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Robert Audley vigorously follows the clues in order to discover that Lady Audley is a mother, a bigamist, and a murderess. These methods used to define women or ascertain their sexual histories are meant to implement rigid social and economic boundaries in Victorian society.
To analyze and explain the significance of the femme fatale motif in the mid-nineteenth-century novel, I will divide this study into six chapters that define the femme fatale, provide a historical perspective to show how her image reflects the socioeconomic problems among Victorian women, and explain my theoretical approach, which deals with a narrative reading of the femme fatale and demonstrates the cultural influences that help to construct her. This project specifically discusses the mid-Victorian femme fatale in Lady Audley’s Secret and Armadale, among a number of other Victorian novels written between the 1840s and 1860s.7 In the concluding chapter, I will explain how the midcentury femme fatale leads to a reevaluation of the term at the end of the century in Thomas Hardy’s Tess.
Though the midcentury fictional femme fatale and the New Woman subvert traditional paradigms of domestic or fallen women, and they are viewed as a revolt against established culture, they indeed represent two very different threats to patriarchal power and bring about different social issues concerning women.
The first chapter defines the femme fatale by distinguishing her from the prominent Victorian fallen woman. The importance of such a distinction is to show how the ideological apparatuses of home, family, religion, and education lead to the creation of these feminine tropes. For example, Dickens’ Emily in David Copperfield is as equally fallen and powerless as Collins’ Lydia Gwilt: they have been ill-used, willfully discarded by male characters who could have protected them. However, these female characters exercise different options, which leads Emily to be epitomized as the proverbial fallen woman, while Lydia, refusing to be a victim, becomes more of an avenger, which gives her character more substance, more depth. To make these distinctions clearer, this chapter discusses the masquerade and boundary markers, namely, the domestic sphere and public space, which metaphorically keep women “in their place.” The second chapter further explores the masquerade of the femme fatale in an analysis of Dickens’ Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield.