A Masculinizing Investigation: The Detective and the Problem of Women’s Reticence in Lady Audley’s Secret

Brittany L. Roberts

James Eli Adams, Herbert Sussman, and others have argued that emphatic self-disciplining was a significant part of the process by which Victorian men could establish their status as gentlemen. Lady Audley’s Secret, I argue, gives us a good case-in point. Given Robert Audley’s transformation from what Vicki A. Pallo calls a “ne’er-do-well aristocrat with no ambitions or respect for societal expectations” to a “model citizen [who] embod[ies] the social institutions he had heretofore rejected” (466), and given that this transformation occurs through the process of detection he must undergo, it appears that the self-discipline involved in becoming a good detective can likewise turn even the most lazy and indulgent of aristocrats into industrious married men. Ascertaining the right time to speak, act, finesse, or simply keep quiet is crucial to solving the case, and solving the case is likewise a testament of Robert’s masculine self-control.

The problem is that the lawyer-in-training is not a very good detective at all. In fact, it often seems he tries to avoid solving the mystery at hand. For example, Robert offers to “leave England and abandon [his] search for evidence” if Mr. Harcourt Talboys will only ask him to do so (194). He chooses to “extort nothing from [Georgey Talboys’s] innocent simplicity” (177), and he similarly refuses to exploit Mr. Maldon’s potentially-obliging “drunken imbecility” (170). I argue in this paper that Robert’s observable evasion of the truth is indicative not of an unwillingness to solve the mystery of his aunt’s sinister past, but rather of a desire to solicit information from women specifically. Of interest, too, is the extent to which women in the novel work to check the amateur detective’s investigative success by avoiding his questions and remaining inflexibly silent—which seems to serve as an immense source of power for them throughout the novel. Ultimately, I suggest that the profound effort both Lady Audley and her lady’s maid, Phœbe Marks, take to impede Robert’s investigation serves not only to protect themselves from his insinuating allegations, but also to challenge the authority of masculine empiricism—a challenge that Robert Audley must overcome for the detective plot to work and, as an agent of this plot, to affirm his own masculine identity.