Animals, Biopolitics, and Sensation Fiction: M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

This essay argues that Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) explores relationships between humans and animals as a way of working through a wider biopolitical problem wherein the knowledge of life, care for life, and the abandonment of life overlap. Central to my inquiry is the novel’s key detective figure, Robert Audley, who is given as a caregiver to and non-harmer of animals. Yet, if Robert is rarely without an animal by his side, he is also rarely far from his next mutton chop. On one level, Braddon’s narrative seems to participate in a biopolitical project similar to the production of bare life as Giorgio Agamben understands it, including animals so as to exclude them, rendering animal life disposable in order to demarcate the human life that is valuable. However, a closer look reveals that Braddon’s attention to animals ultimately complicates this dynamic, opening up spaces that resist and refuse the abandonment of life.

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