What really makes sensation fiction “sensational”? According to Patrick Brantlinger, who poses the same question in his essay titled “What is ‘Sensational’ About the ‘Sensation Novel’?,” the sensation novel comprises “violent and thrilling action, astonishing circumstances, stereotypic heroes, heroines, and villains” and contemporary interest in “bigamy, adultery, and the problem of divorce law” found in crime newspapers (Brantlinger 5). Here, he suggests the obvious. The sensational, shocking aspects of sensation fiction must be the explicit violence, bigamy, murder, or deceit that take place within Victorian society or the domestic abode, particularly when undertaken by women in fits of “insanity” who subvert the conventional order. Further, Brantlinger, like many other sensation fiction scholars, asserts that sensation novels rely on the “subordination of character to plot,” where circumstantial evidence, “descriptive detail,” and “setting” motivate characters like Robert Audley, who Brantlinger paints as the reluctant hero of Lady Audley’s Secret (12-13). Thus, he assumes that the sensation reader does not care about the characters in sensation novels, but rather, that characters are less important in producing the novel’s “sensational” aspect than the violent, murderous, or bigamous acts they experience or commit.

However, this characterization of sensation fiction seems to oversimplify the function of the “sensational,” especially because sensation fiction relies upon its ability to draw in the reader and elicit some sort of audience surprise or astonishment. Often, this effect on the audience comes by way of the reader’s connection with or sympathy for the novel’s fictional characters, and it is particularly difficult to imagine that all sensation novels do not or cannot evoke sympathy for any of their characters. As we discussed in our seminar on the Brontë sisters, reader reception of fictional novels depends on our ability to become invested in the plight of characters or to at least understand the motivations behind their actions (whether we agree with them or not). We sympathize with Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, despite his abusive cruelty, because we understand how he was mistreated as a child and recognize his own feelings of inferiority inculcated by his adopted family. I argue that Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon works through its narrative structure and its development of character backstory to similarly elicit the reader’s sympathy for its titular anti-heroine, Lucy Audley, who commits bigamy, attempted murder, and arson (among other crimes) in order to escape poverty and create a more comfortable life for herself on her own terms. This sympathy augments the novel’s own sensational aspect, particularly because it requires the reader to sympathize with the character that deceives her husband, tries to kill her nephew and her former husband, and generally subverts gender and societal conventions to assert her own agency. The reader does not simply react in horror or revulsion to Lucy Audley’s violence or deceit; in fact, the reader sympathizes with Lucy, despite her violent means, because we know the circumstances that have occasioned her response.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sympathy” can refer to the following potential definitions:

• A “conformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes persons agreeable to each other.”
• A “quality or state of being thus affected by the suffering or sorrow of another; a feeling of compassion or commiseration.”
• And most prominently, the “quality or state of being affected by the condition of another with a feeling similar or corresponding to that of the other; the fact or capacity of entering into or sharing feelings of another or others; fellow-feeling. Also, a feeling or frame of mind evoked by and responsive to some external influence” (“Sympathy” OED).

I argue that the second and third definition elucidate the effect of sympathy created in Braddon’s characterization and development of Lady Audley, particularly through the way in which she gradually reveals Lucy’s (or Helen’s) history in the novel’s narrative organization. Unlike Robert Audley, George, or any other male character in the novel, Lucy’s plight and the manner in which her power is taken away from her evokes sympathy, because the reader comes to know and understand the reasons for her comportment. The novel begins with Lucy, as Sir Michael proposes to her, and the positioning of Lucy’s perspective at the novel’s start immediately invites the reader to identify with Lucy or to be curious regarding what we do not yet know about her. Through the investigation conducted by Robert, the reader learns that Lucy has assumed a new identity to escape from poverty (after the desertion of her husband), she has committed bigamy in marrying Sir Michael for wealth and comfort, and she attempts to kill those who get in her way or try to reveal her secrets. These actions are not technically admirable, but because Braddon provides readers with knowledge of Lucy’s past, as well as requiring us to acknowledge the limited options available to women of her social and economic status, Lucy’s suffering affects the reader, who feels sympathy for her regardless of her crimes. When Lucy must reveal these crimes to Sir Michael, the scandal or sensation of her actions are overpowered by Lucy’s recollection of her past hardships and the constraints put upon her as a married woman. She declares that she “was a slave allied for ever to beggary and obscurity. People pitied me; and I hated them for their pity” (Braddon 347). Further, she rebukes Sir Michal and Robert for their inability to empathize with her plight and the conditions that motivated her bigamy, stating that Robert and Michael “have been rich all [their] lives, and can very well afford to despise me; but I knew how far poverty can affect a life, and I looked forward with a sick terror to a life so affected” (345). However, even Robert Audley feels this sympathy for Lucy after he has mercilessly condemned her for her ‘unfeminine’ violence. As he transports Lady Audley to the maison de santé, where she will waste away for the subsequent two years before her death, he gazes upon “the wretched creature lying forlorn and friendless in the cabin” and cannot “but sometimes pity her for her womanhood and her helplessness” (376). Just as Lucy invokes sympathy from those who seek to silence and judge her, the novel invokes similar sympathy from the reader for Lucy’s predicament. The novel’s ending, though concluding with a stereotypically happy marriage and the imprisonment of the “villain,” leaves the reader rather unsatisfied, precisely because we sympathize with Lucy. It seems especially cruel that Lucy is punished (and essentially removed from Victorian society) considering what Braddon has revealed about her and the extreme efforts taken to remedy her poverty and obscurity. This sympathy creates and augments the sensational aspect of Lady Audley’s Secret. The reader does not ultimately sympathize with the novel’s stereotypical hero, Robert, and instead, sympathy lies with Lucy, the subversive, radical, and violent female character who refuses to restrain herself according to societal gender roles or station. Perhaps this is what frightened contemporary critics the most: they likely understood their readers’ ability to sympathize with and understand the reasoning behind Lucy’s defiance of societal rules for women of her economic and social status.

In an essay titled “The Sympathy of Suspense: Gaskell and Braddon’s Slow and Fast Sensation Fiction in Family Magazines,” Erica Haugtvedt makes a similar claim regarding the scholarly assumption that sensation novels only require “suspense” to stimulate the reader’s interest (Haugtvedt 150). She states that while “cliff-hangers” and narrative withholding of information are important to the sensation genre, many have not acknowledged the non-sensational “slowness” of narrative necessary in the construction of a sensation novel (151). In particular, her essay substantiates my own argument about Braddon’s use of sympathy to draw the reader’s attention to Lucy; Haugtvedt claims that the sympathy of sensation novels, “built on the legacies of the narrative’s past and present,” creates our “investment” in characters and enables an “anxiety of suspense to flourish at key junctures of narration” (151). Thus, she argues that the anxiety and suspense of sensation novels requires the exact sympathy that I believe Braddon elicits in her construction of Lady Audley’s story. We cannot feel anxiety, worry, or shock in regard to Lucy’s actions without the inherent sympathy produced in the development of her character throughout the novel’s narrative. This sympathy renders the sensation novel truly “sensational.”

In posing my original question, which asks what renders sensation novels “sensational,” I also analyzed Lady Audley’s Secret, my chosen sensation novel, and Pride and Prejudice, a domestic novel, with Voyant and CLiC to see how authorial word choice helps to construct the sensational aspect of the sensation genre. In particular, do the words that we consider “sensational” really appear within Lady Audley’s Secret? Are there prominent words that occur within both the sensation novel and the domestic novel, and what does this suggest? Do my searches in Voyant and CLiC elucidate any striking words that relate to my argument about reader sympathy created by the sensation novel?

First, I ran both Lady Audley’s Secret and Pride and Prejudice through Voyant to find which words occurred most frequently in both texts. I indicated stop words, including character names, pronouns, and words like “say,” “said,” or “the.” After removing stop words, I utilized Voyant’s summary tool to see the top thirty most frequent words in each text. Surprisingly, fourteen out of thirty most frequent words, or almost half of the words, occurred in both texts. These words included “man,” “young,” “thought,” “room,” “house,” “time,” “day,” and “know.” Because the novels share fourteen of their thirty most frequent words, this suggests that both the domestic and sensation genre rely upon similar narrative conventions and settings for their novels. The sensation novel, while dealing with plots of bigamy, violence, or murder, still depends upon the setting of the Victorian world made familiar in the domestic genre which preceded it. Even at this minute level, Voyant makes apparent that the sensation genre borrows from and builds upon some narrative structures popularized in earlier fiction.

In creating word clouds of five hundred words for each novel, something similar materialized. I picked out nearly sixty striking or prominent words from each novel’s word cloud, then listed them side by side to make comparisons between the compilations of words. Once again, about half of the words that I picked out can be found in both novels: these words connote elements of the both the sensation and the domestic genre, including “gone,” “believe,” “night,” “poor,” “eyes,” “mind,” “home,” “wife,” “letter,” “reason,” “cried,” “lost,” “fear,” “power,” “money,” “trouble,” and “anxious.” This suggests that the sensation novel not only relies upon “sensational” words or themes, but also needs to be counterbalanced by elements of the domestic or “non-sensational,” in order to construct its sensational aspect. The words that are not shared between the two novels only reinforce what we already know differentiates the two genres. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon frequently employs “strange,” “secret,” “death,” “dead,” “grave,” “creature,” “pale,” “cruel,” “mad,” “madness,” and “shadow,” and these words fit within our own conventional understanding of what sensation represents. Prominent words in Pride and Prejudice that do not appear within Lady Audley’s Secret’s frequent words include “happiness,” “marriage,” “pleasure,” “feelings,” “agreeable,” “amiable,” “engaged,” and “affection.” These words emphasize the importance of domestic relationships between families, friends, and couples, and they suggest the general nature of uncontroversial, societal bliss necessary in the domestic novel.

I then continued to CLiC to see what the tool could elucidate in terms of “sensation” words, whether the two novels’ word choice adheres to conventional assessments of sensation words, and whether the word “sympathy” offers any interesting results in both novels. The word “sensation” itself appears in both Lady Audley’s Secret and Pride and Prejudice, occurring eight times in the former and three times in the latter. In both, the word is never used in relation to the “sensation” novel or what critics and audiences considered “sensational.” In fact, the word is often utilized to relate the physical or emotional “sensations” felt by characters as they react to the world around them. Elizabeth looks at Mr. Darcy with “a triumphant sensation,” while Phoebe feels a “choking sensation” at the thought of her drunken husband. The only time that “sensation” relates to something particularly sensational, in regard to the sensation genre, is when George Talboys’s desertion of Helen is described as making “quite a sensation” in the town of Wildernsea. The infrequent use of “sensation,” especially in Lady Audley’s Secret, suggests either that Braddon did not need to explicitly identify something as a sensation in order to render something sensational, or that, perhaps, the Victorians had used another word to suggest that an element is “sensational.” I am still looking to find what this word may be. Similarly, Braddon only once specifically utilizes the word “bigamy” to describe Lady Audley’s actions, and this comes from the mouth of Dr. Mosgrave as he explains to Robert that bigamy does not make Lucy “mad.” Here, perhaps, Braddon employs the conventional word “bigamy” to delegitimize its role in the sensation genre. Lady Audley’s bigamy is not sensational, delusional, or insane; in fact, her bigamy stems from reasonable and rational efforts to elude poverty after she is deserted by her first husband. After considering this notion that Lady Audley actually utilizes her reason and intellect, I searched for “reason” in Lady Audley’s Secret with CLiC. Surprisingly, it occurs thirty-eight separate times throughout the novel, and Braddon often utilizes it when Robert or Lucy ponder their reasons for doing something.

Further, Pride and Prejudice employs the words “suspense” and “anxious” numerous times, and I consider these words to be indicators used in the sensation genre to signal that which is “sensational.” The word “suspense,” noted by Haugtvedt as a popular term used to identify the “sensation” in sensation novels, appears in Pride and Prejudice six times, often when both characters and readers are prevented from immediately ascertaining important narrative information. This specifically recalls the way in which sensation novels deliberately structure their narrative to toy with the audience and withhold information; it seems that, at least in Pride and Prejudice, we can perhaps see the hint that suspense will become an important narrative tactic as fiction novels developed later in the century. As critics often note the way in which sensation fiction produced anxiety towards the role of women and the stability of social convention, it is particularly striking to see “anxious” used almost thirty times throughout Pride and Prejudice. Austen utilizes this word almost entirely in the context of the characters’ social anxieties regarding their marriage, their money, and their general station in society. The Bennet girls are “anxious” to wed, Mr. Bennet is “anxious” to get rid of Mr. Collins (who will overtake their home after Mr. Bennet’s death), and the Bennet family is “anxious” when Lydia defies convention and runs away with Mr. Wickham. These instances suggest that the anxiety apparent and prevalent in sensation fiction, or for contemporary readers of sensation fiction, were perhaps built upon the social anxieties produced in the domestic novel. Both the domestic and the sensation novel identify and criticize the anxieties created by the restricting societal rules which governed everyday comportment, and both Pride and Prejudice and Lady Audley’s Secret ultimately resolve these anxieties by ending in a conventional marriage. They at once evaluate the problematic nature of these societal rules and submit to them in the end.

Finally, I looked at the word “poor,” which occurs in both the novels, to analyze how this word emphasizes or augments the sense of reader sympathy for the characters of domestic and sensation fiction. CLiC makes it evident that Pride and Prejudice and Lady Audley’s Secret employ “poor” both as it relates to those of low economic status, but more importantly, as it describes someone to be pitied or sympathized with. Exclamations of “Poor Charlotte!” “Poor Jane!” “Poor Mr. Darcy!” “Poor Alicia,” and “Poor little girl,” among many others, emerge in both texts to emphasize the way that both genres depend upon our ability to identify with and acknowledge the feelings of the fictional characters represented. “Poor,” used thirty-eight times in Pride and Prejudice, appears 161 times in Lady Audley’s Secret. And because this occurs in the sensation novel, as well, it suggests that the sensation genre, too, needs to develop sympathetic characters in conjunction with its sensational aspects. Braddon also elicits reader sympathy in highlight Lady Audley’s poverty, and Lucy remarks frequently upon her former economic difficulties in order for Robert and Sir Michael to understand the reasoning behind her violent actions. The word “sympathy” itself occurs six times, and twice, it refers specifically to other characters who sympathize with Lady Audley, including Phoebe and a French nurse at the maison de santé. CLiC thus enables me to visualize the ways in which Braddon constructs this sympathy through her careful word choice and the characterizations of Lucy and those around her.

Works Cited:

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. Penguin Books, 1998.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “What is ‘Sensational’ About the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 37, no. 1, 1982, pp. 1-28.

Haugtvedt, Erica. “The Sympathy of Suspense: Gaskell and Braddon’s Slow and Fast Sensation Fiction in Family Magazines.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 149-170.

“sympathy, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/196271. Accessed 4 February 2019.