Trials of Passion by Lisa Appignanesi Page B

can see that risque Frenchman Gustave Dore’s lowlife pictures – ‘and she had better see the devil’. ‘She can be carried through any quantity of filthy streets on a tramway for threepence; but it is as much as her life’s worth to walk in them, or as her modesty’s worth to look into a print shop in them.’
    In Ruskin’s vision women’s very ability to walk around freely constitutes a danger to virtue: tempted by the depravity of the streets and led astray by cheap and seductive commodities, women are really only safe at home. Letter 33 in Fors Clavigera asserts:
    The end of all right education for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place; that she should as seldom leave it as a queen her queendom; nor ever feel entirely at rest but within its threshold.
    Christiana Edmunds had sinned against this ideal of womanhood in multifarious ways. She had dared to travel on her own: she had taken that smoky railway from Brighton to Margate and from there into the depravity of London; then came the two-hour journey back to Brighton on the same train as her poisoned sweetmeats. She had walked the streets on her own, an act that seems already to stand in for sexual activity, the euphemistic ‘street-walking’ that it is feared it may lead to; and she had taken a room at a ‘hotel’ on her own. This was transgression on a major scale, though to elicit Ruskin’s heated warning it must have been shared by sufficient women.
    On top of all this, in an attempt to win back her married lover together with her reputation (that term that carries the all-important Victorian slippage between status and virtue), she had planned and plotted and behaved in such a way as to divert suspicion from herself as the poisoner of Emily Beard. With no man’s help, she had allegedly purchased her sweetmeats, injected them with the strychnine and arsenic obtained through a variety of ruses, distributed her chocolate creams and publicly testified at an inquest. She had even confronted police Inspector Gibbs with the taunt that he would ‘never find it out’. The risk in all this was enormous, and at the end it had landed her here, at the Old Bailey. Christiana was definitely bad. Where that badness might shade into madness now became a matter for general conjecture.
    There were several models available, in both press reports and popular literature, for Christiana and the public to draw on and elaborate.
    Uncanny echoes of her trajectory exist in the ‘sensational’ novels of her own day. The femmes fatales here are often represented as seductively fatal to men, but in the end seem to be fatal mostly to themselves. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s bestselling novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Lady Audley uses her outstanding beauty and her native cunning to escape poverty. Her path from first love to bigamy, and finally to a ‘murder’ which isn’t quite one, is certainly bad. Yet her noble husband and nephew prefer to think such badness, when it resides in so lovely a receptacle of femininity, must be madness:otherwise, the social order would be destroyed. As the mad doctor called in to diagnose Lady Audley states: ‘You would wish to prove that this lady is mad, and therefore irresponsible for her actions.’ Our hero Robert Audley, who can find no other way to comprehend such extreme behaviour, responds: ‘Yes ... I would rather, if possible, think her mad.’
    Wilkie Collins’s Lydia Gwilt in his novel Armadale of 1866 – like Christiana and Lady Audley, a woman who can barely afford the middle-class trappings she both wants and feels she is owed – is brazen both in her desires and in her class rage. Beautiful, she takes her freedom and strides the streets of London and foreign capitals, only to end her days a suicide at the quack Dr Downward’s clinic for the mad. Fascinating it may be, but sexualized female