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The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature (“secret”) of bourgeois patriarchical society in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret by examining the issue of madness in terms of Foucaultean “madness,” since the definition of madness itself reveals the nature of the society. Foucault argues that definition of madness in the 19th century is a kind of strategy employed to control those who deviate from the bourgeois morality as well as those who threaten the bourgeois society, while regarding a madhouse as the instrument which inculcates bourgeois ideology through its patriarchical family system. The ways to control the “mad” woman in Lady Audley’s Secret almost exactly corresponds to those indicated in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. Helen/Lady Audley is defined as a mad woman because she oversteps the boundary of womanhood set by the bourgeois patriarchical society which demands passivity and blind obedience from women, and then she is ultimately “buried alive” or rather banished to a madhouse whose operation system resembles that of a patriarchical family with its keeper as an authoritative father and its inmates as his “should-be” obedient children. In this sense, Robert Audley who banishes Helen/Lady Audley as a mad woman after accusing her of her bigamy as well as her attempted murder can be considered to grow into an upholder of the patriarchal ideology. His growth as a “responsible” member of the patriarchical society, however, is paradoxical, because his growth is achieved through his concealment of the “unpleasant truth” that the ideal woman, that is, “angel in the house,” is a myth enforced upon Victorian women who cannot but be mad in the light of patriarchical ideology. This is the real “secret” which the patriarchical society wants to conceal.
