In addition to its more noticeable, purely intellectual and social approaches to the feminine, the criminal, and the insane, Lady Audley’s Secret significantly occupied and to some degree defied an ongoing discourse of its time concerning the physical and physiological manifestations of mental conditions.  As late as 1870, several years after the novel’s first serialization, Henry Maudsley in the lectures that formed the basis of his Body and Mind was able to state in all earnestness that the operations of the mind were inextricably intertwined with the aesthetic and physiological manifestations of the self’s corporeal exterior.  “We cannot truly understand mind functions,” he wrote, “without embracing in our inquiry all the bodily functions and, I might perhaps without exaggeration say, all the bodily features” (Maudsley 24, emphasis added).  Therefore, when a patient is mad, “he [or, we may assume, she] is… lunatic to his fingers’ ends” (41).  He approvingly cites another thinker who argues that the “criminal class”—a category having “close relations of nature and descent to… insanity”—was distinguished by low or degenerate physical characteristics (66).  To describe this collection of governing principles, Lynn Voskuil coins the phrase “somatic fidelity,” the idea that “the body necessarily and indisputably betrays its inner truths” (613).

Such scrupulous and methodological (if also spurious) measurements and mappings of the cranium did not, of course, translate directly into preconceptions of the aesthetic and cosmetic manifestations of madness, but the widespread credence that was lent them gave room for hypotheses like Maudsley’s to take hold.  And if Maudsley himself did not focus so much on exactly what a lunatic woman might be expected to look like, Charles Darwin (who not coincidentally credited Maudsley for inspiration and assistance in obtaining models and notes (Darwin 20)) was prepared to fill the void.  In his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin reproduces a singular image entitled, imaginatively, “From a photograph of an insane woman, to show the condition of her hair.”

Lest one assume that the example given is simply that of a woman whose mania leads her to bizarrely style her own hair, Darwin takes pains to explain the correlation of the hair to the mental illness through purely involuntary physiological processes.  In cases like this, he relates, the hair “’rises up from the forehead like the mane of a Shetland pony’” (296) and becomes drier and harsher, so that the wisdom earlier cited by Maudsley about being a lunatic to one’s fingers’ ends also applies “to the extremity of each particular hair” (298).  The converse was also held to be true: “’I think,’” Darwin quotes a report, “’Mrs— will soon improve, for her hair is getting smooth, and I always notice that our patients get better whenever their hair ceases to be rough and unmanageable’” (298).

Perhaps, then, the growing reliance on scientific language and methodology to lend credibility to such beliefs may have magnified the potential for fear where such convictions were shaken and subverted.  It was such subversion that one Henry Bellair used to shock and titillate his readers in a magazine article entitled “The Lunatic Beauty,” in which he wrote of the “thrilling curiosity and profound awe” evoked when “the countenance of the demented wears the lineaments of beauty and intelligence,” as opposed to the more honest “face[s…] the conformation of which indicates lunacy” (118).  Bellair’s solution, to keep Voskuil’s somatic fidelity intact, is to make his anecdote of Adele Collaston a case of what might be called artificial insanity—the natural beauty received her mental illness unnaturally, via a blow on the head (and, in not the most medically or socially progressive resolution ever, is accidentally cured via another application of such violence).  Lady Audley’s Secret transgresses further by not allowing its audience this measure of safety.  In fact, Braddon’s novel goes so far as to directly put a point on the fact that Helen Talboys’s ostensible nascent or latent madness is hereditarily obtained from her mother, a woman who, like Helen herself, is “no raving, strait-waistcoated maniac […] but a golden-haired, blue-eyed, girlish creature” with “yellow curls” and “radiant smiles” (358).  Therefore, Lady Audley (née Talboys) transgresses and sensationalizes not most because she is potentially mad but because she would be mad under false pretenses, mad in defiance of her exterior.  As Voskuil writes, she “variably thrill[s] or disgust[s]” Victorian audiences because she looks the part of Victorian womanhood and wifehood but refuses to be it (613), but the reverse is equally true and salient: she professes the part of the madwoman, but refuses to look it.

At the same time, some found humor in bringing madness into the courts.  An 1862 issue of Punch published the article “The Jonathan Lunacy Case,” which satirized the trial of an “alleged lunatic.”  While his charges are not made explicit, the witnesses called to the stand generally represent Jonathan as a “silly,” obnoxious drunk who merely requires some discipline in his life.  Madness is a hot topic for the Victorians, but there is still much confusion on how it should be defined and what role it can play in the court system and society as a whole.     

This distinction between a lack of morals and madness was of particular importance to the Victorians, especially as it related to criminal behavior and incarceration.  This tension is acted out in Lady Audley’s Secret when Dr. Mosgrave visits Audley Court.  The big question posed to the doctor becomes one of how to account for Lady Audley’s bad behavior – in other words, is she “bad” because she is mad?  Interestingly enough, the doctor initially says no.  He finds Lady Audley’s behavior perfectly accountable, reasoning: 

Not only is Lady Audley considered entirely sane, but she is spoken of as brave, ingenuitive, and strong – all qualities given much more credit in a female of the twenty-first century than one of the mid-nineteenth century.  After having a private (and mysterious) meeting with Lady Audley, the doctor complicates his previous response.  Now he proclaims that Lady Audley, “has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence…She is dangerous!” (Braddon 385).  This shift highlights a particular tension in the Victorian identification of madness; it exposes a connection between diagnosis and a felt threat to the established norms.  Lady Audley’s independence, determination, and strength were dangerous in a female.  A diagnosis of madness reins her in to something explicable and, quite literally, containable.  In this way, the medical discourse supports and reaffirms society’s expectations.  Women are to be submissive, docile, and dependent.  Those who are otherwise are mad.

As Victorians consider how to define madness, Braddon calls her audience to analyze the motivation behind the behavior often deemed “mad” and re-examine the confines that force women into impossible situations.  “Braddon suggests to the reader that Lucy is not deranged, but desperate; not mad (insane) but mad (angry)” (Matus 344).  The rigid and sometimes contradictory expectations of the Victorian female pen Lady Audley into a corner, and she lashes out in a way similar to what Braddon describes as a wild animal caught in a trap.  Instead of seeing her “bad” behavior as evidence of insanity, Braddon seems to suggest that society should adjust its morality gate.