“What does it mean?” he thought. “She is altogether a different being to the wretched, helpless creature who dropped her mask for a moment, and looked at me with her own pitiful face, in the little room at Mount Stanning, four hours ago. What has happened to cause the change?” (148)
In this passage Mr. Audley had just run into Lady Audley at the train station in London. Lady Audley greets him and seems to be in a normal state of mind, compared to the fearful women he had seen just hours before. As Robert helps Lady Audley into the train, his thoughts begin to question her change in behavior. The word choice here is very important in terms of her emotional behavior as it reveals that Lady Audley can go back and forth between extreme states of being a “wretched, helpless creature” and “pitiful” to having a completely normal conversation with Robert. The readers saw Lady Audley almost at her breaking point , but only hours later the readers are told she is complete fine. This leads to questions about her sanity and her past life, as Braddon also uses the word “mask” to describe the way she normally acts and how she had dropped her mask only for a short while. This indicates that she is covering up her true self. The implications in this paragraph leads to questions about Lady Audley’s mental state. Is Lady Audley emotional unstable and does it have anything to do with her past? If so, what happened in her past to make her so weak and vulnerable? Why does she put on a mask in public but in private she seems to break down? Is she afraid of something or someone? Does Lady Audley have multiple personalities? Finally, the most important question to be asked is what is Lady Audley hiding?
I completely agree with your post Carlin, and I have a few points that I would like to add to your perspective. During the Victorian era, dolls would often have childlike, porcelean faces that were as white as snow (and in my eyes, incredibly unsettling). Now I must ask a question, what character has “childish beauty… with large clear blue eyes, and pale golden ringlets”(25)? Lady Audley. In this comment post, I will be drawing a comparison to Lady Audley, to a porcelain doll whose porcelain face/mask is cracking and breaking away. Robert’s inquisition of Lady Audley during the chapter “In the Lime-Walk” really demonstrates how her demeanor and her mask are crumbling away. Throughout the chapter, Lady Audley attempts to hold her ground at Robert’s persistent questioning, and going so far as to declare to Michael Audley that “Robert Audley is mad” (284). In addition to this, the cracks in Lady Audley’s mask become even more evident with her actions throughout chapters XII and XIII, where she goes from staring at the coals in a fire, to plotting her next move, to outright declaring that “if [Robert] stood before me now… I would kill him [and] I would do it- I would do it”(302). As Lady Audley’s mask really begins to crack and shatter, her true persona begins to show. In a way, there is a pseudo- Dr. Jerkil/Mr. Hyde dynamic that occurs with Lady Audley. When she has a firm grasp of her life and all people within it, she assumes the role of Lady Audley. However, with Robert being an active interloper to her plans, she loses control of her “normal” self. As a result of this, her child like, porcelan mask begins to break away to reveal a side of a character that we have barely witnessed. Will the Lady with the “porcelain mask” regain control of all things in life? Or will Robert Audley successfully avenge George Talboys? We will have to wait and see.
In this post you make sound points and raise fair questions. In regard to Lady Audley’s extreme flip-flops that you noted, I would say this arises from her cunning character. Lady Audley knows what she wants and how to play others off to achieve her ends. She manages to do this while keeping her true intentions and fears unmentioned. An incident that comes to mine is when she hysterically breaks down in front of Michael Audley, convincing her husband that Robert suffers from madness (p. 247). When alone after this act, Lady Audley thinks to herself, “I have been afraid of you, Mr Robert Audley… but perhaps the time may come in which you will have cause to be afraid of me.” (p. 248) Her manipulation of Michael Audley demonstrates just how calculated she can be in achieving her end goals. In the particular episode you highlighted, I think Lady Audley acts as a “wretched, helpless creature” to show Robert Audley a glimmer of what he should fear if he conducts his investigation any further.
The use of a mask to describe Lady Audley’s changing emotions is very interesting and telling. As The Inventor of Truth hinted at in his comment, if we view this moment in the context of the Victorian era, we a presented with different meanings. In the Victorian Era, women were expected to be involved in domestic life and live in privacy, unlike men who were fit to go out and work in the public sphere. Women were also expected to be pleasant, ladylike and cordial; emotionless models of virtue that would never show if something was wrong. In a way I believe that describing Lady Audley and her mask, is the author pointing out this expectation of women during the time period. Lady Audley having a mask also seems to suggest that Lady Audley has more than one secret, perhaps even a secret identity. If she is capable of concealing her emotions so easily, it stands to reason that she could conceal other secrets such as a past life easily. Is she who she claims to be? As Carlin was saying in the post, it also hints at mental instability. It must be tiring and challenging to wear the mask all the time, and what is it that it attempts to hide?
I loved this chapter. It really is revealing because we finally see a different side to Lady Audley. Behind her false facade, a truly human person exists: a person who stumbles on words, becomes nervous, etc. She is no longer this ethereal person that she presents herself – she is vulnerable and exposed, in a sense. After all, she never expected to run into Robert at the train station.
The image of a mask is important, and I do agree with the other commenters that the image of the mask is hinting at “mental instability” and as a symbol of women’s domestic role during the Victorian era. However, even more, I believe that this is serving as a representation of Lady Audley’s character in general. While Lady Audley puts on this “too good for this world” visage, she is ultimately human. However, because of the understanding of the Victorian era and the emergence of the domestic sphere, women had a prescribed role in this society and were ultimately pushed to fulfill that role. However, as readers already know, Lady Audley is different from the status quo. She takes matters into her own hands, and because she is a master of manipulation, her plans almost always go the way that she wants.
I think this small passage brings up the theme of madness and what it means to be an individual. Sure, although women had a well-defined role during this time, does that mean that they have to live up to it? Lady Audley, clearly pushing the limits, opposes this notion, making it clear that, in order to survive in this patriarchal society, being a woman is simply what you make of it. She travels to London to discover more about this “circumstantial evidence” that Robert as brought up so frequently.
Evidently, Lady Audley hasn’t covered up all of her tracks. At least not yet.
In response to Jumpman’s comment regarding Lady Audleys ability to manipulate and ‘play off others’, it is clear that throughout the book her cunning facade has started to slip, just like the metaphorical ‘mask’ that she wears. This made me think about a description of Phoebe Marks, ‘Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world.” During the Victorian Era women were meant to know their place, never speaking their minds or show any sense of individualism (which contradicts the idea of Pheobe having any sense of individualism at all- is she individual in the eyes of men in that era? Or is she individual because society doesn’t understand the idea of individualism yet because it wasn’t the norm?) or strong character traits which explains why Phoebe is described as, ‘silent and self-contained’. The representation, ‘take no colour from the outer world,’, is the opposite to Lady Audley who is so deceitful and cunning due to ‘the colour from the outer world’, because of the circumstances in which she was raised, growing up in poverty with an alcoholic father. I feel as though the way in which she was raised and where she was raised etc all had a massive impact on her character as well as her mental stability. Her surrounding environment created her to be a deceitful and manipulative character, in a way, extremely individual compared to all the other female characters in the book.