\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWhat had been his love for his first wife but a poor, pitiful, smoldering spark, too dull to\u00a0be extinguished, too feeble to burn? But this was love\u2014thiS\u00a0fever, this longing, this restless, uncertain, miserable hesitation; these\u00a0cruel fears that his age was an insurmountable barrier to his happiness;\u00a0this sick hatred of his white beard; this frenzied wish to be young again,\u00a0with glistening raven hair, and a slim waist, such as he had twenty years\u00a0before; these, wakeful nights and melancholy days, so gloriously\u00a0brightened if he chanced to catch a glimpse of her sweet face behind the\u00a0window curtains, as he drove past the surgeon’s house; all these signs\u00a0gave token of the truth, and told only too plainly that, at the sober age\u00a0of fifty-five, Sir Michael Audley had fallen ill of the terrible fever\u00a0called love.<\/p>\n
If he ever remembered these things, he dismissed the thought of them with a shudder.\u00a0It pained him too much to \u201cbelieve for a moment that any one so lovely and\u00a0innocent could value herself against a splendid house or a good old title.\u201d\u00a0(Lady Audley\u2019s Secret, Chapter 1)<\/p>\n
The passage I chose to analyze for this blog post is from Lady Audley\u2019s Secret. Early into chapter one, the narrator describes Sir Michael Audley\u2019s first marriage, and his desire to have a young and beautiful wife at the age of fifty-five. The passage vividly describes Michael Audley\u2019s former marriage as \u201cmediocre\u201d by saying \u201cthe spark was too dull to be extinguished and too feeble to burn\u201d. Furthermore, it even goes on to say that he might have been secretly relieved by the demise of his wife and sheds a light on Michael Audley\u2019s desires and how his actions have contributed to the things that happen in the novel.<\/p>\n
As we know Michael is hopelessly obsessed with Lucy Graham and is blind to her atrocious doings which are happening right under his nose. He is almost a puppet to Lucy\u2019s plans and hunger to have a life of high social status and riches. The way the passage describes Lucy Graham early on in the novel is quite in convention with the gothic genre as Lucy Graham\u2019s features are excessively highlighted and sexualized while it appears she has underlying motivations and also portraying the characteristic of femme fatale. <\/em>Michael is in denial by the very fact that Lucy\u2019s intentions for marrying him was only for his social status and wealth. Consequently, ending up portraying Michael Audley as a symbol of innocence and naivety and is quite ironic that this is exactly how Lucy Graham was described in the beginning of the novel.<\/p>\n \n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWhat had been his love for his first wife but a poor, pitiful, smoldering spark, too dull to\u00a0be extinguished, too feeble to burn? But this was love\u2014thiS\u00a0fever, this longing, this restless, uncertain, miserable hesitation; these\u00a0cruel fears that his age was an insurmountable barrier to his happiness;\u00a0this sick hatred of his white beard; this frenzied … Continue reading Blog post #2<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5356,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539","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\/5356"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}