Reading, according to Associationism, is a material act, for as we have seen, language is a part of the sensorium, and reading bodies undergo physical changes inspired by the imaginations and memories which reading inspires. It is tempting to read this trajectory in the other direction, and thereby to claim that bodies are legible as texts.

The conflation of these two, however, is precisely where things fall apart. While the physiological response to a given stimulus may be within a statistical norm, the expression of that response is not nearly so predictable. This is especially true when probable outcomes depend on the mediation of a third body's adherence to a social role, as in the cases of women as domestic guardians of moral and emotional knowledge. When Rosanna Spearman mediates between Franklin Blake and Sergeant Cuff as the embodiment of the legal institution, she does not in fact inhabit Blake's body. Rather, she replicates probable social roles, for her social role is to enable a male body to interpret another body. Benjamin Morgan draws attention to the ‘powerfully normative dimensions of Bain's account of the mind’ that produce ‘the pleasures of regularity, order, and subordination’ (Morgan 2017: 97). In short, predictable physiological response does not yield predictable social response; rather, predictable social response yields predictable social response. But it is easy to read this backwards, so that one believes that probable social interaction presupposes consistent physiological etiology.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, I suggest, sees the conflation of the social and physiological as contest over knowledge itself – scientific, legal and emotional. While knowledge often bears the trappings of empiricism, it is only ever naïvely mechanistic, for it believes that bodies can be reduced to apprehensible formulae. Flattened versions of science must bifurcate bodies into external representations that make interiors legible. Here, ‘representations’ means reproductions of bodies in part or in whole. Sometimes, these representations are obvious reproductions, as in portraiture; in other instances, these representations are more abstract, as in letters composed by the bodies in question, or sweeping data sets. Representations differ from metaphors in that they are not code, but rather, direct glimpses into a body's interior.