Mothering and Male Masochism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd

Feminist literary critics often praise Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensation
novels for undermining Victorian gender ideologies, and yet by failing to scrutinize
aspects of maternity and female sexuality, they overlook some of her work's most
subversive potential. In Aurora Floyd, for instance, Braddon deploys the trope of the
missing mother to deconstruct the Victorian maternal ideal of a pure, passive angel in the
house. Her text proposes a notion of motherhood, which is more concerned with internal
goodness and vitality, rather than with the Victorian era's emphasis on external
proprieties and socially constructed notions of femininity. Braddon's Aurora is a
motherless girl who develops into a strong, sexually assertive and, thus, unfeminine
woman by Victorian standards. In positioning Aurora as the narrative's heroine, Braddon
promotes female dominance and male masochism as alternative gender relations to the
traditional domestic economy of male mastery and female submission.