Aurora Floyd

"I think a lot of it is a reaction to the more didactic novels of the 1830s–1850s. It is also closely connected to the rise of very sensational stage plays. There’s a lot of overlap between the stage and the sensation novel: cliffhangers and exciting plot-twists. The challenging relationship between the aim of respectability and the covert recognition of a sexual underworld we spoke about at the beginning also comes to the fore. Sensation novels often focus on the way that urban life can produce more radically surprising social encounters, as opposed to village life. People who are thrown together in sensation novels would have never come into contact with one another otherwise. Aurora Floyd isn’t exactly like that, but the cross-class relationship at the beginning of the novel isn’t seen as often in earlier Victorian novels. Aurora Floyd focuses on the way that cross-class romance is not actually productive—I think that’s pretty common in the mid-nineteenth century novel. That changes quite dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century. Yes. There’s not as much condemnation—not as much suspicion. It’s still challenging, but the novel that’s most closely connected to Aurora Floyd , Lady Audley’s Secret , features a woman who comes from a poor background becoming Lady Audley. Through her own will, she creates a perfect pre-Raphaelite ‘Angel in the House’ persona. Well, they’re less connected to a kind of demimonde. Defoe is episodic—concerned with the way an episode or part of a story creates a pivot for a character to react to. Whereas both Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret focus on personal representation. It’s the building of the self, rather than response to event. In that way, Braddon is very different from someone like Becky Sharp, the main character of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48), too. Sharp is more closely connected to eighteenth-century or seventeenth-century picaresque heroines, because she has a plot-event that produces an inflection point that then changes the story; she has to respond to it. By contrast, Lady Audley creates her persona by picking and choosing from pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, Patmore-ian female docility. She’s trying to build the psychology of a perfect wife. That’s also the reason it’s flawed, and the reason her performance doesn’t work in the end. She can’t hold together the persona she’s constructed for herself. The end of that novel dissolves into madness. Madness is the only explanation we have for someone who would do this. “A lot of sensation fiction shuts down female power, or suggests the best response to female independence is control” Aurora Floyd is quite different, even though it’s often paired with Lady Audley’s Secret . Janice Radway’s great book on twentieth-century romance novels , Reading the Romance , has an almost sociological argument about romance readers. Her assessment of the heroine of a romance novel counters the Victorian angel in the house: the romance novel heroine is always dark, with flashing eyes, very independent, does things for herself. This fantasy of perfect female power in the romance novel is, I think, very close to the representation you get in Braddon’s Aurora Floyd . Aurora is a proto-Romance-novel heroine, and importantly, she doesn’t end with a miserable life. There is a bigamy plot, but she ends up happy with John Mellish at the end of the novel, rather than condemned to madness. She’s diminished, yes, but she’s able to retain some of her independence at the end of the novel, which usually sensation fiction does not allow. A lot of sensation fiction shuts down female power, or suggests the best response to female independence is control. Aurora Floyd never going to take out her horsewhip again—that scene is so bizarre in that novel—but she’s still going to be feisty. That feistiness seems to be a strong connector between Aurora Floyd and twentieth- or twenty-first century romantic fiction. Braddon picks up on the interest that headstrong characters have for readers, and doesn’t fully dampen it at the end of the novel. In many Victorian novels, a typical female pair is the headstrong, independent woman and the docile gentlewoman. You get it really clearly with Lucy and Aurora. But the docile woman doesn’t win in the end here; there’s a more equal treatment which is unusual for Victorian novels. But the most unusual scene in the novel is most definitely the horsewhipping scene. Sure. There’s a man who works as a groom, and who seems to have understood that Aurora Floyd’s first husband (another groom) is not actually dead, but horribly maimed. (This a bigamy novel, but unlike Lady Audley, she doesn’t know she’s bigamous until she sees her first husband again.) So, when Steve Hargreaves sidles up to Aurora and tries to get her to acknowledge his awareness of her bigamy, she whips him with her horsewhip. The description of this scene starts with her pulling out a gold jeweled horsewhip. Yeah, it’s like a toy whip. Its smallness is emphasised. Then her hair comes out of its bun, her cheeks flush and she’s described as towering above this small man. The man who eventually becomes her husband sees this and controls her passion. This scene skates the line between rage and erotic rage. It’s done really well, highlighting the way a canny Victorian novelist can play with representation so as to signal eroticism without it being explicit."