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Elaine Showalter has characterized Victorian sensation novels of the 1860s as "a genre in which everything that was not forbidden was compulsory."(1) Thus, much to the chagrin of many contemporary reviewers, these works focused on murder, attempted murder, bigamy, adultery, and a series of "lesser" transgressions which shocked and titillated their audience. As well, sensation fiction tended to present sexual irregularities as motivating the crimes which drove its plots, something which played no small role in reinforcing its popularity.
There was, however, one "forbidden" sexual topic which could not be addressed directly, even within the risque confines of these novels, and that was homosexuality. Nonetheless, even though homosexuality remained, in Lord Alfred Douglas' famous phrase, "the Love that dare not speak its name," the origins and themes of sensation novels allowed them to explore this taboo subject in ways unavailable to most other forms of "mainstream" mid-nineteenth-century literature. In The History of Sexuality Foucault asserts that, as far as the categorization of homosexuality is concerned, "Westphal's famous article of 1870 on 'contrary sexual sensations' can stand as its date of birth."(2) The concept of the "homosexual," therefore, as it has come to be understood in the twentieth century, was being formulated at almost the exact historical moment sensation fiction first achieved notoriety. It is perhaps not surprising that sensation authors found ways to work this newly-arisen "category" into their texts, which after all were intended to startle, if not appall, their audience.
Thus in Lady Audley's Secret (1862), one of the earliest and most successful examples of sensation fiction, Mary Elizabeth Braddon explicitly presents the threat posed by her central female character as a challenge to male homosocial bonds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's hypothesis of "the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual--a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted"(3) becomes particularly evocative for this novel. By portraying her putative hero, Robert Audley, as driven by repressed homoerotic desires, Braddon exposes the self-interested and self-protective denial which underlies Victorian patriarchal society. The subtextual revelation of the "unspeakable" secret of male homosocial desire is essential to Braddon' s feminist critique of the roles and behaviors forced upon women by men who are unwilling to acknowledge their own motives and insecurities.
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