As I'm off sick this week with an ear infection, also affecting my throat (!), this week's blog is the paper I delivered at the weekend for Sensational Influences: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Literary Legacy - 4-5 September 2015. Once I've recovered the blogs will go back go the usual adaptation reviews! The next one is the BBC's latest adaptation of
Lady Chatterley's Lover! So keep your eyes peeled for some sauciness after the last two weeks of academic dryness!
Mad, Bad or Pretending? Analysing the Theatrical Approach to Lady Audley in Nineteenth-Century Stage Adaptations of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
Whilst I've been listening to the papers today, I’ve also been noting all of the different words we use to describe Lady Audley:
Innocent
Girlbride
Villain
Pretty
Mad
Blonde
Childlike
Femme fatale
Actress
As you can see, she's a lot of things to people. This was also the case for the Victorians. So can she be just one of these things? We’ve tended towards calling her bad, or a villain, today, but I argue that the uncertainty around deciding if she is bad or mad, or even if she is something other, for example, consciously acting mad, was a deliberate decision made by Braddon in order to provoke a sensational response from the reader. This is why the authenticity of her madness remains as much of an issue today as when it was first published. But by studying the nineteenth-century adaptations of Lady Audley’s Secret we can identify how she was interpreted at the time by specific factions of society, not just by critics, other writers, royalty or other notable contemporary figures, but by real people. We’ll ultimately never be able to decide whether she is mad, or bad, or acting mad, but I think that that is the real secret of Lady Audley’s Secret, it’s nothing to do with her true identity.
The nineteenth-century adaptations present Lady Audley as either a transgressive woman, who was forced into making a bad decision about how to support herself after her husband abandoned her, as in William E. Suter’s 1863 and John Brougham’s 1866 adaptations. Whilst the others simply dismiss her as a madwoman, for example, George Roberts’ 1863 and C.H. Hazlewood’s 1863 plays.
My PhD thesis focuses on an examination of the Victorian approaches to some of the most contentious figures in nineteenth-century literature when they were adapted to the stage. The plays I examine in the Lady Audley’s Secret chapter of my thesis are William E. Suter’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1863), George Roberts’ Lady Audley’s Secret (1863), C. H. Hazlewood’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Brougham’s 1866 play The Mystery of Audley Court. Whilst they are all London based adaptations, they were written for and appeared in a range of theatres across the city as such they do cover a wide spectrum of society. The theatres that the plays were written for appealed to different social classes to make up their audiences and as such different approaches to the complex central character, Lady Audley, can be recognised.
I need to explain a crucial term before my comparison of the plays begins to provide some context of nineteenth-century theatre. All of the plays discussed here are examples of theatrical melodrama. The literal translation of melodrama is ‘music drama’. Music was played during performances of plays in this genre and this has a direct impact on the manner in which the actors performed. Patsy Stoneman in Jane Eyre on Stage; 1848-1898 refers to both Taylor and Booth, who have suggested that this “inevitably led to a heightened, deliberate and passionate mode of delivery’, with many pauses to allow the words to carry; actors emphasised their words by facial and bodily gestures (Stoneman 2007: 6 citing Taylor 1989: 125 – 129 and Booth (a) 1964: 31-36). Melodrama was the dominant theatrical form in the nineteenth-century (John 2009: 1). Melodrama arose from The Theatre Regulating Acts as prior to 1843, there were only two ‘legal’ theatres in England, The Covent Garden and Drury Lane. These theatres were the only ones that were licensed to produce ‘legitimate’ drama, therefore, the ‘minor’ theatres, such as the New Surrey Theatre and the Adelphi Theatre, had to adapt the manner in which they produced plays in order to meet the public’s demand for entertainment in order to evade the law. This meant that theatre houses had to use music as an accompaniment to their productions as the legitimate theatres were the only ones permitted to produce spoken drama.
I'm looking at one key scene in all of the plays to demonstrate my point today given the time limit. The scene examined in the adaptations is where Lady Audley is reunited with her husband George Talboys, who believes her to be dead when she has actually assumed a false identity and married again. Interestingly this scene is only described by other characters in the novel and does not actually feature, whereas it us a key scene in the plays. The reasons for the omission of the scene in the original source but the invention of and insertion of it into the plays are multiple so I do not have time to discuss that here today.
William E. Suter’s play is the first adaptation to appear that we know of from the Lord Chamberlain’s archives. It is also the most famous due to the high profile court case surrounding it, which arose because the play was published in paperback by Thomas Lacy at a time when it was illegal to do so because of the copyright laws of the age. A dramatist could only adapt and produce a novel without permission or payment, they could not print it. In order to have rights over a play adaptation of their novel, the author must have written, staged and registered the play before anyone else. Mary Elizabeth Braddon went on to do this herself years later when she wrote Like and Unlike in 1887.
William Edmund Souter was an actor and playwright appearing largely at Sadler’s Wells in London. He was a successful playwright most known for writing melodramas and comedies for minor theatres in London. His success was such that his plays continued to be performed in provincial theatres for decades. The Queen’s Theatre, London was where this production of Lady Audley’s Secret was staged. It was the only theatre in the borough of St. Pancras. In its early days, the theatre did not attract a very illustrious audience, members mainly coming from the skilled working class trades, for example, shoemakers, carpenters, tailors, bricklayers, etc. and the popular occupations for women being domestic servants, cooks, charwomen, milliners, seamstresses, etc. (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 149). This is evident in the play’s shared focus between the invented servant characters and Lady Audley and Robert Audley. It even opens with comedic business between the servant characters Bibbles and Bubbles. These characters occupy the sub-plot of Suter’s play and interject the novel’s original plot at various points for comedic effect. As such the play is highly melodramatic. This might explain why Suter’s approach to Lady Audley is that she is a bad woman. One reviewer from The Era described Adelaide Calvert “playing” Lady Audley “with a thrilling intensity” (The Era, Sunday 14 June 1863: p12). At all times there is a high level of emotion in Suter’s play and this is particularly the case in the key scene I will look at today.
LADY A: Listen to me. After your departure, I vainly sought employment – a wife whom her husband had deserted could not be innocent of all fault – and no one would receive me as the instructress of their children. I was penniless – helpless – hopeless; before me was starvation or a repulsive life of infamy! I shrunk from both and resolved to live anew, and for myself alone. I ceased to be Mrs. George Talboys, forgot even that I had ever been Helen Maldon, and became Miss Lucy Graham... I became Sir Michael’s wife... (Suter 1863: 34)
The line “a wife whom her husband had deserted could not be innocent of all fault” reveals how strict the Victorian image of femininity could be as it indicates the mode of thinking that even abandoned wives were suspected of committing actions that has driven him away. Today that can be hard to swallow. We look at Lady Audley with pity, knowing that George abandoned her and their child, left her with little money or anything of worth whilst knowing her to be incapable of earning a decent living, and yet she is the one saddled with the blame, with aspersions cast on her character and none on George’s.
No one condemns George for leaving his wife and child as he recounts his tale in either the novel or the adapted plays, so in this section Lady Audley raises the hypocrisy of this double standard. Deciding if Lady Audley is mad can be answered with the line “I shrunk from both and resolved to live anew, and for myself alone” (Suter 1863: 34) which indicates that thought and calculation went into her assumption of a false identity. As with Braddon’s portrayal of Lady Audley’s assumed life, it was not the act of a lunatic. It was the illegal act of a trapped woman left with few options to support herself.
Because the play was written for a poor working class audience it is no wonder that Suter shows Lady Audley to be a trapped woman who simply does what she can to earn a living to support herself and her child not knowing when, or even if, her husband would return. Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians reveals that prostitution was a flexible occupation in the Victorian period with women turning to it as and when they needed to find extra money to support themselves and their children (Marcus 1964: 6). As such the audience of The Queen’s Theatre in London would no doubt have had housed former and current prostitutes, who would have a very different notion on what was acceptable to do to support your family than the more middle-class theatre houses.
John Brougham’s approach to this scene in his 1866’s production for Astley’s Theatre, also supports that Lady Audley acted in a calculated manner when she assumed her false identity and ran away leaving her child with her father:
Lady A: You left not letter, but fled like a dastard, leaving me penniless, friendless, - hopeless! – The abandoned wife finds little pity from the charitable world, in vain I sought for employment, - there was nothing before me but starvation, or a life of infamy. – I shrunk from both, determined to blot out the past for ever, and under a new name began the world again as Lucy Graham. – I went into a family as Governess, and toiled there for a miserable stipend; Sir Michael Audley saw, admired and married me, you now know everything; and to all this, let me add that I will never give up the wealth and splendour I have obtained; therefore, if you are wise you will forget me and go!- (Brougham 1866: 61 - 62)
Again, the image of the abandoned wife is conjured showing the pity that Brougham was attempting to evoke for this transgressive woman forced to make bad decisions by a restrictive patriarchal society. It also reveals that for Brougham, Lady Audley had thoroughly considered her options before taking on her new name and starting her new life. John Brougham’s poignant depiction of a transgressive Lady Audley may be a consequence of his own background and opinions as the theatre that this was written for used to attract a respectable middle class audience who you’d expect to find a mad Lady Audley depicted for as I shall explain later. Brougham was a very popular and successful playwright specialising in adaptations. I examine his 1848 adaptation of Jane Eyre in Chapter One of my thesis. Brougham was originally from a wealthy Irish family in Dublin but due to a series of family deaths he was left destitute and impoverished, when he had originally planned to become a surgeon. He turned to acting as a means of supporting himself and later due to his success, he moved to America. As Brougham had, like Lady Audley, been forced to seek any means to make money he might well have sympathised with her plight. He might also have been able to sympathise with Lady Audley’s battle against a prejudiced society, as during this period there were some anti-Irish movements due to the huge waves of migrants arriving in England fleeing Ireland because of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. This criminal, woman pushed to the edge version of Lady Audley as presented by Brougham and Suter, is contrasted with the dismissive approach that she was just mad and therefore her actions should be regarded as such. Both George Roberts 1863 and C.H. Hazlewood 1863 take this approach to the character.
George Roberts actually worked with Braddon on the creation of this production. As Braddon had publicly complained about the large number of unauthorised stage versions of her novel which were appearing, Roberts was very keen to gain her approval and therefore invited Braddon to the rehearsals. Braddon responded to Roberts’ invitation saying that she was “flattered and gratified” and that she “would not for a moment dream of offering any suggestions” (Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York and London: Garland, 1979: p143) cited in Roberts (1863: 8). George Roberts was born Robert Walters in 1832 in London, the son of a barrister. He followed into the family profession and worked as a barrister in Oxfordshire before moving to London to pursue his career as a playwright. He pursued his second career whilst living in chambers with five other barristers (cited in Roberts 1863: 5). This dramatisation of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret was Roberts’ greatest success with productions continuing regularly in Britain throughout the century. In order to avoid a court case similar to that which Braddon experienced over the lack of appropriate copyrighting for her novel, Roberts protected his play by personally overseeing the printed edition of his work.
The play was under the management of Frank Matthews, who played Luke Marks in Roberts’ adaptation, when it opened on 28th February 1863. When the play opened, the novel was at the peak of its success. Jennifer Carnell describes it as “the current hit of the circulating libraries” in her introduction to George Roberts’ play (Roberts 1863: 6). Lady Audley’s Secret was the St. James’ Theatre’s biggest hit to date, running for over one hundred performances before starting a tour of the country. Ian Henderson cites a review in the Illustrated London News which describes Lady Audley as “prompted to crime by hereditary insanity and untoward circumstances, and therefore impelled by both external and internal motives” (2006: 15). In the key scene that we are examining today, where she is reunited with George Talboys, she details the trials and tribulations that led her to assume a false identity and marry bigamously conjuring enormous sympathy from the audience:
LADY A: Wrong! have not you wronged me? You prate to me of toil and suffering. You do not know the labour that has been my lot for many a weary day. What was my life when you were gone? No helping hand held out to me by your proud family; I, your wife, left to choose ‘twixt death and drudgery. I chose the latter, bitter though that choice was... I argued, I reasoned, and last I justified myself. I have a right to think that he is no more to me, nor I to him, and why should I let his shadow stand between me and prosperity? (Roberts 1863: 39-40).
This makes her sound like a very rational woman especially with her comments that she ‘argued’, ‘reasoned’ and ‘justified’ the decision, but nineteenth-century medical studies of madness, identified ‘moral madness’ as a specific type of insanity. This was a concept introduced by James Cowles Pritchard in 1835 in Treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind to describe a particular kind of mental disorder where the madness consisted of “a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, (and importantly for Lady Audley) moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations” (1837: 16). If Lady Audley did suffer from moral insanity was she then not culpable for her crimes? Moreover, was moral insanity the excuse used by nineteenth-century society to refer to the criminal behaviour that was actually just unpalatable for them? Lady Audley’s reasoning of her bad decisions for the Victorians was a symptom of her madness. As the play goes on, Roberts’ characterisation of becomes progressively and more obviously unhinged. Roberts’ final scene indicates his overall interpretation to Lady Audley’s ‘madness’, as she collapses into a trance-like state because of the mental strain with Robert Audley saying over her that “the soul still lingers, but the mind, the mind is gone! CURTAIN” (Roberts 1863: 63-64).
The impact of the area and the class composition of the audience who would have lived in the surrounding area of the theatre, on Roberts’ approach to Lady Audley is interesting because the theatre was said to be respectable and to attract a more middle-class audiences. As such by making Lady Audley mad, he aligns himself with the traditional, conservative, patriarchal view of women as weak and degenerate. Mental illness was considered to be a female condition with women being more susceptible to it.
In Hazlewood’s play, Lady Audley goes into even more detail describing the situation that George Talboys left her and their newborn baby in when he abandoned them. She explains how believing herself to have been deserted she changed her name and became a governess:
LADY Audley. ... not one letter reached my hands; I thought myself deserted, and determined to make reprisals on you; I changed my name; I entered the family of a gentleman as governess to his daughters; became the patient drudge for a miserable stipend, that I might carry my point--that point was to gain Sir Michael Audley's affections; I did so, I devoted all my energies, all my cunning, to that end! and now I have gained the summit of my ambition, do you think I will be cast down by you, George Talboys? No, I will conquer you or I will die! ... I have fought too hard for my position to yield it up tamely. Take every jewel, every penny I have and leave me! ... I am no longer the weak confiding girl you first knew me no, I am a resolute woman--and where I cannot remove an obstacle I will crush it (Hazlewood 1863: Act 1: Scene 1 no page numbers).
This Lady Audley is trapped, frightened, and emotional. The scene reaches such a tense pitch that she even tries to bribe the now equally rich George reminding him pointlessly of her newly obtained wealth. It is only when her bribe fails that she realises that she will have to get rid of George another way and they fight before she eventually pushes him down the well after stabbing him:
It is indeed--die! [Pushes him down the well, the ruined stones fall with him.] He is gone--gone! and no one was a witness to the deed! ... [exulting]. Dead men tell no tales! I am free! I am free! I am free!--Ha, ha, ha! [Raises her arms in triumph, laughing exultingly falls (Hazlewood 1863: Act One: Scene One no page numbers).
The stage directions here so obviously cast Lady Audley as mad here by describing her as exulting, triumphant, hands raised in the air. The climax scene of Hazlewood’s adaptation, shows Lady Audley entirely succumbing to madness
Robert. Do you not see she is mad?
Omnes [retreating from her]. mad!
LADY Audley. Aye--aye! [Laughs wildly.] mad, mad, that is the word. I feel it here--here! [Places her hands on her temples.] Do not touch me do not come near me--let me claim your silence--your pity--and let the grave, the cold grave, close over Lady Audley and her Secret.
[Falls--dies--Music tableau of sympathy--GEORGE
TALBOYS kneels over her. CURTAIN (Hazlewood 1863: Act II: Scene Five no page numbers)
Here Lady Audley has a moment of psychosis seeing the, by then, deceased Sir Michael in front of her before she eventually collapses and dies. When Robert tells everyone that she has gone ‘mad’, they ‘retreat’ from her as though her diagnosis was contagious, indicating the extent of the fear that Victorian society had of ‘madness’. The language is noticeably very melodramatic and tense, but the manner in which it was acted is not confirmed by any surviving reviews of the production or the actresses, sadly. The moment of mania or psychosis that is shown in this scene belongs to a different aspect of mental health that is more severe than hysteria, as is indicated in Andrew Scull’s Hysteria (2009: 35). As such, this implies that Hazlewood did genuinely consider Lady Audley to be certifiably mad. Delusions were a key element for the legal defense of insanity in the period as per the, still used, 1842 McNaughton rules. The reason for this approach to Lady Audley might be a consequence of the theatre for which he was writing as they thrived on extremely emotive, suspenseful, high pitched entertainment. This adaptation was first produced at the Royal Victoria Theatre, London on 25 May 1863. The Victoria Theatre was built in 1818 as a result of the dramatic expansion in the population of London in the eighteenth-century due to the Industrial Revolution, which was particularly felt south of the River Thames in the Southwark and Lambeth areas were the Victoria was located. As the areas expanded, the Victoria and the nearby Surrey Theatre became vital for providing entertainment to the people living in the area. The Victoria was dependent on the “patronage of a class unable to get far from the immediate scene of their daily labors” for its audience (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 8). The audience was even described as “the lowest and vilest in London, the very scum of Lambeth” (H. Barton Baker, The London Stage: Its History and Traditions from 1576 to 1888 (London: Allen, 1889) cited in Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 9). The low working class audience of the Victoria Theatre received “Melodramas, Domestic Melodramas of 3 Acts, Burlettas, Comic Interludes, Pantomime” as their entertainment (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 24).
In conclusion, while the dramatists differ on whether Lady Audley was mad, bad or acting mad, they all agree that what became of her was as a consequence of the desperate position she had been forced into and from which she had few options to release herself. This is very important trope in Victorian literature. Look at Jane Eyre when the same struggles also result in a near mental collapse in the Red Room, or Lady Isabel Vane who disguises herself as a governess and moves back in with her husband and his new wife just to be able to see her children again.
Lady Audley as a lower-middle-class woman who marries a wealthy officer, grew to expect a certain lifestyle which was suddenly not going to be provided for her anymore, and more than that, they did not know how they would survive. Her husband abandons her and her child and then, because of the unfairness of the marriage laws of the day, she was prevented from releasing herself from the husband who abandoned her and their child without further contact. Is this injustice enough to make her ‘mad’?
For Roberts and Hazlewood, it was. Lady Audley is ‘mad’. Whereas, for Suter and Brougham, Lady Audley is a bad woman or, more pertinently in Brougham’s case, a woman who made bad choices. In A Literature of their Own, Elaine Showalter states that the worry for many was that “Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative” (Showalter 1984: 167). This explains the more obviously mad stage versions of Lady Audley. By portraying Lady Audley as mad, her actions were dismissed as abnormal and then the traditional image of the good, ‘angel in the house’, middle-class woman could be permeated without further disturbance and other equally transgressive acts in life and literature could be dismissed as evidence of female mental weakness. As madness was considered to be a feminine illness, her behaviour was only deemed ‘mad’ because she was seen to be acting in what was considered to be a recognisably unfeminine manner. She was meant to be a moral instructress to her children whilst her husband was allowed to occupy the world, existing in the public sphere surrounded by temptations but at the thought of his chaste, Christian wife waiting at home, he was able to conquer all temptations and return home to her to be saved over and over again. Lady Audley doesn't do this. She does not submit to peaceful poverty in her husband’s absence. Brougham highlights this hypocrisy in his conclusion by having Lady Audley accuse everyone gathered around her for goading her to ‘madness’. But Suter, Roberts and Hazlewood all include the scene where Lady Audley explains to George Talboys that she assumed a false identity because of the impossible position she had been put in. And, therefore in all of the plays, Lady Audley’s actions, whether they are rooted in madness or not, stems from the restrictions placed on her gender during the nineteenth-century. That she tried to escape those restrictions, made her ‘mad’ in the eyes of nineteenth-century society.
