Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have interpreted Lady Audley's Secret as censuring the horrors of women's domestic lives by treating the title character as subversive.1 The problem with these feminist readings of Braddon's novel is that, in re-envisioning Lady Audley as a sympathetic character, scholars suggest that Lady Audley' s actions are praiseworthy2 and that her primary antagonist, step-nephew Robert Audley, embodies the oppressive circumstances she resists. This kind of interpretation oversimplifies the complexity of patriarchy by assuming that the patriarchal victim cannot also commit reprehensible crimes and that the man who benefits by and defends patriarchal norms does not also suffer from them. A more complex critique of patriarchy in Lady Audley's Secret emerges through combining feminist and postcolonial theories. Lillian Nayder employs such a combination by identifying the 1 857 Indian mutiny as a backdrop for Braddon's novel.3 However, her application of postcolonial theory serves only to re-vilify Lady Audley in the wake of too enthusiastic feminist scholarship. Instead of viewing Lady Audley and Robert Audley as either good or evil, we can use postcolonial theory to see more accurately the power structures that so warp their characters.Because, as Frantz Fanon indicates, "All forms of exploitation resemble one another",4 examining a combination of discourses regarding power can greatly improve our understanding of how various forms of power operate. In Lady Audley 's Secret, Braddon uses imperialist discourse to highlight structural inequalities, particularly the oppression experienced by Lady Audley and the indoctrination of Robert Audley into the classist British patriarchy. Although this hierarchy of critiques - the use of an imperialist critique to focus on other aspects of English culture - is Eurocentric because it relegates actual imperialism to the periphery of the discussion,5 the study of this technique contributes not only to our knowledge of Braddon's particular literary moment but also to our better understanding of the interrelationship among forms of exploitation.According to Edward Said, "'imperialism' means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory". Therefore, imperialism is the philosophy that permits colonization or "the implanting of settlements on distant territory".6 Because of the practice of this philosophy over time, nations and their citizens possess "a considerable material investment" in such beliefs.7 Maintaining this investment necessitates an objectifying attitude toward colonized peoples; as Fanon writes, "since none may enslave, rob or kill his fellow-man without committing a crime, [our soldiers] lay down the principle that the native is not one of our fellow-men".8 Without imagining colonized people as objects, colonizers would experience moral difficulty in continuing to oppress them for material gain. This imperialistic attitude dehumanizes the colonizers as well as the colonized.9These theories regarding the psychology of colonization can be applied to Lady Audley's Secret because the novel itself gestures toward colonial issues. The most prominent of such gestures is the use of Australia, an English penal colony, as the unrepresented location of George Talboys' successful gold mining. As Said discusses in Culture and Imperialism, the colonized periphery does not figure as a setting in Victorian novels until after the middle of the century. Rather, "outlying territories are available for use, at will, at the novelist's discretion, usually for relatively simple purposes such as immigration, fortune, or exile".10 The periphery becomes the distant site where "restless" English characters can make their fortunes.11 Similarly, products from the colonies and other exotic places like Crimea where Britain had an economic or political role appear as details in Braddon's novel, reminding readers about the existence of the colonial periphery on which the Empire depends. …