wo types of femininity: the domesticideal and the transgressive siren, with the angel of the house as the personality preferred by conventionalVictorians. Clara falls into the category of the proper feminine and Lady Audley is the improperfeminine. The effect of multiple identities and roles on the part of Clara and Lady Audley can beinterpreted in many ways and suggests different implications. The identities can stand for hiddenpsychological problems in these two women as a result of the suppression they encounter in their society,problems which the creation of multiple identities attempts to control. Both Clara and Lady Audley aretrying to create a happy and free life, but they keep having to deal with Robert, the shadow of the manof the house, a shadow that threatens and accomplishes to destroy everyones happiness save his own.Clara and Lady Audleys accounts also suggest that women are caught between things. The women ofthe novel are somehow forced to fit into the confines of the Victorian country house because societydeems they belong in the domestic role. If the domestic ideal is threatened, then they are confinedelsewhere, as in an asylum. Either way, however, they may not be let out of confinement. The novel ends soon after Georges return to London, and the celebration of the two marriagesbetween Clara and Robert, and Alicia and Sir Harry Towers. In containing both Clara and Lady Audley,the main focus of the novels closure... is the bourgeois, suburban idyll... where Robert becomes thehead of an idealised affective family and a rising man of the legal profession (Pykett 104). The novelultimately becomes about Roberts quest for manhood and, accordingly, Braddon ends Lady AudleysSecret by restoring domesticity and the patriarchal, aristocratic family. The portrayals of Clara and LadyAudley are used to expose the anxieties of gender, social class and marriage in 19th century Victoriansociety. The novel takes the transgressive woman...
