Unlike Emma. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Response to Bovarism in The Doctor’s Wife.

The figure of the woman reader exercised an undeniable fascination on the artistic and literary imagination of the nineteenth-century. This paper aims at exploring some essential aspects of the cultural significance of this recurrent and multifaceted theme, focusing in particular on Victorian fiction and the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Drawing on psychoanalytical theory and analysing some pictorial representations of the female reader (such as F. Leighton’s The Maid with the Golden Hair, or Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s Portrait of Katie Lewis), the paper will propose an introductory discussion of some crucial symbolical implication of the theme. Moving from this theoretical background, the paper will examine The Doctor’s Wife within the context of the contemporary sensation novel and of the extremely violent reactions and debates raised by the appearance of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in Britain. Braddon’s reworking of the plot and characters was obviously aimed at avoiding some of the moral objections made against the French novel and it could be interpreted as the attempt to provide the Victorian reading public with an edifying version of the same story told by Flaubert. However, Isabel Sleaford, Braddon’s response to Emma Bovary, could be also read as a subtle, if ambiguous, attempt to advocate the positive and constructive value of female reading: a post-flaubertian (and to a certain extent anti-flaubertian) vindication of the uncanny and disturbing figure that both the French novelist and his opponents seemed to condemn: the figure of the woman reader.