“Do you know what it is to wrestle with a madwoman?”: madness and revenge in Lady Audley’s Secret

Abstract

This article examines the representation of madness and revenge as forms of resistance to social oppression in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Although Lady Audley invokes hereditary madness as a justification for her crimes, her trajectory reveals not a loss of reason, but a conscious refusal to accept the limitations imposed on Victorian women. In a society that naturalises female inferiority, revenge becomes, for the protagonist, the only means of restoring a sense of order in a world that has stripped her of rights. Her criminal acts (bigamy, identity fraud, murder) do not stem from irrationality, but from a desire for autonomy and a need to redress injustices. Thus, revenge is not merely a personal response, but a symbolic gesture aimed at restructuring her ethical and emotional universe, an effort to impose a new logic where previously there was only chaos and powerlessness. In this context, madness is less a diagnosis than a strategy: the only socially acceptable identity through which to justify her revolt. The novel, therefore, challenges the boundaries between sanity and insubordination, exposing the contradictions at the heart of the Victorian ideal of femininity.