Representation of female duality by Victorian author

Abstract

There’ll be girls across the nation that will eat this up./ Babe, I know that it’s your soul, but could you bottle it up?” Sarah Bareilles

As women authors of the 19^th century struggled to express themselves, they createdCharacterswho were both what they should be and what they were told was wrong. The female novelist’s need to express a darker side of herself led to the creation of madwomen, ghosts, spectres, and murderesses. These villainous characters represent the dark side of all women that part of themselves the authors were taught to hide. In their novels, some Victorian female authors represented female characters as possessing dual, opposing natures. Two characters can be seen as part and counterpart to each other in Jane Eyre, and in Lady Audley’s Secret the duality may be contained within the same woman. By creating these characters, the authors were able to give expression to the repressed part of their selves, and their readers could also subconsciously pick up on small acts of rebellion, getting a secret thrill out of the unconscionable acts committed in these novels. In order to illustrate this duality of good and bad in the female Victorian character, this chapter will look closely at these two novels and discuss the ways in which they represent the dual nature of women in Victorian society. In Jane Eyre, we will see the author using two characters to represent the public appearance and private fears of women while Lady Audley’s Secret shows duality at its extreme, embodied within one woman who tried desperately to become the perfect lady. This chapter will look at the ideas of the woman as the other and subject of the male gaze and the duality in female characters, connecting all these ideas to the characters of Jane Eyre and Lucy Audley.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Simone De Beauvoir wrote about the construction of women as the other, while Laura Mulvey related this idea to how women, as the Other, are repressed by the male gaze. Some female Victorian authors, living in a repressive society, react to this yet unarticulated idea of the male gaze in their representations of women. This is why we see such characters as Bertha in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; while Jane is representative of what the Victorian woman should be, Bertha is a manifestation of that part of a woman kept hidden. Similarly, Lady Audley, in Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Braddon, is an example of a woman who is able to manifest herself as the male ideal on the outside while her true nature is the very antithesis of this. In this way, they are each creating characters who exist within the male gaze and yet, underneath the surface, they are rebelling against the patriarchal definition of woman.