“Hence forth you must seem to me no longer a woman; a guilty woman with a heart which in is worse wickedness has yes some latent power to suffer and feel; I look upon you henceforth as the demoniac incarnation of some evil principle.” (Page 340)
In this passage Robert is accusing to Lady Audley and saying she is no longer a woman. For all Robert’s hatred of women (Page 208), his largest insult is that she is no longer a woman. Later on the same page Lady Audley says, she is a madwoman. This seems to imply that she is separate and different from other woman. Lady Audley is deceitful in her guise as a woman. Her beautiful face, golden hair, and childlike disposition is all veiling who she really is. Lady Audley is set up to be a perfect woman, a loving wife and the center of societal attention, only to later be revealed as a madwoman.
“When the lovely fairy of the ball-room re-enters her dressing-room after the nights long revelry, and throws aside her voluminous Burnous and her faded bouquet, and drops her mask; and like another Cinderella loses the glass-slipper, by whose glitter she has been distinguished, and falls back into her rags and dirt,” (Page 331). Roberts frustrations with woman could be centered around this false for front. Womanly perfection is only a disguised to be taken off in the private of later. This seems to echo Victorian times. At the time, England was ruled by a queen who created rules about propriety that symbolized womanly strength. In this constricting time, everyone was were not as they were, and were not the face they put on in society. The image of woman that the Victorian times created like a mask to be worn on the outside but always needing to be taken off. Lady Audley is a good example of this society pressure and her character shows the ways in which someone could hide.