuscation, but it is not simply a more impenetrable version of the peace that enveloped Audley Court before Lady Audley came to disturb it.Footnote ¹⁴ “Fairy cottage,” “rustic woodwork,” “latticed windows,” “pretty baby,” “smooth lawn,” “slender wherries,” “little Swiss boat-house,” “pretty rustic smoking room” (435–36; vol. 3, ch. 10) – this catalogue of superlative stylistic features reveals Robert's new abode to be a veneer without depth, a surface that has become the thing itself. His rustic seat is a frozen imago, mythologized and taken out of history, and, consequently, impossible to interrogate as a misrepresentation of some putative Gothic depth. The fairy cottage amounts to a travesty of the picturesque style, its intense miniaturization and beautification implying an ironic distance. Whereas the picturesque ruin of the old Audley Court could still produce a Gothic frisson, the new rusticity is too bogus to smack even of nostalgia. What Braddon's novel demonstrates is that the new regime of bucolic cottages cannot answer to the anxieties the novel articulates. The ending is strangely affectless; it sanitizes the Audleys' family history and transforms it into a sentimental tale fit for a tourist. The image of Lady Audley's “prett[iness]” is apparently all that remains of the narrative when it is offered for consumption by “visitors”; the memory of the disturbing deeds of the “beautiful devil” (383; vol. 3, ch. 6), “the demoniac incarnation of some evil principle” (340; vol. 3, ch. 3), is slowly being obliterated. In this way, the novel avoids succumbing to the “ideology of progress,” or the mythic theory of history sternly critiqued by Benjamin (Arcades 857). Things are not better at the end and “Peace” is no more authentic than it was at the start. It is at our peril that we forget, by the novel's conclusion, its early warning: “No crime has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not been also done in the face of that sweet rustic calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with – peace” (57; vol. 1, ch. 7). The ending's self-consciousness suggests, rather, that the passage of (narrative) time may yield no significant advancement over the original situation of disequilibrium between semblance and truth, an imbalance which propelled the detective plot because it seemed to necessitate the dismantling of such appearances. Braddon's play with literary conventions is, then, a way of acting out a much larger anxiety about the transience of literary and other fashions. Superannuated conventions represent all the other disaffected fetishes that litter the history of modernity. A picturesque cottage, for example, may reference the sentimental idyll but it may also constitute a fashion fad of yesteryear, captured on its way toward becoming an obsolete empty vessel. Lady Audley's Secret is savvy about temporal passage: it indulges neither in retrogressive nostalgia about auld lang syne (when Audley Court was proof against “mermaids”) nor in triumphant visions of the coming utopia (when “All losses are restored, and sorrows end”). It speaks, instead, to an anxious feeling of uncertainty about the reality of apparent progress and the meaning of the present moment.

III.

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

Henry James recognized the significance of this paradigm already in 1865 when he wrote in The Nation that the sensation novel exposes us to the “most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. . . . Instead of the terrors of ‘Udolpho,’ we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible” (593). In Braddon, the home becomes positively uncanny (unhomely), in the sense given to the concept by Friedrich Schelling and emphasized by Freud: “Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open” (qtd in Freud 132). In fact, Freud could have been describing the structure of the sensation novel when he said about the movement of the uncanny that it “start[s] from the homely and the domestic” and “develop[s] towards the notion of something removed from the eyes of strangers, hidden, secret” (133). Braddon's idea of “the mysteries that may hang about the houses we enter” follows a similar logic, surmising that the hearth may be haunted by criminal secrets. But the novel forcefully articulates another mode of uncanniness – one rejected by Freud – which Jentsch thought was an effect of “intellectual uncertainty” (Freud 125). For instance, Braddon's paradigmatic passage achieves its effects largely through the deployment of the word “may”: homes may or may not be unhomely; mysteries may or may not be found there. The sense of intellectual uncertainty follows from the distressing realization that certain historical, even traumatic, events may be traceless or invisible, or leave only oblique traces. The narrative questions the reader's faulty assumption that historical events radically mark their actors and scorch the very ground upon which they take place. Nothing, we are led to believe, could be further from the truth. Instead, the novel challenges the reader's belief in the existence of indelible stains by what amounts to an invitation to life in the modern uncanny.Footnote ¹⁶ According to Braddon, to live in the modern world is to be deprived of the certainty provided by mandrake and blood stains; it is to live in a state of perpetual suspension – or what Daly calls “low-level anxiety” (Literature 39). The novel warns us that signifiers and signifieds may not function according to the principle of resemblance, or in other words, that “fairest scenes” may well denote “foul deeds.” Critics often point out that, in this way, the sensation novel teaches readers to see the peacefulness of the bourgeois dwelling as a masquerade (Taylor xiv) and to resist seduction by beautiful façades (Showalter 3). The novel's “pleasurable paranoia” about empirical observation requires, Brantlinger argues, the professional services of a skilled detective, who has the expertise to read beyond the surfaces of “straightforward empiricism” (146–47). But Braddon may be going even further by not going to the other extreme of believing every scene of peace a mask of violence. Brantlinger suggests that “[i]in such a world . . . everything threatens to become a clue” (161), but Braddon is at least as anxious about the possibility that “everything” is never one way or another: that some clues might be missed, some misinterpreted, and some non-clues mistakenly read as clues. For Braddon, the reader of a novel or the observer of a picturesque landscape may never ultimately know if what they perceive is mimesis or masquerade. It is much more disturbing to have to remain in uncertainty about appearances than to have to come to terms with an uncomfortable but certain truth. Braddon's modern subjects are, I believe, consigned to intellectual ambivalence, with or without the help of professional detectives or readers.

At first glance, Lady Audley's Secret seems to go against Benjamin's idea that modern subjects are characterized by a compulsive need to “preserve the traces” of their material existence (Charles Baudelaire 46). But the sensation novel's key anxiety, which, as we have seen, has to do with the possibility that traces may be impossible to “preserve,” represents a more fundamental modern preoccupation with the ruination and impermanence of such human traces. “Trace” is a keyword in the writings of Walter Benjamin, where it articulates the problem of relations between persons and things in modernity. Benjamin's German word, Spur, actually condenses all the meanings that the sensation novel evokes in the concept: pointing to abstract traces (as in “nicht die Spur einer Ahnung haben”), marks people leave on objects (and vice versa), clues that put a detective on a criminal's trail (as in “jemandem auf der Spur sein”), and even marks such as physical train tracks. Benjamin, who proclaims himself “less on the trail of the psyche than on the track of things” (Arcades 212), shows throughout The Arcades Project that the nineteenth-century phantasmagorias of the interior are vital to the modern subject who makes up for the “absence of any trace of private life” in modernity by leaving such traces in his own “cocoon”-like space (216): “Indefatigably, he takes the impression of a host of objects; for his slippers and his watches, his blankets and his umbrellas, he devises coverlets and cases. He has a marked preference for velour and plush, which preserve the imprint of all contact” (20). But the modern subject is not only fond of casings. He or she is defined by them: “The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his étui” (Arcades 20). In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, a book that many commentators regard as condensing the major preoccupations of The Arcades Project, Benjamin suggests that the bourgeois dwelling in the style of the Second Empire is “a kind of case for a person and embeds him in it together with all his appurtenances, tending his traces as nature tends dead fauna embedded in granite” (46). The compulsion to leave traces is here more explicitly read as a “compensation” for the “inconsequential” nature of life in modernity and the impermanent nature of life in general: “Even if a bourgeois is unable to give his earthly being permanence, it seems to be a matter of honour with him to preserve the traces of his articles and requisites of daily use in perpetuity” (46). Finding in things a sort of carapace for the psyche, Benjamin's modern subject suspends the separation of materiality and psychology and confounds the distinction between person and thing on which modernity is founded.Footnote ¹⁷ Though Benjamin stringently resists the reduction of person to thing, he nonetheless articulates human subjectivity as a function of their complex dialectics.

The compulsive need to leave traces is, unsurprisingly, a symptom of the gradual annihilation of individual subjectivity under the modern regime. Benjamin argues, in fact, that the detective story came into being in the nineteenth century precisely as a way of tracking the “obliteration of the individual's traces in the big-city crowd” (Charles Baudelaire 43). For Braddon, too, relations between persons and places, persons and things, may be deceptive or inconclusive, and more is at stake than a critique of bourgeois domesticity as a kind of subterfuge. In other words, Lady Audley's criminal identity depends on the possibility of tracelessness – on the “obliteration” Benjamin speaks of – but even she cannot, will not, disappear completely: “‘No more dependence, no more drudgery, no more humiliations . . . every trace of the old life melted away – every clue to identity buried and forgotten – except these, except these’” (17; vol. 1, ch. 1; emphasis added). Evidently, then, a delight in the destruction of traces – she can remake herself because traces are not permanent – demands an exception (a double exception). The exclusion pertains to “a narrow black ribbon round her neck” with which Lucy is perpetually fidgeting, a “trinket” hidden under her dress, “a ring wrapped up in an oblong piece of paper – the paper partly printed, partly written, yellow with age, and crumpled with much folding” (17; vol. 1, ch. 1). Even Lady Audley, the radical makeover maven, is not exempt from the compulsion to leave traces and refuses to put everything behind. Hidden in the innermost sanctum of her apartments at Audley Court, in the secret drawer of her jewelry cabinet, is another stash of odd material fragments. The servants, Phoebe and Luke, through whose eyes we apprehend these treasures, at first believe them to be “queer rubbish,” without “mercantile value” and out of place in the company of the “diamonds, rubies, pearls, and emeralds” piled there (34; vol. 1, ch. 3). Phoebe, well versed in the exchange value of a secret if not in her lady's actual past, immediately turns these hieroglyphics into currency by blackmailing her mistress. But in themselves these memorabilia of Lucy's abandoned child – “a baby's little worsted shoe rolled up in a piece of paper, and a tiny lock of pale and silky yellow hair” (34) – have value only because Lucy cannot let go of them, even though she knows how destructive their discovery could be to her position as the Lady of Audley Court. These souvenirs constitute material traces of the past but are eventually transmuted into secret fetishes, a distinction that Lady Audley's Secret makes hard to sustain. Once Lady Audley hides and protects her memorabilia, they begin to resemble fetishes: powerful, even magical objects, shreds of the child's body and clothing, which substitute for the child's real presence and connect Lady Audley to her past.Footnote ¹⁸ Traces, the novel seems to be saying, will be left even by a character who exploits the obliteration of traces in order to remake herself.

It is in Robert Audley's musings on detective science that we find the novel's most accurate image of the nature of the trace. Robert, who likes to indulge in theorizing whenever an opportunity presents itself, explains that circumstantial evidence is like

A trace can be thought of as an infinitesimal material fragment but, to begin with, it is a fragment without meaning (or, rather, its meaning does not inhere in the trace). A button may be inexplicable in and of itself, even though it provides a solid piece of physical evidence; in a network of other such shreds and fragments, however, it becomes readable and potent as one of the “links of steel.” The novel, in fact, likes to compare the detective to a monomaniacal collector in pursuit of some elusive but highly prized piece whose primary meaning is that it somehow completes the collection. Benjamin also sees the Paris Arcades as a “world of secret affinities,” where “palm tree and feather duster, hair dryer and Venus de Milo, prosthesis and letter-writing manual come together . . . as after a long separation” (Arcades 874). But the detective, just like Benjamin's flâneur, can never escape the niggling fear that his fabric of traces is a “mere collection of crochets – the nervous fancies of a hypochondriacal bachelor” (Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret 252; vol. 2, ch. 10). Likewise, the surreal arrangement of objects Benjamin encounters is a “rebus” to be solved only in so far as “nothing of the lot appears to be new” – but other than that, no secret plot conjoins the goldfish, the revolver, and the musical scores (Arcades 874–75).

Ultimately, Lady Audley, her working-class background, august title, and aristocratic residence notwithstanding, is only a more exaggerated but still accurate representation of the modern subject's complex affair with material odds and ends. She is most herself amid the veritable profusion of luxurious objects in a boudoir that resembles a “little Aladdin's palace” (292; vol. 2, ch. 13).Footnote ¹⁹ The description of her rooms takes the form of a phantasmagoric listing, as in a museum catalogue or curiosity cabinet:

Even though, as Katherine Montwieler has argued, Braddon relishes the power of commodities “to show poor women how to affect gentility, and once they have accomplished this goal, how to perfect it” (43), the sensation novel does not stay in the confines of any such didactic agenda. Braddon, in fact, seems more interested in moments when the peaceful coexistence of persons and things breaks down. Seen in this light, the boudoir is a place where Lady Audley's identity is both constituted and exposed as a ruse. The passage begins with Lady Audley reclining among her things and becoming fantastically fused with them: she is “the most beautiful object in the enchanted chamber,” “made bewilderingly [more] beautiful by the gorgeous surroundings which adorn the shrine of her loveliness” (291–92; vol. 2, ch. 13). The phantasmagoric sense that this is the moment when Lady Audley's identity comes into its own is strengthened by the presence of numerous mirrors, “cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners,” in a way that not only “multiplie[s]” her image but also congeals it into a concrete “object” (291). But the scene concludes with the surprise revelation that “all the treasures that had been collected for her could have given her no pleasure but one, the pleasure of flinging them into a heap beneath her feet, and trampling upon them and destroying them in her cruel despair” (293; vol. 2, ch. 13). This is an important, but ultimately idle, comment. Lady Audley does no such thing; on the contrary, when she has to depart from Audley Court, she merges with her things even more closely, attempting to transform them into intimate layers of her dress. She hides “fragile teacups and covered vases of Sèvres and Dresden among the folds of her silken dinner dresses” and “secrete[s] jewelled and golden drinking cups amongst her delicate linen”; she does not overlook “her favourite Russian sables even in this last hour of shame and misery” (376; vol. 3, ch. 6). Lady Audley is clearly a “mercenary soul” (376). But still the narrator rhetorically justifies such “hanker[ing]” after objects by, paradoxically, throwing into doubt such symbiotic couplings between persons and things, such foldings of things into skirts and linings: “Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence? . . . the utmost that we can do for the relief of our passion is to knock over an easy chair, or smash a few shillings'-worth of Mr. Copeland's manufacture” (206; vol. 2, ch. 6). In fact, too symbiotic a relationship with one's dwelling is, in Braddon, only a simpleton's dream. Harcourt Talboys, George's father, “was like his own square-built, northern-fronted, shelterless house,” and consequently “[saw] no softening shadows that might alter the sharp outlines of cruel facts” (183–84; vol. 2, ch. 4). This is not to say that the sensation novel escapes the logic Benjamin outlines, but rather that it registers the excesses of pleasure and rage that constitute the traces of distinction between persons and things. Though she hordes her treasures with a textbook fetishist's dedication, Lady Audley is, in fact, bored in the midst of her veritable porcelain museum and sits “listening to the moaning of the shrill March wind and the flapping of the ivy leaves against the casements, and looking into the red chasms in the burning coals” (292; vol. 2, ch. 13). The narrator is careful to caution readers that Lady Audley's “misery” amid her possessions cannot be construed as a critique of “opulence” (292). Rather, what the narrator intimates again and again is that things, even though they are imbued with the glitter of desire, are never in perfect congruence with the persons for whom they serve as “étui.”Footnote ²⁰ Breaches between persons and things – revealed in moments of rage against the “unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence” (206; vol. 2, ch. 6) – are the other side of the bourgeois subject's preference for objects he can imprint with his traces; clearly, objects cannot fulfill the promise of “compensation” that they hold out.

The novel's fascination with the possibility of tracelessness does not protect it from ambivalence about it, and Lady Audley's Secret vacillates between the idea that (some) acts leave no traces and the idea that a trace always remains. We could say that the novel believes in a perfect crime but simultaneously shows its impossibility. The detective narrative requires a faith in traces (that is, criminal evidence); consequently, at the climax of the novel's detective plot, it asserts that marks will be made and traces will be left irrespective of conscious intention. Lady Audley cannot but leave behind a trail of physical evidence, which only needs the gaze of a committed reader to be deciphered. Conversely, Lady Audley herself is marked by her deeds, her body becoming a piece of evidence. After the attempted murder of her first husband, George Talboys – Lady Audley cheerfully stuffs him down an abandoned well, not far from her bedroom window – Robert detects “a bruise upon her delicate skin,” “four slender, purple marks” on her wrist, which she tries to veil by means of a strategically placed bracelet (90–91; vol. 1, ch. 11). But even the glitter of a splendid gold cuff fails to obscure the telltale marks. In fact, the jewelry has the opposite effect, attracting an inquiring gaze: “He looked at her pretty fingers one by one; this one glittering with a ruby heart; that encoiled by an emerald serpent; and about them all a starry glitter of diamonds. From the fingers his eyes wandered to the rounded wrists” (90). The bruise is an interesting figure for the trace in several respects. First, its occurrence has nothing to do with the conscious intention of the crime's perpetrator; the sensitivity of one's blood vessels cannot tally in the calculus of even the most perfect crime. The bruise thus represents a sort of excess inevitably generated when an act is committed; we can surmise that even insignificant events mark the world in exactly this way. But, secondly, the bruise also suggests that marks of this sort are rarely permanent; in a few days, the bracelet will mask nothing but smooth skin. The novel anxiously raises but also suppresses the possibility that a trace is inherently impermanent (lest the foundations of its detective plot begin to founder). The “fad[ing]” whose possibility the narrator entertains in the last chapter thus constitutes a return to the idea of tracelessness at a moment when we would most expect an exultant celebration of the triumphs of detective science. Lady Audley's Secret surmises that all traces are like bruises, fleeting marks whose meanings quickly disappear. Like picturesque buildings, and discourses about them, marks eventually succumb to the passage of time. Even crimes whose detection requires the greatest discernment may not be simply covered up again but fully erased and forgotten.

Ultimately, the end of the novel resists dispelling the anxiety the narrator voices that “we may walk unconsciously in an atmosphere of crime” (144; vol. 1, ch. 18). The vanishing in question pertains not just to the influence of Lady Audley on George Talboys' life, but to the broader cultural memory already shown to be forming at the end of the novel. As Brantlinger and Taylor show, the sensation novel may be interpreted as a sort of literacy program, an education in reading beyond appearances. But I would argue that Braddon's novel suggests that there is no reading practice capable of counteracting the transience of traces or withstanding the pull of ideology, which encourages the restoration, not destruction, of the touristy vision of “the pretty, fair-haired woman, who died abroad” (436; vol. 3, ch. 10). The pre-Raphaelite portrait of Lady Audley – whose “minutely-painted” details are instrumental in uncovering the “beautiful fiend” hiding behind the “soft and melting blue eyes” of a mere “child” (72, 12, 55; all vol. 1, ch. 8; 1, 7) – is, at the novel's conclusion, veiled by a “curtain” (436). But soon there will be no need for such superstitious protection against the image's sinister power: there is no reason to believe that the ominous portrait will escape the fate of the other paintings in the gallery, which are being consumed by damaging “blue mold” (436). Even though Lady Audley's crimes have been brought to light and the guilty party punished by exile, visitors at Audley Court still “walk unconsciously” through a scene of crime, while the growing legend of Lady Audley retains no trace of her guilty desires and evil deeds. Traces, the novel shows, vanish like bruises or become puzzling curios or museum objects, whose subjective meanings cannot be reconstructed except as signifying the passage of modernity into “aborted and broken-down matter” (Arcades 874). Audley Court now appears to readers (and visitors alike) as the remnant of a world just now superseded but already falling into ruin. The fairy cottages that arrive to replace it are only more phantasmagoric images, fated to appear obsolete even before the novel's final sentence comes to an end.