Voyeurism In Lady Audley's Secret

I argue Lady Audley’s portrait is crucial to the movement and culmination of Braddon’s novel. Its symbolic implications are multivalent: as Lynette Felber writes, ‘[the portrait] protests the power and authority of the male gaze; it anatomizes fetishistic desire; and it raises questions about the construction of women and their sexuality in Victorian society’. Structurally, the portrait heralds the fate of Lady Audley by revealing her dual nature, by implicating a significant secret, and by signifying, in its unfinished state, the uncertainty of her (and George Talboy’s) future. The portrait thus serves as a catalyst; it appears and, in its appearance, becomes vital to the turning of the plot.

Voyeurism in Lady Audley’s Secret, pertaining …show more content…
In the first instance, the act of observing intimate effects of Lady Audley’s boudoir, her sanctum, and Robert ‘seat[ing] himself on a chair before [the portrait] for the purpose of contemplating [it] at his leisure’, calls into play the ‘hierarchized paradigm of male gazer/female object’ which gave men power over their subject. Of this gaze, Laura Mulvey surmises: ‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly’. Lady Audley’s portrait, and the ways in which characters interact with it, can thus be read as a commentary on Victorian gender identity. In this passage, woman is reduced by the male gazes of Robert, George, and the unnamed pre-Raphaelite artist, so that her physiognomy exists, and is immortalised, as a source of male scopophilic pleasure. In evaluating the ideological implications of Lucy’s portrait, Sophia Andres further writes: ‘[the portrait] captures some of the inherent contradictions in Victorian gender ideology which at once worships women and imprisons them within the domestic sphere, depriving them of the power it grants