Dreams of Transparency: M. E. Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent

This chapter examines the depiction of visuality in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s first novel The Trail of the Serpent (1860). It begins by outlining how the ‘dream of transparency’ survived the challenge of early physiological optics to leave behind an uncertain intellectual landscape at mid-century, in which the prospect of obtaining truth through vision was uncertain. In Braddon’s novel, anxieties about visual obfuscation and the eye’s limitations are mapped onto its ambiguous antagonist, whose exploits demonstrate the fallacy of trusting to ‘ocular demonstration’. Yet a belief in the clarifying potential of vision persists, and the metropolitan scenes in particular fail to corroborate popular beliefs about the dangerously obscuring effects of urbanity. In fact, the touristic gaze and class politics of ‘visibility’ are shown to expose as much as conceal the criminal element. Despite the eventual thwarting of the antagonist via detective processes, however, his posthumous life as a waxwork exhibited within Madame Tussaud’s—where he becomes the subject of continual misreadings—highlights the ongoing ambivalences of modern visuality.