ABSTRACT
This image of a beautiful and powerful woman acting out in violent passion against lower-class cruelty exemplifies much of what was scandalous about sensation fiction: it candidly opposed ideologies of bourgeois femininity and domesticity that envisioned middle-class women as naturally docile, passionless, and submissiveas exalted moral mistresses reigning benevolently over the domestic sphere, which in turn was imagined as privatized and insulated from economic or class concerns. Aurora’s conduct in the whipping scene is so antithetical to the precepts of domestic ideology that reviewer W. Fraser Rae stoutly denies such behavior is even possible: “We are certain that, except in this novel, no lady possessing the
education and occupying the position of Aurora Floyd could have acted as she is represented to have done.”3 However, Rae belies his own assurance in a stable construction of bourgeois femininity when he states of Braddon, “An authoress who could make one of her sex play the chief part in such a scene, is evidently acquainted with a very low type of female character, or else incapable of depicting that which she knows to be true.”4 If that which Braddon “knows to be true” is the ideal of true womanhood, then according to the reviewer’s own protestations, that ideal exists simultaneously with an other, “very low type.” The erotic coding of the whipping scene-Aurora’s hands “convulsed by passion,” her towering frame, flashing eyes, “fallen,” tangled hair, and the whip “like a rod of flexible steel in that little hand”—plainly speaks to cultural fears regarding female sexuality and desire that threaten the social order, and more specifically, the sanctity of the home. According to Richard Nemesvari and Lisa Surridge, this scene articulates concerns over “the spectre of female rebellion,” “unladylike aggression and physicality,” and the “appropriation of masculine manner and action” and indicates that “Aurora threatens to hold the whip hand in her marriage as well as with her servants.”5 At the same time, while the scene openly flaunts female sexual power and desire, these characteristics are not entirely negative, for after all, Aurora is “sublime in her passion,” responding out of proper feminine compassion to the abuse of a weak and helpless animal. As Lyn Pykett notes about Braddon’s technique, “The effect is a representation of female sexuality as voyeuristic spectacle, which offered both male and female readers pleasurable images of female erotic power.”6 Moreover, the master/slave symbology invoked by the mistress flogging the servant inflects the scene with sadomasochistic overtones, which accrue significance here not so much because they mark deviant sexuality, but rather, because they construct an unstable discursive arena of power inversion and permutation. As Anne McClintock argues, instead of simply denoting who has power and who lacks it, sadomasochism “is an organized subculture shaped around the ritual exercise of social risk and social transformation,” in which the economy of sadomasochism “is the economy of conversion: master to slave, adult to baby, power to submission, man to woman, pain to pleasure, human to animal and back again.”7 Braddon’s whipping scene enacts this theater of conversion through radical reversals of gender and class roles, in which Aurora’s act of aggression defies the proscriptions of both her sex and station. At the same time, however, the scene remains faithful to institutions of power, in which the morally and spiritually superior mistress is naturally meant to dominate the servant, or, in McClintock’s terms, “The player stages the delirious loss of control within a situation of extreme control.”8 Yet, most significant, the whipping scene reveals such distinctions of social power to be tenuously scripted, based not on nature but on economics, performed as it is by a woman with a “slender whip; a mere toy, with emeralds set in its
golden head,” soon to be “broken in half-a-dozen places.” McClintock goes on to explain that:
The spectacle of Aurora’s whipping scene is largely problematic, therefore, precisely because it presents constructions of gender and class as being open to historical change. As a tableau of domination and submission, the scene represents both the desire to fix gender and class categories and anxiety over the very fixity of those categories. Occurring as it does contemporaneously with the public controversies over women’s legal, educational, and occupational status in the historical moment of midcentury, this scene both expresses apprehensions and fantasizes about assertive women like Aurora who threaten the institutions of the family and the home, the separation of public and private spheres, and constructions of gender and class difference. As recent critics have shown, such arrangements of power within the domestic sphere were necessary to the maintenance of middle-class economic, political, and moral authority, and, furthermore, were largely reliant on the signifying practices of women within the home.10 At this time, according to Pykett, “Women (or ‘woman’) became a public spectacle, the object of discourse and the subject of numerous articles and essays,”11 in what would become known as the Woman Question. As indicated by Braddon’s frequent use of horsey heroines like Aurora Floyd in her fiction, horses and women together exacerbated many of the tensions written into domestic ideology. Furthermore, the cultural practice of horsebreaking, which was popularized during the late 1850s and early 1860s, provides another site where the problems wrought by the Woman Question and domestic ideology are communicated and negotiated. Therefore, while women were being represented in fiction and in public debates as insurgent figures who were resisting or denying their natural roles, at the same time, they were being symbolically broken and trained in the discourses of the horsebreaking spectacle, an elaborate semiotics of domination and submission performed in public and recounted avidly in the press.
