The Woman in White upholds masculine ideals through the benefits that male characters gain, surprise surprise. And Lady Audley’s Secret undermines them through the consequences that male characters suffer. Because these differences made the woman more threatening and the man more vulnerable it is understandable that some critics stuck with what was familiar to them.
With good intentions Walter leaves the woman he loves to go to another continent, just as with good intentions George leaves the woman he loves go to another continent. Walter’s departure reflects his masculine ideals because he feels duty bound to leave so that Laura can live her life. Walter never fully suffers the consequences of leaving Laura alone and unprotected. When he returns he, like George, briefly believes his love has died, but, he discovers the truth fairly quickly.
He then takes on the role of protector and defender. In the end he marries Laura with very few consequences. Their main losses are monetary and a small amount of missing memory which is suffered by Laura, not by him. Walter ends up in a much better position than where he began.
George is not so lucky.
His good intentions, based in a sense of honor and duty to his family, gives George the idea that he needs to leave to earn money for his family. He decides to leave without discussing the matter with anyone. When he returns he finds his wife has “died” just a short while before he returned with the fortune he had worked so hard to earn. His stereotypically masculine traits have led him astray, and he suffers the consequences of his impulsiveness. His wife marries another man and fakes her death to avoid George. She pushes him down a well and assumes he has died.
He suffers some major consequences.
In this sense, Lady Audley’s Secret criticizes George’s masculine ideals, which caused him to leave his wife alone. Unlike Collins, Braddon brings to light the flaws of the ideals others praised.
An anonymous reviewer of Lady Audley’s Secret calls attention to this supposed imminent threat: “the real influence of everything this lady [Braddon] writes is to depreciate custom .… She disbelieves in formal habitual goodness” (“Our” 365). The reviewer then proceeds to complain that duty, a typically male trait, was being set aside in Braddon’s novels, noting that reason was often disregarded in favor of instinct. This gives us insight into the problems some critics had with LAdy Audley's Secret. They resisted any overt challenge to gender norms, particularly when a typically female trait was favored over a typically male one.
Understandable for the time period.
What gets under my skin is that just a year earlier critics overwhelmingly praised Collins’s, The Woman in White despite many problems with the plot. A reviewer in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine observed, “Woman in White' is not a chance success or caprice of genius … the author has been long engaged in preparatory studies, and … the work in question is really the elaborate result of years of labour” (“Sensation” 568).
A lot of praise for a book (which was admittedly very interesting) but which also had gaping plot holes.
For instance, how did Laura and Walter marry when Laura did not technically exist in the eyes of the law at the time? Why did Count Fosco gain advantage over Walter and then immediately proceed to tell Walter what he needs to know, instead of merely shooting him as Fosco had previously planned? And, finally, did Laura actually escape from her captors alive?
On top of those questions, at one point in the novel Laura very obviously arrived after her supposed death. That later mistake had to be changed, but Collins’ error did not cause disfavor in the eyes of the critics. They were willing to ignore even major flaws in the novel’s details.
On the other hand, critics were very vocal about Lady Audley’s and other heroines’ “unrestraint”: “There is nothing more violently opposed to our moral sense, in all the contradictions to custom which they present to us, than the utter unrestraint in which the heroines of this order are allowed to expatiate and develop their impulsive, stormy, passionate characters” (“Our” 353).
Yet none criticize the flighty husband who, on a whim, decides to go to Australia to make his fortune? George does not discuss anything with his wife before making his decision; instead, he leaves with half the money in the middle of the night. Does that not also fit within the realm of the “impulsive”? If Lady Audley had decided that she needed to make her fortune overseas immediately and had left without telling her husband, she would have suffered at the hands of critics who might ask, where was the respect for her spouse, how could she do such a terrible thing?
Even if her intentions had been good, critics would insist that she should have discussed her departure with her husband who had a right to some say in her actions. Would the critics have been quite as upset with George if he had remarried when his wife seemed to have vanished completely with no word for over three years? Gender expectations clearly played a large part in critical disdain for both Lady Audley’s actions and Braddon’s novel.
A lot of praise for a book (which was admittedly very interesting) but which also had gaping plot holes.
For instance, how did Laura and Walter marry when Laura did not technically exist in the eyes of the law at the time? Why did Count Fosco gain advantage over Walter and then immediately proceed to tell Walter what he needs to know, instead of merely shooting him as Fosco had previously planned? And, finally, did Laura actually escape from her captors alive?
On top of those questions, at one point in the novel Laura very obviously arrived after her supposed death. That later mistake had to be changed, but Collins’ error did not cause disfavor in the eyes of the critics. They were willing to ignore even major flaws in the novel’s details.
On the other hand, critics were very vocal about Lady Audley’s and other heroines’ “unrestraint”: “There is nothing more violently opposed to our moral sense, in all the contradictions to custom which they present to us, than the utter unrestraint in which the heroines of this order are allowed to expatiate and develop their impulsive, stormy, passionate characters” (“Our” 353).
Yet none criticize the flighty husband who, on a whim, decides to go to Australia to make his fortune? George does not discuss anything with his wife before making his decision; instead, he leaves with half the money in the middle of the night. Does that not also fit within the realm of the “impulsive”? If Lady Audley had decided that she needed to make her fortune overseas immediately and had left without telling her husband, she would have suffered at the hands of critics who might ask, where was the respect for her spouse, how could she do such a terrible thing?
Even if her intentions had been good, critics would insist that she should have discussed her departure with her husband who had a right to some say in her actions. Would the critics have been quite as upset with George if he had remarried when his wife seemed to have vanished completely with no word for over three years? Gender expectations clearly played a large part in critical disdain for both Lady Audley’s actions and Braddon’s novel.
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