Abstract:
While formulaic plot, journalistic intrigue, marital violence, and bigamy are important elements used by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), two sensation novels, to elicit shock, the novels ultimately rely on constructions of identity and appeals to readerly sympathy in order to elicit their emotional, visceral, and sensational effects upon the audience. Both novels are “sensational” by the way in which they enable the reader to sympathize, align, or identify with female impostors. Though Lucy’s and Amy’s violent and manipulative actions hardly prove sympathetic, the women themselves generate sympathetic alignment with their female audiences by revealing the failings of conventional gender roles and the expectation that women conceal their true selves under the guise of untenable “angelic” façades. Both Lucy’s and Amy’s performative femininities undermine male ideals of womanhood, revealing these ideals for their superficiality and lack of realism. These performances serve Lucy’s and Amy’s own efforts to assert agency and power by whatever means necessary. They conceal their desire for agency under these façades in order to adhere to the feminine ideals espoused by their respective husbands, families, and societies. They are expected to uphold unrealistic, performative versions of womanhood, and when their performances expose the unsustainability of such expectations, they are ultimately punished for being performers in the first place. Though Robert and Nick respectively vilify Lucy and Amy as unnatural, mad, and unfeminine, their judgments rather have the opposite effect. Instead, they underscore the unfairness of pre-established ideals regarding a woman’s proper role and the societal (or male) anxieties produced by feminine assertions of agency. The reader, and especially the female reader, identifies with Lucy and Amy in recognizing the inequities that force them to “perform” the personas that fit within such a restrictive model of femininity.