Passage: \u201cI should be preaching\u2026 opposed to opulence.\u201d (Braddon 292)<\/p>\n
Lady Audley\u2019s Secret <\/em>is filled to the brim with mysteries and, well, secrets. What strikes me, though is that we know nothing about our narrator<\/em>. Most 3rd<\/sup>-person-perspective novels have a nameless, unidentified narrator who exists solely as the eye through which we see characters & events. n Lady Audley\u2019s Secret<\/em>, however, our narrator has personality that usually leads to readers discovering they had some connection to the events unfolding before our eyes. They comment on different characters\u2019 actions and thoughts; they directly address the readers so much in the first two paragraphs of the book that I genuinely thought the whole novel would be told in second person; they know and see things that an individual watching this unfold shouldn\u2019t know. They also show favor or disdain towards certain characters, particularly Lady Audley and Robert. As in this passage, though, I would like to focus on Lady Audley.<\/p>\n The narrator has never minced words with Lady Audley. They certainly did not when describing her portrait in chapter eight, going so far as to call her \u201ca beautiful fiend\u201d. \u00a0Unlike that passage, though, our narrator dives straight into her \u201cwretchedness\u201d (Braddon 292). There is none of the narrative objectivity seen in the age-old \u201call seeing eye\u201d narrator here. This familiarity and frankness implies that our narrator knew Lady Audley very personally, including her secrets. Sir Michael knows close to nothing about his wife. Alicia would certainly be heard calling Lady Audley \u201cwretched\u201d that many times in so few sentences. George might also call her such horrid things. Phoebe and Luke, however, are the only ones that know a large enough secret for Lady Audley to continue paying their bills; Luke is as likely as Alicia to bad-mouth \u201cmy lady\u201d like this. Frankly, I doubt he would even think to compare her to \u201ca half-starved sempstress\u201d (Braddon 292). So, my theory? Our narrator is either George\u2019s ghost or Phoebe. If we were being told this story by George\u2019s ghost, it would explain how they know Lucy, Robert, and Harcourt Talboys so personally and <\/em>how so many private scenes are described. Ghosts have also become a repeated visual in the novel. Sure, according to normal ghost rules they aren\u2019t omniscient, but how are we, the living, supposed to know that for sure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Passage: \u201cI should be preaching\u2026 opposed to opulence.\u201d (Braddon 292) Lady Audley\u2019s Secret is filled to the brim with mysteries and, well, secrets. What strikes me, though is that we know nothing about our narrator. Most 3rd-person-perspective novels have a nameless, unidentified narrator who exists solely as the eye through which we see characters & … Continue reading Call Me Ghost Ishmael<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4717,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4717"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}