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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2005
Iconic Androgyne: Byron's Role in
Romantic Sexual Counter Culture
William M. Lofdahl
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
ICONIC ANDROGYNE:
BYRON’S ROLE IN ROMANTIC SEXUAL COUNTER CULTURE
By
WILLIAM M. LOFDAHL
A Thesis submitted to the
Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Masters of Arts
Degree Awarded:
Summer Semester, 2005
The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of William M. Lofdahl
defended on May 2, 2005.
______________________
James O’Rourke
Professor Directing Thesis
_______________________
Eric Walker
Committee Member
_______________________
Barry Faulk
Committee Member
Approved:
______________________________________________________
Bruce Boehrer, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named
committee members.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ..........................................................................................
iv
INTRODUCTION...................................................................................
1
1. BYRON THE CELEBRITY AND POP CULTURE ICON....................
8
2. REEVALUATING THE THIRD SEX……………………………………..
26
3. THE REVOLUTION OF THE ANDROGYNE IN BYRON’S POETRY..
39
4. CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………
55
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................
58
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ....................................................................
62
iii
ABSTRACT
Iconic Androgyne explores the nature of androgyny in both the poetical works of
Lord Byron and in his composition of Byron’s own persona. Most contemporary
scholarship approaches androgyny from a queer theory or feminist theoretical base, and
explore androgyny as a condition where a male character slides away from absolute
masculine subjectivity to occupy a space that hovers somewhere between the
masculine and feminine poles. The result of this idea is that scholars most often view
the androgyne as lacking power. This paper seeks to reevaluate the androgyne and
redefine it in a new environment wherein the persona incorporates the strongest
elements of both genders to create a powerful third sex. Lord Byron helped to create
himself as a mythical androgyne who was eagerly received by a counter-culture
comprised of youth and the rising urban, working class whose radical agenda was to
seek social equality, which included sexual democracy. Thus, the mythic Byron
persona became a figure for a socio-sexual revolution behind which the counter-culture
could rally. Byron’s influence is still felt in the modern day as androgynous or sexually
ambiguous celebrities such as David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and other leaders of the
Glam rock revolution took up the reins to drive the revolution that Byron began.
iv
INTRODUCTION
A standard cliché in our society is that negative publicity is still publicity,
and it keeps those persons being talked about in the minds and on the lips of the
consuming public. In many instances public controversy does more for the
popularity of a celebrity than repeated critical celebrations of skill or other merit
based recognitions. The large circulation of tabloid press, news magazines, the
continued presence of gossip columns, and the rating success of tabloid
television programs, like Celebrity Justice, attest to the public’s craving for
controversy. Take the relatively recent example of the basketball celebrity
Dennis Rodman. Not many would disagree with the fact that he was a talented
ball player, but his skill in the game was not what gave this man his name
recognition. It was in fact the controversies that surrounded his personal life that
led to his celebrity status. Most people know he played basketball, but only the
most avid fans of the sport could relay detailed specifics of his performance on
the court. What the mass culture associates with this man is the nature of his
character. His name conjures up memories of a man in a white wedding dress
with several body piercings and multi-colored hair. Rodman created this image
to create controversy which kept him in the public eye. We should not
undervalue shock-value.
In much the same way, Lord Byron was one of the few poets who gained
celebrity status, of mythic proportions at that, in his own lifetime and beyond.
This fame, or infamy depending on the observer’s point of view, and the
popularity of his writing were not mutually exclusive as in the separation of the
persona and his craft in the Rodman example. What did occur, as Peter
Manning points out, was a winning combination of a brilliant publication and
promotion strategy conceived by John Murray, and the creation and rise of the
Byronic myth, achieved partly by the contributions of Annabella Milbanke,
Caroline Lamb and other women of prominence in Byron’s life whose writings
and general gossip about their relations with the poet and his adeptness as a
lover and a scoundrel gave birth to the myth. However, most of the credit for his
meteoric rise should be given to Byron himself for developing a complex strategy
1
of self-promotion, which Francis Wilson contends began to spin out of Byron’s
control when it fell into the hands of the public. In essence, Byron’s poetry and
stories about the man himself, whether revealed or endorsed by the poet or
invented from the imagination of the public through a process of fantasy, became
publicly traded commodities.
This kind of character creation is not a new concept in marketing the
commodified self. Since the early nineteenth-century the growing consumer
sphere moved out of neighborhood markets which carried products that satisfied
a need, like offering soap to one who needed it, to a more crowded marketplace
where there were choices in the soap that was bought. With more competition,
the manufacturers of these commodities sought ways to ensure the popularity of
their particular product. To continue with the example given, manufacturers of
soap began branding their product to distinguish it from the competition and
marketing that brand to increase its popularity with the consumer.
This need for individuation also occurred in the creative marketplace. The
author or composer or artist whose name appears on a piece is the brand name
of that piece, and just like that bar of soap, artistic products were bought up
based largely on brand recognition. However, distributors of these artistic
products did little in the way of mass marketing. Nicolas Mason points out that
the marketing of brand names was not widely practiced until the 1770s when
branding itself actually took hold (419). What Mason calls the “commodification
of the aesthetic” (413), or the marketing of artistic products, did not begin until
branding took hold in other markets. It is true that publishing houses and paytheaters existed long before the late eighteenth-century, and the name brand of
the poem, play or painting played the key role in how well the product moved off
the shelves or filled theater seats. In essence, the name of the artist was name
brand of the piece. However, in these instances, the name brand mostly gained
its recognition by the quality of the product rather than the marketing of that
product. This early type of branding, based on audience response, is different
than what Mason describes as happening later in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury when publishers actively devised marketing campaigns to sell their
represented artists. The popularity an author experienced was based on a
2
shared perception by the public of the work’s quality as well as a perceived
reliability of the author to continue to produce such work. Any aesthetic judgment
is a subjective one. The amount of public consensus is the measure of
popularity; talented writers had a larger share of the audience. Even to this day
the longevity of aesthetic commodities is most often merit based, the merit
obviously subjectively ascribed. The marketing of a product can only go so far if
its quality is substandard.
This merit-based recognition takes time to develop. Prior to the mass
advertising of these artistic products, sales of the pieces occurred relatively
slowly. Specifically talking about literary products, readership or sales grew by
the word-of-mouth reporting of the merits of the particular pieces. In this way,
literary branding is a cumulative process. As more people liked the piece, a
wider audience bought the piece based on the recommendation of others. This
slow process of gaining fame as an author does not fit with the literal overnight
success of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Mason rightly points out that
having the original printing of the text sell out in three days based purely on its
artistic merits is close to impossible (424). He continues by acknowledging that
other scholars like Jerome Christensen and Peter Manning recognized that the
sale of Childe Harold did not follow the regular pattern of mouth to ear
advertising, but they primarily attributed the success of the piece to the shrewd
business sense of John Murray (414). While Murray was no doubt a major factor
in the work’s success, Mason noticed that there was considerable conversation
about Byron prior to the release of the poem that prompted much of its instant
success.
Without retelling the circumstances related by Mason that created “Brand
Byron,” it is that label itself which is important to this investigation. Just like
Rodman, Byron’s character became the most recognizable feature of the poet. I
am not by any means devaluing the work that Byron produced, because despite
the sudden success of Childe Harold, the longevity of the poem’s popularity and
the generally favorable critical responses to most of his poems, especially in the
face of some objections about their morality or lack thereof, are testaments to
their artistic merits and the talent of the poet. Rather what I am stating is that the
3
various controversies surrounding the poet are what kept his name in the mouth
of the public and made him a legend in his own time.
A great deal of scholarship has been produced about the star status of
Lord Byron, much of which has become the foundation for this current
investigation. Within the study of Byron’s celebrity, most scholars place their
emphasis on the phenomenon that Frances Wilson calls “Byromania,” adopting
the term coined by Annabella Milbanke. Lord Byron was elevated to the status of
superstar in his own lifetime, and after his death, the legend lived on as
embellishments of his deeds both in controversy and adoration. His mystique
continues to the modern day. This mythic personage’s presence remains
palpable in any of a number of cultural settings, modes of dress, behavioral
mannerisms, and references to him in various media. No other literary figure has
had his name attached so popularly and extensively as to become a stereotypical
characterization for both fictional and real-life people, as the Byronic hero.
Starting with literary characters invented during Byron’s lifetime and continuing
through pop-celebrities like James Dean, Elvis and David Bowie, scholars, fans,
and critics have made careers for themselves by identifying Byron in these later
figures. The Byronic hero is an old notion that has fallen out of favor in
contemporary Byron scholarship, partly because over the years that concept has
undergone an almost exhaustive study and partly because the Byronic hero
establishes a certain paradigm for primarily male behavior which is slowly
beginning to break down in academic circles as more inquiries uncover the
“queerness” of Byron.
Queer theory scholarship concentrates on the elements of the
homosexual or homoerotic themes in Byron’s life and work. Byron’s dubious
sexual escapades serve as the springboard from which critics attempt to find
imitations of Byron’s life in his art. Abigail Keegan and other critics work
extensively with Byron’s sexual epic Don Juan since it is the piece where
scholars agree that Byron most openly disclosed homoerotic themes through the
characters’ various encounters and, as Jonathan Gross points out, through the
narrator himself. Don Juan is also the epic in which the poet is most easily
identifiable in the characters he creates, though once one becomes familiar with
4
the pattern, finding him in his other works becomes a relatively simple matter.
In contemporary scholarship, Byron’s homosexual behavior has taken the
spotlight, moving other episodes of “deviant” sexuality into the shadows. His
numerous encounters with women often receive less attention than the few
occasions where male/male relations are depicted or implied. A review of his
actual liaisons, as recorded in his own journals as well as those with whom he
came in contact, yields a seemingly clear preference for male/female relations,
especially in his maturity. However, even during the nineteenth-century rumors
of sodomitical activity helped to shape the mythical Byron. Though his major
public scandal during his lifetime was his incestuous relationship with Augusta,
Fiona MacCarthy notes that during that time “Byron’s homosexuality became a
buried subject” (564). Just because it is a buried subject does not mean that the
public was unaware of it. MacCarthy points out that the anonymous publication of
the poem, Don Leon, in 1866 rather unflatteringly portrays the life of the poet as
“a series of sodomitical episodes culminating in anal intercourse with Lady Byron”
(564). The societal standards in Britain of the day kept same sex relations
hidden and, in most cases, conducted outside a person’s public heterosexual
lifestyle, yet it seems that the public as least speculated about Byron’s
homosexuality. Though Byron was not blatant about his male liaisons, he was
very outspoken about other social issues that contributed to his overall
hedonism. He continually thumbed his nose at societal standards of morality and
decorum and conducted his affairs in defiance of those cultural standards. This
defiance actually contributes to what Peter Graham presents as Byron’s selfpromotion or mythmaking, which leads into the central thesis of this essay.
Byron’s popularity in the nineteenth-century, both in Britain and on the
continent, especially within youth culture and the liberal, urban working class (I
say urban to make the distinction between it and the more conservative rural
working class), bears a striking resemblance to the relationship between youth
and rock and roll stars of the “British Counter-Culture” between 1966 and 1973
that Daniel Foss and Ralph Larkin have called a “historically unprecedented . . .
youth movement” (qtd. in Nelson 6). However, there are parallels between the
youth-driven, cultural revolution of that period and the one that took place during
5
Byron’s lifetime, thereby contradicting Foss and Larkin’s assessment. Just as
Nelson suggests that the more recent cultural uprising was a reaction against
capitalistic systems, the counter-culture movement of the nineteenth-century was
born out of the rising urban working class and carried by the youth culture as a
reaction to capitalism and industrialization. In 1845 Frederick Engels wrote in his
The Condition of the Working Class in England that Byron was popularly read
among the working class. Engels states that “Byron attracts their sympathy by
his sensuous fire and by the virulence of his satire against the existing social
order. While the middle classes, on the other hand, have on their shelves only
ruthlessly expurgated ‘family’ editions . . . prepared to suit the hypocritical moral
standards of the bourgeoisie” (Critical Heritage 368). Though beginning humbly,
Liberalism and Democratic thought were spreading throughout Britain as the
Romantic counter-culture movement grew. Showing all of the parallels between
the two counter-culture movements is far too expansive a task to wholly address
here. This project will focus on the revolution of sexuality as part of the larger
issues of social liberty that occurred during the nineteenth-century while drawing
the connection between the counter-culture movement of the twentieth-century
and its origins in Romantic Britain.
Byron’s celebrity, his superstar status, his popularity among the youth and
otherwise free spirits of Europe, and the degree to which his sexuality is an
integral part of the Byronic mythos are strikingly similar to the atmosphere
created by the Glam movement during the late 1960's and early 70's. During that
movement, much of the pop, underground culture was represented by Glam-rock
musicians who, like Byron, were shocking the conservative British hegemony
with their questionable, ambiguous sexuality. In particular David Bowie’s alter
ego during the period, Ziggy Stardust, became the poster-image for the
movement and the symbol of social revolution. Stardust, and by association,
Bowie seem to fit into the new Byronic male uncovered by queer scholarship.
Both pop-icon figures not only represented socio-sexual revolution, but they
became objects of sexual desire for the participants in that sexual revolution. An
audience finding itself attracted to those images of revolution was forced to face
its own ambiguous, and at least homosocial, nature. It was particularly
6
Stardust’s androgyny which made the character so appealing to a vast and
diverse audience. In much the same way, on the level of character if not
appearance, Byron had the same effect on his liberal, activistic, audience during
the first half of the nineteenth-century, which continued to influence subsequent
generations of social revolutionaries and as we will see the Glam movement
itself. A second historical irony is that of the young, revolutionary Romantic
poets, Byron was action-oriented. Where the rest talked of political revolution
and reform, Byron actively took up the sword, yet it was his sexual politics which
left a legacy behind. On the surface it appears that the androgynous, sexually
dubious Byron overshadowed the politically volatile Byron. However, sexuality in
the nineteenth-century was a hot-bed of political activity. The combination of the
poet’s own open sexuality and the sexual issues presented in his work was as
much a case of political activism as his involvement in Greek independence.
Though unlike Greek independence, the cause of sexual liberation was a lifelong
pursuit. This investigation reevaluates the role of Byron’s sexuality, specifically
how Byron’s sexual persona elevated him to the status of celebrity and how that
androgynous persona became an iconic figure for the popular culture which
sought sexual democracy.
The first chapter will firmly establish Byron’s role as an iconic figure in the
youth-driven social movements of the nineteenth-century. The next will establish
the androgynous persona of Byron and show the necessity to reevaluate the
androgyne from a position of increased, rather than neutered, power. The
section will conclude by showing how that figure reappeared in the British
Counter-Culture movement of the twentieth-century, and will briefly describe its
impact in that period so as to open the door to chapter three and a discussion of
Byron’s poetry. Chapter three presents textual examples of the androgyne in its
new context as a figure-head for youth-driven, liberal radicalism which envisioned
not only social equality and economic stability in the face of Britain’s growing
industrial economy, but also (and more specifically for this essay) a sexual
equality which extended beyond simple gender equality to a complete freedom of
sexuality, inclusive of gender identity and sexual practice.
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CHAPTER 1
BYRON THE CELBRITY AND POP-CULTURE ICON
In order to fully embrace the idea that Byron became a pop-culture icon,
this chapter must begin with a discussion of contemporary celebrity theory as it is
focused on today’s electronic mass media and then reposition it to a nineteenthcentury context in order to see pop-cultural studies’ applicability when discussing
Byron and nineteenth-century counter-culture. Celebrity and pop-culture
scholarship primarily focuses on the second-half of the twentieth century, since
the rise in prominence and influence of electronic, mass media hyped-up or
otherwise created these personalities and brought the public sphere face to face
with them.
While introducing the idea of the celebrity in his book Celebrity and Power,
P. David Marshal draws from the work of Francesco Alberoni when he says that
“stars are a modern phenomenon that has emerged from the developing
complexity and social fluidity of modern society. They are an elite ‘whose
institutional power is very limited or non-existent, but whose doings and way of
life arouse a considerable and sometimes even maximum degree of interest’”
(15). Byron clearly fits into the category of “star” as defined by Marshal who
gives that epithet to one whose character “has transcended the films that he or
she has performed in and created an aura” (12). Though his discussion
concentrates on modern film stars, the definition is easily adaptable to Byron,
since the poet’s persona extended far beyond his poems, though Byron’s star
status works somewhat in the reverse because Byron’s aura was not created out
of the characters in his poems. Instead, the characters like Don Juan, Manfred,
and Lara, arouse more interest because the audience reads Byron in the
character. As for the notion of limited or non-existent institutional power, that is
perhaps true in contemporary western society where, as Marshal notes, the
machinery of mass media was constructed to divide the social from the political
so that the constructed celebrities with social power are prevented from carrying
their influence over to the political arena. In the nineteenth-century no such
8
buffer existed, and often artists from various media held considerable sway over
public opinion which gave them institutional power.
Today’s mass media is largely responsible for the creation of our
superstars; therefore they are controllable by the same institutions. The images
created become the living embodiment of certain desires held by the public who
live these fantasies vicariously through the stars whose lives they follow. At the
same time these stars help to perpetuate the hope for the fulfillment of the
public’s desires. Despite the diversity of the desires held, no matter what fantasy
the public wishes to play out, there is an overriding theme that is found within and
drives each one of them, the desire to be recognized, to stand apart, essentially,
to be an individual. In his book Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer states,
Stars articulate what it is to be a human being in contemporary
society; that is they express the particular notion we hold of the
person, of the ‘individual’. They do so complexly, variously—they
are not straightforward affirmations of individualism. On the
contrary, they articulate both the promise and the difficulty that the
notion of individuality presents for all of us who live by it. (7)
Dyer goes on to explain some of the complexity of individuality when one is trying
not only to identify the individual but also identify the individual’s place in a
constructed social order. The celebrity as a portrayer of individuality
demonstrates to the public throng how to live and succeed in society. He goes
on to explain:
Stars represent typical ways of behaving, feeling, and thinking in
contemporary society, ways that have been socially, culturally and
historically constructed. Much of the ideological investment of the
star phenomenon is in the stars seen as individuals, their qualities
seen as natural. . . . Stars are also embodiments of the social
categories in which people are placed and through which they have
to make sense of their lives . . . categories of class, gender,
ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. (16)
What happens when the celebrity is primarily self-constructed with a propensity
for subversion? Byromania moves beyond the realm of innocuous celebrity
9
worship and establishes itself in the political arena as an opposing force to the
dominant social order. Byron created his persona purposefully to challenge
gendered cultural norms, and the resulting character took its place at the head of
rising social issue of sexual equality. By discussing the celebrity model and
retroactively applying it to Byron’s lifetime, we can see how the ideas discussed
above work with regards to Byron and his effect on his public with regard to its
social struggles.
Greame Turner and other academicians collaborated to produce Fame
Games, the majority of which traces the emergence of a domestic brand of
celebrity in Australia, whereas previously the Australian cult of celebrity worship
relied on importing its icons from Hollywood. However, the authors are quick to
notice a parallel in the birth of Australia’s own celebrity culture with the initial rise
of popular culture in early nineteenth-century Britain. The introduction of the
book devotes a number of pages to the development of the celebrity.
Essentially, these authors also look at the explosion of the consumer class and
the commodification of the aesthetic in much the same way that Nicholas Mason
does in “Building Brand Byron,” but Turner focuses on the media’s role in the
production and promotion of the celebrity, which (with the exception of semantic
differences of media and journalism rather than commerce and commodification)
are the same ideas.
Just as Mason mapped and discussed the public sphere in the context of
the marketplace, Fame Games discusses the public sphere in the context of the
discourse of public affairs. The book adopts the model created by John Hartley
in Popular Reality which shows how issues concerning British culture were
pondered over by what Hartley called the “traditional public sphere.” According
to Turner, Hartley explains that this incarnation of the public sphere was
dominated by “a culturally homogenous group of Enlightenment intellectuals
committed to the process of rational debate; their ideas circulating among a
limited but influential public” (7). As Britain moved into the nineteenth century,
the traditional public sphere gave way to a more democratic one. The public
sphere truly became public. Hartley goes on to state that the “major
contemporary, political issues of today (environmental, ethnic, sexual, and youth
10
movements)” (7) all arose outside of the traditional public sphere. Rather than
coming out of intellectual, social or political elitist debates, they were “informed,
shaped, developed, and contested within the privatized public sphere of
suburban media consumerism” (qtd. in Turner 7).
Referring back to Celebrity and Power, Marshal states that “the celebrity
as a public individual who participates openly as a marketable commodity serves
as a powerful type of legitimation of the political economic model of exchange
and value --- the basis of capitalism --- and extends the model to include the
individual” (x). For Byron, the commodified poet and his commodified poetry
work conjunctively as a kind of two-handed engine. Both commodities work
together to propel and enlarge the Byronic myth. Yet Byron’s iconic status does
not rest solely on these two commodities.
In Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer discusses the circumstances behind the
popularity of a particular figure at a particular time. He believes that the celebrity
“embodies what the discourses designate as the important-at-that-time central
features of human existence” (18). Fame Games also explores this idea in what
it calls “flashpoints” of culture “where a particular celebrity dominates media
coverage, producing an excessively focused global culture” (3). In the converged
context of journalistic media and consumerism the book continues by stating that
“there is a common element which links the flashpoint moments with an industry
that supports itself by producing celebrity for everyday consumption. That
element is that appeal of the celebrity for media audiences” (5). Also, combining
the two ideas, flashpoints are created when the celebrity figure embodies the
ideas of what the focused culture views as the important features of human
existence, in Bryon’s case sexual liberty. Making the leap from journalistic media
to literary publicity, self-promotion, and character mimesis in the discussion of
Byron as a pop-culture icon is relatively simple. Byron and Murray advertised his
sexuality at a time when the youth-culture struggled for sexual democracy. The
continued popularity of Byron throughout his life and continuing beyond his death
to today is the result of a myth perpetuated by a sub-culture whose goal of sexual
freedom, though making strong advances, has not been fully achieved, making
Byron a rather long flashpoint.
11
We know that over the years Byron’s publisher, John Murray, played a
significant role in the creation of the Byronic myth. However, Mason, drawing on
evidence of Murray’s finances, points out that though he posted several
advertisements in the days leading up to the publication of the first two cantos of
Chile Harold, which surely contributed, in some degree, to the work’s rapid
success, Murray spent considerably less money in the promotion of Chile Harold
than was common at that time (425-426). The rapid success came from Byron
himself. It was Byron’s own political or socially radical sense that led him to
recognize the flashpoint in his own society which caused the new public sphere
to welcome him with open arms.
This new public sphere itself was representative of the growing interest in
social democracy with the rise of an urban working class readership who sought
social equality. Peter Schock draws from work of William St. Clair who
demonstrates that “the poet’s readership expanded enormously in the 1820’s
through cheap editions of Don Juan, which made them accessible to the working
class” (100). Karen McGuire also points out the expanse of Byron’s readership.
She notes that beyond the sales figures for Byron’s work a large percentage of
his audience consisted of people who shared copies of his work with friends,
people who borrowed copies from circulating libraries, and people who read
copied passages in the more easily accessible commonplace books. She too
utilized St. Clair’s study in which he estimates that Byron’s readership was
actually five to ten times higher than the actual sales numbers (143). In 1900
Mark Rutherford wrote in “The Morality of Byron’s Poetry” on the comparison
between Byron’s works and the poetry produced during his time. He states,
A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people. He was able to obtain
a hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even
of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre. Modern
poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class . . . Byron secured
access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by
strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equaled and never perhaps
surpassed (Critical Heritage 372).
12
Whereas the public sphere of old was comprised of the socio-political and
intellectual elite who were the arbiters of social issues who handed down their
judgments to the lower orders, the new sphere of the nineteenth-century was
centered in the lower orders whose judgments began exerting pressure upward.
In providing a different perspective of the nature and workings of the
public sphere in the nineteenth-century, Fame Games continues by drawing from
the work of C. Lumby who contends that the nature of the popular reporting
media is not a degradation of the eighteenth-century ideal (that ideal being the
elitist centered sphere), but rather a transformation which reflects the
“importance of the domestic, the feminine, the private and the personal” (qtd. in
Turner 7, my emphasis). Lumby’s observation concisely summarizes the nature
of the public sphere’s modulation to accommodate the growing, working class,
commercial culture by focusing on the home-grown concerns of the populace. In
this new arena, Turner considers the celebrity “a combination of the commercial
interests of the cultural industry . . . and the shifting desires of the audience”
(11), an audience which reflects the capitalistic and democratic desires of the
rising working class consumers.
Marshal presents the celebrity as the embodiment of the democratic age
in that the notion of celebrity offers the possibility of open attainability (6). The
public sphere that began to solidify its shape during the early nineteenth-century
is solely responsible for the creation or destruction of the celebrity. Furthermore,
the sign of celebrity offers the possibility that anyone may achieve that status
within the public sphere. Marshal explains that “the restrictions of a former
hierarchy [the aristocracy] are no longer valid in the new order that is determined
by merit and/or the acquisition of wealth” (6). From this perspective, Byron’s
aristocratic position had little to do with his celebrity status. His being of the
aristocracy only added color to Byron’s character. Since his lifestyle and writings
dealt with the same cultural issues as that of the urban working class, they
perceived him to be more in touch with their own feeling, which removed some of
the distance between the classes; he was counted amongst the radicals. In other
words he was not a celebrity because he was an aristocrat but because he
created himself as a voice and a figure of the counter-culture. His liberal views
13
went against the dominant political structure, and he realized that a growing
segment of the public was also shifting its views. He recognized the flashpoint
and promoted himself as the herald of this new democratic sensibility.
In 1812 Byron made his last appearance and first speech in the House of
Lords. His infamous speech opposing the Frame-Breaking Bill proved to be
political suicide. Needless to say the speech had no measurable effect on the bill.
After the speech the members of the Tory party scoffed at the young Byron for
his eloquent yet irreverent rantings, while members of his own Whig party quickly
scrambled to denounce Byron’s views as not part of the party’s agenda in an
attempt to save their own reputations in the aftermath. Mason believes that
Byron never meant to make any political gains by his participation in that
meeting. He feels that Byron was already working his self-promotion as a poet.
According to Mason, “Byron paid little attention to his critics, focusing instead on
the encouraging words of radicals” (330). In the ten-odd days between Byron’s
appearance in the House and the publication of Childe Harold, Byron’s name
appeared quite conspicuously in the London newspapers and was the talk of the
town. When his poem was released, the public, a broad cross-cut of the different
social strata, rushed out to read what else this radical had to say. Though
McGuire points out the initial printing of Childe Harold was not affordable to the
working class, he showed that over time, through the publication of cheaper
editions and copy-sharing, they too were able to at least read if not own a copy
of that work. So a large segment of the higher and lower orders clearly fell in
love with the Byron brand of socio-political commentary. It is at this point in 1812
that Byron had become a superstar, but it would be a few years before he truly
became an icon for the youth driven counter-culture.
The other important outcome of the frame-breaking speech was the actual
death of his political career, an outcome that I argue was also part of his design.
With Byron’s political bridges burned and his aristocratic station worth little more
than a social pass card, the liberal public was free to adore him as one of its own.
To answer the question posed earlier, this is what happens when a selfconstructed celebrity has a propensity for subversion. He becomes a martyr for
the radically liberal politicians in Parliament and eventually the iconic figure for
14
the Romantic counter-culture movement.
What came after was natural. Readers of Childe Harold were looking for
more examples of brazen social and political commentary in the text. They
unpacked the cultural commentaries found in both Harold’s experiences and the
narrator’s commentary and attributed these ideas to the author. Soon, the public
began seeing not just Byron’s messages in the work, but the poet himself. So
controversies present in the poem became a part of Byron’s life whether true or
not, which helped to increase the myth. Even the negative criticisms of
immorality were perceived by the radical public as something to be celebrated, if
only because it offended the old guard.
In Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer states, “no one aspect [of a persona] is
more real than another. How we appear is no less real than how we have
manufactured that appearance, or than the ‘we’ that is doing the manufacturing.
Appearances are a kind of reality, just as manufacture and individual persons
are”. He continues to say that the “whole media construction of stars encourages
us to think in terms of ‘really’” (2). The media construction in this case is like
critical reviews of Byron’s work and Murray’s marketing, since tabloid press,
though operating in the nineteenth-century, was not the media powerhouse it is
currently. Marshal’s adaptation of phrases common to the contemporary cult of
the celebrity helps to demonstrate the meaning of Dyer’s comment. We as
endearing fans often ask if a certain star is “really” the same in person as he is
on screen (17). What happens in the minds of Byron’s fans is to wonder if Harold
is really Byron or whether it is the narrator or Don Juan who is really the poet.
So, rather than trying to place aspects of the star’s performance personalities, we
try to identify our perceived (often self-created) notions of Byron’s social
mannerisms and personal philosophy in the fictive characters he creates.
While it is commonplace for an audience, particularly literary scholars, to
look for the author’s message in the body of any text, thereby assigning an
agenda to that work, something more than that was happening with Byron. As
he produced more works he did not just remain popular; his popularity as a
persona grew wildly. Even works that were poorly received on the grounds of
their aesthetic shortcomings and more importantly censured because of his
15
immorality were snatched up by the readership, like Don Juan which evidence
shows sold less than some of his other works. However, some of the scandal
concerning the poem’s immorality made it an important work for the underground
social revolution. Another comment from “The Morality of Byron” states that
it is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults
than can be charged against him that wherever there was any
latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of
ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the
people lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept. The
cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have [read a frightful
lot], are not competent to estimate the debt we owe to Byron.
(Critical Heritage 372)
From the publication of Childe Harold throughout the rest of his life, the public
feverishly devoured every publication, every story, every sighting, anything
associated with him, and as a result, the mythical or legendary Byron grew bigger
than the flesh and blood author. After the publication of the first two cantos of
Don Juan in 1819, the public’s fantasy and his mythmaking was spinning out of
control, sometimes in conjunction with his literary popularity and sometimes
independent of it, and the hegemony began to see the threat to its stability as a
result of Byromania. Ghislaine McDayter comments:
The literary and real Byronic worlds began to collapse in the public
imagination, making it possible for Byron’s seduction of his
readership to slip from the metaphoric to the literal. Following the
public’s lead, the critics hostile to Byron began to translate his
literary seductiveness into material moral depravity, with Byron
playing the role of lustful magus in a sexual debauch with a crowd
of innocent victims. (47)
Though these critics still celebrated the high aesthetic quality of Byron’s poetry,
many of the themes fell on harsh criticism, which just added more fuel to the
counter-cultural fire that was already white hot with youthful energy. Even John
Murray feared the backlash that would come from the publication of Don Juan.
The first printing was done without Byron’s or Murray’s name appearing
16
anywhere on the edition, though MacCarthy comments that the public generally
knew the authorship of the poem (365). In fact, Murray’s concern for the
reputation of his firm ran contrary to Byron’s desire to spread his radical social
messages. MacCarthy relates that in 1822 Byron, fed up with Murray’s
unauthorized edits to remove scandalous lines in his work and his continued
trepidation over Don Juan, finally decommissioned Murray as his primary
publisher in favor of John Hunt who published the bulk of Byron’s writing from
that point on (440). Hunt worked with Byron to dispense his messages and aid in
the promotion of Byron’s character and the growth of Byromania.
In discussing the propensity then as well as now of discussing the man
more than his work, Wilson states that “Byron’s poetry once had the same impact
on his readers as his personality, for another effect of Byromania was the
extraordinary and unparalleled counter-culture of imitations which his writing also
inspired” (5). But even in these imitative texts, the focus was not on recreating
the poet’s sense of expression, for many of these pieces like Don Leon are poor
and half-hearted attempts to capture the poet’s genius. Mostly, the majority of
these mimetic authors simply thought to put their own spin on the often
scandalous aspects of Byron’s life through completely fictional scenarios, thereby
cashing in on Byron’s popularity. McDayter comments that Byron’s “poetic
career best exemplifies the nineteenth-century explosion of literary
commodification” (44).
Continuing the discussion of Byron’s unbridled success, Wilson writes that
eventually the Byronic became detached from the actual character of the poet
such that Byron lost complete ownership of the image. She states that the
“Byronic became public property” (6). Though I do not doubt that this happened
in some manner, I am not sure that it occurred to the extent that Wilson
maintains. Byron as the self-promoter of his image may not be responsible for
the imitations of his stories by others, but he is the catalyst for creating the brand.
It is true he publicly denied any association with the counterfeit texts that were
being produced. However, most of his objections come from his personal
conceit; he did not want his name associated with what he would have surely
considered work that displayed little if any of his talent for verse. In researching
17
this idea, I could not find any evidence that Byron posted any objections to the
stories being produced that did not claim his authorship but where the significant
character was patterned after the greatly exaggerated stories of his debauchery
and lasciviousness. In actuality these stories were an integral part of the everexpanding, cyclical Byronic universe which firmly established him as a cultural
icon for the liberal counter-culture that began to worry the establishment. Even
the once revolutionary William Wordsworth saw the direction that Byron was
leading his readers. In a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson dated 1820, he fears
that “Don Juan will do more harm to the English character, than anything of our
time; not so much as a Book;--But thousands who would be afraid to have it in
that shape, will batten upon choice bits of it, in the shape of Extracts” (Critical
Heritage 164). Wordsworth’s fear was that Byron’s social criticism would spread
to his audience who would instigate actual cultural rebellion to change the
conservative British character, which did occur. However, Byron’s influence was
not achieved by duping an innocent, unsuspecting public; his young and urban
working class audience was prepared for just such a socio-political upheaval. To
them, Byron’s ideals as presented in Don Juan and other works reflecting the
growing dissatisfaction with British society that these two groups, in particular,
felt. Marshall explains, “The celebrity sign effectively contains this tension
between authentic and false cultural value. In its simultaneous embodiment of
media construction, audience construction, and the real living and breathing
human being, the celebrity sign negotiates the competing and contrasting
definitions of its own significance” (xi). There had always been tension between
the two poets.
For Wordsworth, coming from a position supportive of the traditional
English conservatism, Byron represented a false cultural value that he felt would
undermine the foundation of English identity. Byron felt that Wordsworth was not
a true revolutionary. Wordsworth promoted the idea that his poetry was the true
voice of the people, since he made the decision to use plain language and
versification to relate the messages in his work. Though his style did make his
poems more accessible to common readers, Byron criticized the messages being
presented. Byron felt that Wordsworth was representing the false cultural value,
18
at least the cultural value of the counter-culture. Byron saw his own significance
being validated by Wordsworth’s disapproval. Byron believed that his AntiRomanticism was the true voice of the revolution.
Now that the iconic Bryon is in place it is time to investigate the parallel
between him and his figurative descendant of the early 1970’s, David Bowie, who
also took his place as a radical figurehead for the similarly liberal sexual
revolution during the named “British counter-culture” movement. This movement
has many explicit similarities to the youth movement that Byron fueled during the
nineteenth century. In her book dealing with the late twentieth-century British
counter-culture, Elizabeth Nelson states, “That the counter-culture activists were
the heirs of the nineteenth-century Romantics . . . is suggested by their
respective rejection of authority and restraint and insistence upon the autonomy
of the individual and his/her freedom from traditions and conventions which had
ceased to be liberating.” These conventions were opposed by promoting such
social ideas as “interest in communal living” and the “abolition of institutionalized
sexual relationships” (9). Both of these areas are completely interconnected
producing a new order of social democracy.
This democratic community was so much more than simply accepting
divergent sexual and gender types. It was a homogenizing of these types into
one community. It was not just recognizing homosexuals, heterosexuals,
masculine women, and effeminate men. This community became an elaborate
cross-connections of all these character types to produce entirely different
classifications of sexuality wherein the old labels just mentioned ceased to exist.
Essentially, those people were no longer identified by their various sexualities but
by inclusion within this underground sexual democracy. This community
passively brought about social change during the 1960’s and 70’s. Nelson
states, “Revolutionary community control suggested that it might be possible to
change society not by the traditional – and generally considered fraudulent –
revolutionary practice, but by contracting relationships which were fundamentally
different from those existing within ‘straight’ society. In other words, the
revolution could take place while people continued to develop a different lifestyle
which reflected the embryonic alternative society” (103). Nelson also speculates
19
that the messages of some rock musicians of the movement, of whom we can
include Bowie, “suggested to many young people the inability of the ruling
generation to continue to enforce the playing of life’s games according to its
rules” (46), thus giving energy to the production of those revolutionary
communities. In his book, Glam!, Barney Hoskyns states that “Ziggy enabled
Bowie to turn himself into an icon of deviance” (33).
Much as Byron had, Bowie created a public persona which propelled him
to superstardom almost as quickly as his Romantic progenitor. In a very telling
parallel to Byron’s recollection of Byromania where he proclaimed to have
awoken and found himself famous, Bowiemania is described by Bowie’s on-stage
partner, Mick Ronson. “The success was overnight. It was like waking up one
morning and finding that we were suddenly superstars” (qtd. in Hoskyns 34).
Bowie’s not-so-sudden, sudden rise in fame was the direct result of the creation
of Bowie’s most famous alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust. In a very short amount of
time, with the help of mass marketing and self-promotion, this character
developed legions of fans who lived every word of social criticism and every call
to cultural revolution that rang out from his voice over the microphone, and they
too created fantastic stories of their hero which often completely misrepresented
the actual artist.
Toward the end of the 1960’s Bowie was a working musician, but had yet
to achieve the status of star. Similarly to Byron’s Hours of Idleness, Bowie’s
early projects received some positive accolades but on a much smaller scale
than his later productions. As a result, he was not an unknown artist, but neither
did he stand out in his profession. The advent of Ziggy changed all that. Bowie
did not invent Glam as an extension of the British Counter-Culture movement
toward its end. Rather he was inspired by the provocative sexuality of some of
Andy Warhol’s projects like the band Velvet Underground. Bowie adopted some
of the sexually ambiguous glamour and coupled it with his own bi-sexuality and
liberalism to create a figure he knew represented the flashpoint in 1972 British
youth culture. This shift in the counter-culture itself can be likened to the Antiromanticism that Byron spearheaded in his own time where he engaged a radical
shift in the Wordsworthian definition of Romanticism. In effect, that Glam culture
20
was reacting even against other British youths from the early years of the
Counter-Culture of the hippie movement whom they viewed as puritanical in their
own right, according to Hoskyns.
In commenting on the rise of Glam, Hoskyns quotes B. P. Fallon who was
the publicist for the popular band, T. Rex during the era. The members of T.
Rex, like Bowie, reinvented themselves into glam personas. In much the same
way that the Anti-Romantics challenged the rural conservativism of Wordsworth
and the Lake-Romantics, Glam was a reaction to the rural, bluesy-folk music
produced by artists like Bob Dylan who gained considerable influence in Britain.
In the eyes of Bowie and other glam artists, Dylan, British Dylan-like artists, and
the other naturists were far too conservative and restrained within the British
socio-political order to truly cause a stir. Fallon states that “there was too much
grey. What was needed after that was something flash and loud and vulgar and,
to some people, annoying” (5). In much the same way that Byromania
dominated the literary scene during the poet’s lifetime, Hoskyns proclaims that
“Glam swept the nation in ways that were at once innocent and morally
subversive. It called into question received notions of truth and authenticity,
especially in the area of sexuality” (6). In the forward of Glam!, Todd Haynes, the
director the Glam rock tribute movie, Velvet Goldmine, states that because of the
Glam movement “for a brief time pop culture would proclaim that identities and
sexualities were not stable things but quivery and costumed, and rock and roll
paint its face and turn the mirror around, inverting in the process everything in
sight” (x). As much as the atmosphere of that period was politically ripe for such
a movement, and not trying to diminish the seriousness of the message that
Bowie intended for his audience, we must remember that he was as much a
showman as he was an activist. He was a product of his commercial
environment and sought out the role of star.
Bowie granted one of his most famous interviews to Michael Watts in 1972
right at the beginning of Ziggy’s creation. In the interview, Bowie made a
proclamation with much of the same combination of vigor and feigned anxiety
that Bryon displayed early on in his career. Where Byron wrote of himself as “a
Man whose works are praised by Reviewers, admired by Duchesses, & sold by
21
every Bookseller of the Metropolis . . . in every Bookseller’s I see my own name,
& say nothing, but enjoy my fame in secret” (BLJ 1:130-31, author’s emphasis),
Bowie told Watts, “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way” (qtd.
in Paytress 2). And huge he was. Bowie created a character that spoke to
massive throngs of disenfranchised youths because of his purposeful androgyny,
and despite Bowie’s attempt to remove all sexuality from the character, Ziggy
had enormous sex appeal as evident in the vast legions of fans and imitators.
Hoskyns explains, “To give Ziggy the kick-start he deserved, Bowie turned
himself into a wild mutation, a polysexual space invader with a carrot-colored
mullet, ‘snow-white tan’ and skin-tight PVC jumpsuits that only exaggerated his
ectomorphic physique” (32). He plainly states that “From Bowie’s skeletal swish
to [Iggy Pop’s] hard-core masochism, glam rock imposed a fierce, unnatural
femininity on the masculine traditions of rock” (xi). Though the public was meant
to receive Ziggy as a person separate from and distinctly different from Bowie, it
is clear that Ziggy provided a mask by which Bowie could enact his personal
beliefs while maintaining a safe distance from those beliefs.
In his book outlining the significance of the album Ziggy Stardust, Mark
Paytress states that “Ziggy personified several themes taken from Bowie’s own
life” (83), especially his views on sexuality. The Ziggy mask provided a comfort
zone for both Bowie and for those who wished to see Ziggy’s stage spectacle
merely as a camp production. Hoskyns is quick to point out that what Bowie
intended was not meant to be taken lightly. He states that “in the rare tradition of
Oscar Wilde, artists like . . . Bowie were able to elevate artifice and irony in their
work without sacrificing emotion in [his] music. Above all, in its parade of selfstyled androgens and alter-egos, and in its declaration of ‘ch-ch-changes’ [the
refrain of one of Bowie’s more popular songs from that era] as the defining
aspect of teen experience, the glam era presented the world a new and radically
fluid model for sexual identity” (xi).
To this day, Ziggy Stardust is one of most recognizable names in the pop
world. This feat of recognition is all the more impressive when we realize that
Bowie killed off Ziggy after only one year. Yet his brief life left an indelible
impression on pop culture. Twenty years after the birth of Ziggy, he was still the
22
first topic of conversation between a number of interviewers and Bowie. In 1992
Jim Jerome of Life magazine interviewed the star. The first topic discussed was
the impact of Ziggy on the pop world. Bowie states that Ziggy came about
because “everything was boring and conformist in the early ‘70’s.” He further
states that it was the “English insistence on conventionality” that led him to want
to shock the public. The result of Bowie’s efforts was that, though the Glam
movement was fairly short lived, the idea of the androgyne persisted in rock
music and pop culture circles in general. Bowie, through Ziggy Stardust, paved
the way for the big-haired, leather-panted, made-up bands of the 1980’s like
Poison, the Scorpions, and Twisted Sister. However, just as Bowie smoothed
over the trail for the popularity of these artists, that trail had long before been
blazed.
The Glam movement itself was not wholly a new creation of the 1970’s.
Even at the time, people involved in the movement were able to see that they
were taking up the sword of a much older social struggle. In 1974, Albert
Goldman wrote, “By whatever mysterious underground channels, the decadent
sensibility [of the Glam movement] has been conveyed from nineteenth-century
Paris and London” (qtd. in Hoskyns 7). Shelton Waldrep, in his book The
Aesthetics of Self-Invention, traces the production of the self from Oscar Wilde to
David Bowie and explains the process of popular character creations, particularly
in the realm of sexual identity. Though Waldrep begins his investigation with
Wilde, he does acknowledge that sexual self-invention does not begin with Wilde.
He states that “a primary precursor for Wilde . . . may have been a particular
strain of German romanticism that he was to embrace via the formulation of the
Dandy—a concept and performance begun by Byron” (xiv). Bowie’s
performance as Ziggy Stardust and even later sexually ambiguous characters
like Aladdin Sane (A-lad-insane) worked in much the same way that Bowie’s
mythic personas, both as an iconic image and as a messenger advocating and
spreading the messages of the sexual revolution.
Though the circumstantial evidence of Byron’s impact on Bowie is
considerable in the similarities of their created personalities and their missions,
one of Bowie’s post-Ziggy character creations stands as not only an irrefutable
23
link between Byron and Bowie, but also as proof that at Bowie himself saw Byron
as a pop-star. In 1984, David Bowie broke ground in the pop world by creating
the first music video that was a mini-movie. Instead of just having a music video
loosely themed around the meaning of song, Bowie created a 20 minute
featurette with a whole story line of which the song is only a part. In Jazzin’ for
Blue Jean, Bowie plays the role of rock-star Screamin’ Lord Byron who is
portrayed as an updated version of the Byronic myth. Before Lord Byron’s
performance he is shown back stage popping pills in a similar fashion to the
nineteenth century stories of Byron living to excess. For the extended video,
Bowie chose to fashion Screamin’s image after one of Byron’s most memorable
portraits. Screamin’ wears an iridescent, effeminate harem outfit which is an
obvious nod to Byron’s oriental portrait where he is shown wearing Greek military
garments. Bowie even attempted to recreate the myth of Byron’s personality.
Screamin’s audience is completely enthralled by his performance on stage. And
after the performance, Screamin’s off-stage personality is that of a pretentious
and haughty queer. In addition to the obvious nod to the Byronic myth, the
featurette is a self-examination wherein Bowie sees himself as a descendant of
the poet and inheritor of his mission. Depicting Screamin’ in the oriental garb is
more than just a comment on his sexuality. It is also acknowledging the
revolutionary Byron.
Like Byron, Bowie lived the life he wrote songs about. His acceptance
and popularity within the counter-culture was the result of being believed by that
culture. He was doing more than profiting from a certain segment of the youth
culture by adopting a façade of its mannerisms. Sexual democracy was a cause
he wholeheartedly supported. The honesty of his convictions allowed the
subculture to view him as one of their own, and his notoriety as music celebrity
worked with that acceptance to place him at the forefront of the movement.
Waldrep confirms that musician’s “embracing of the sexual underground at the
time was as responsible for Bowie’s influence on sexuality as his subsequent
gender-bending styles” (107), because for all that an image is worth, having a
lack of conviction for the ideas that one espouses is usually fairly easy for an
audience to read. Strong convictions and a powerful delivery of those
24
convictions make the leaders rise to the surface. For all the masks that Bowie
wore, it was his overriding sense of rebellion that stood out. Waldrep explains
that “Bowie never let the radical members of his audience down as he continually
metamorphosed into a succession of ever more literal—and politically astute—
personae” (106). For all of Bowie’s personae and Byron’s audience created
mythos, at the core of each is a person with the strong socio-political convictions
that ran opposed to the dominant political atmosphere of their respective times.
Creating these outrageous and powerful androgynous characters whether in
person, print, or song, the two artists gave very public faces to many people’s
personal struggles with identity and acceptance. McDayter recognizes that
“Byron had created . . . a political mob: a new and powerful force – the
ungoverned reading public – which was capable of destroying the carefully
maintained hierarchies of cultural reproduction” (51). This statement is equally
applicable to the revolutionary force that Bowie created in the 1970’s which
fought for many of the same social liberties as the Romantic sexual counterculture.
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CHAPTER 2
REEVALUATING THE THIRD SEX
Ziggy Stardust’s considerable impact on youth culture, particularly in its
expressions of sexual liberty, helps to demonstrate the potential power that an
androgynous figure can have over a receptive audience. Unlike most critical
treatments of the androgyne, this chapter will reclaim the third sex. In most
cases androgyny in literature is perceived as a shift across a line-segment with
absolute male and absolute female serving as the conceptual endpoints, with the
androgyne hovering somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. In most
instances scholarship focuses on androgyny as a lack or loss of full masculine
subjectivity. Rarely have scholars approached the opposite where the
androgyne represents a shift away from being fully feminine. When the mode of
androgyny is addressed, such a shift is celebrated in feminist theory as an
empowerment of the female, while the more common ex-male androgyne is seen
as having slid away from potency, or the character is written as a comedic stock
character, the eunuch or emasculated male. Byron’s use of the androgyne
complicates these long established perceptions for both effeminate men and
masculine women. In both Lara and The Giaour Byron’s central, sexually
ambiguous page characters are women dressed as boys, yet Byron’s description
intentionally presents them to the audience as soft male figures rather than
women in men’s clothes. The audience does know that they are women, but
Byron does not wish the audience to see them as women in drag. However, he
does not wish the audience to view them simply as boys. Instead Byron is
purposefully attempting to blur the gender distinctions. To further complicate the
matter, each page has a powerful, heroic male lover who breaks the fully
masculine paradigm by maintaining tender relations with the page characters.
Byron is promoting the ideas that not only are there no absolutes when it comes
to gender, but also that traditional gender typing and cross-matching does not
work in these tragic love stories. The purpose of this chapter is to redefine
androgyny by moving it off of the traditional linear spectrum and reestablishing it
26
in a multi-dimensional space which supports all variants of gender and sexuality.
In this new definition, sexuality and gender are closely interconnected. Here,
neither sexual preference nor sexual potency is dependent on gender
stereotypes. The Byronic androgyne gains power after freeing itself from
normative gender associations.
Prior to recognizing androgyny as something different, as a third sex,
scholars who ventured into the realm of sexual ambiguity did so from one of two
established theoretical bases, feminism and queer theory. Though approaching
androgyny from a feminist perspective yielded valuable insight into the nature
and desires of the Romantic poet, the scholars who approached the topic from
that perspective chose to ignore a great deal of the physical sexuality that
pointed in the direction of homoeroticism, choosing instead to focus more on a
Freudian or Lacanian reading of the texts to find either Oedipal or
developmental-stage neuroses. Critics like Christina Dokou combine the two
psychoanalytic approaches in an attempt to uncover the reason for androgyny’s
presence.
In Dokou’s investigation of Don Juan, she focuses most of her
attention toward a Lacanian read in the lack of masculinity in Juan. The course
of her investigation depicts the epic as journey towards male self-actualization for
the title character who is constantly hampered along the way not only by the
women he encounters in the narrative but also by the sexual situations in which
he finds himself. All of these obstacles result in the protagonist ( I say
protagonist here instead of hero because Dokou maintains that Don Juan begins
as all stories begin, according to Lacan, with a lack—in the case of this epic, it
lacks an epic hero) (1) not being able to move through the three stages of
Lacanian development. Ultimately what this produces is an androgynous voice
that is as effective as a woman’s in challenging the patriarchy. Short of retelling
the whole of Dokou’s argument let the example of Juan’s upbringing suffice to
explain the direction that Dokou takes when exploring androgyny.
In looking at the relationship between Juan and Donna Inez during his
formative years, Dokou draws attention to the lack of his father’s presence, which
left Juan without a role model of the patriarchy. That combined with a stifling
mother whose mission is to retain both the physical and mental innocence of the
27
boy keeps him from progressing beyond the early, pre-sexual stage of childhood
development where the boy looks to the mother for nourishment and comfort,
essentially wholeness. In much the same way, the other women in the epic start
out representing that same maternal figure to Juan, and circumstances in their
relationship do not allow him to pass beyond the second or mirror-stage of
development, resulting in Juan never progressing from boyhood to manhood and
taking up his socially rightful place in the patriarchy.
Though Dokou’s investigation relied heavily on Lacanian theory, her book
begins with a brief overview of another feminist theory which creates a pseudoandrogyne. This pseudo-androgyne only exists, in part, in the text. The text
contains a stock, poetic female, like a muse, who is the other side of the male
writer’s creative psyche. By reconciling the male poet and his muse a kind of
androgyne is created, even though it is not represented in the artist or text.
Dokou provides the most succinct description of a classical ideal derived from
Aristophanes. She states that there were three sexes that were composite
constructions, male/male, female/female, and male/female couples joined
together. As a result of mankind’s arrogance the gods split each forming the
binary gender arrangement we know (2). Aristophanes’ theory works well in
conjunction with the Lacanian idea of beginning with a lack, since the separated
genders lack their other half.
Diane Hoeveler is another feminist critic whose important work, Romantic
Androgyny, is grounded in Aristophanes’ theory. The book offers valuable
insights to the various workings of androgyny in the male psyche of the six
canonical male Romantic poets. She begins her treatment of the subject by
tracing the classical philosophical and literary roots of androgyny. Based on the
philosophy of Aristophanes, Hoeveler states that her study
. . . will claim that male poets self-consciously employed the
feminine as “Other” and as an alternative source of value in order to
engage in a fictional completion of their own psyches, and that a
large proportion of the “women” in the poetry of the major
Romantics cannot be understood apart from this radical metaphoric
tradition of literary absorption/cannibalization. (xiv)
28
She goes on to say that “The role of the feminine . . . is simple; she is the
principle of reconciliation, grace, freedom, and wholeness, in other words the
Eternal Feminine within the fallen male poet. The Romantic poets sought
androgynous union with this feminine principle as an enlargement of their own
being” (15). But more importantly she acknowledges the politically rebellious
implications of the figure. “The English Romantic poets, however, were writing in
the more immediately accessible environment of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries’ social, political, economic, religious, and sexual revolutions”
(5). In identifying the women who were not truly women but were figments used
as tools by the Romantic poets, Hoeveler concentrates her attention on the
female characters that have traditionally served as literary devices. Her book
concentrates on discussions of the inspirational muse, ideal mother, idealized
double, and soul mate. All of these characters are common female types in
Romantic poetry, but these figures are not the only androgynes working in the
genre, especially in Byron’s texts. There are other women characters who do not
fall within these male constructions and are meant to be taken as they are
presented, as identities separate and distinct from the male poet or hero. This
disagreement of ideas is not particularly relevant. What is particularly important
about Hoeveler’s idea is that her androgyne (the psyche of the poet when
reconciled with the feminine) gains strength with the unification of masculinity
and femininity. The male poet is made whole through reconciliation with the
feminine. However, her work does not apply the same model to the sexually
ambiguous characters found in the text. Those are still presented from a weaker
position and are still viewed in terms of gender polarity, or lacking full masculinity.
The other major academic arena where critics engage the matter of
androgyny is queer theory. At this stage of Romantic scholarship finding the
homosexual in the literature is fairly old hat, particularly when it comes to Byron’s
works. Byronic queerness owes a debt to Louis Crompton whose Bryon and
Greek Love brought together Byron’s personal philosophies and experiences with
homosexuality and the reflection of those ideas in his poetry. For many who
followed, Crompton effectively “outed” one of the most celebrated rakes in
English literary traditions. Just as Keegan acknowledges the influence of
29
Crompton, I follow suit by acknowledging her work in helping me prepare my
reading of Bryon. For though she does not truly tackle the issue of androgyny,
her reading identifies and analyzes Byron’s various representations of sexuality.
Specifically, her addressing of homosexuality as it differs in the particular
contextual categories of “gender, class, nationality and race” (2) has touched on
my reading of Byronic androgyny. Keegan identifies the varying political
significance of homosexuality dependent on where and how it is placed in the
text.
In much the same way, androgyny can work as described by Hoeveler
and Dokou, or it can also work outside of the feminist reading to include other
social and political issues. However, before I embark on that discussion in the
next chapter, the androgyne must undergo a redefinition to identify the political
strength of the character. Keegan makes the statement that all the various
discussions of sexuality will one day produce a state of what Derrida calls a
“sexual otherwise.” In this concept “there would be no more sexes, there would
be one sex for each time, One sex for each gift. A sexual difference for each gift”
(Derrida 199).
The way I read this statement is to remove the binary constraints in
discussions of gender. When it comes to our psyche we are not any more than
the sum of our parts and not every part of our psyche is oriented in line with our
physical sex. Keegan opens her investigation with a paraphrase of Virginia
Woolf who recognized this idea long before it was adopted by critical theory.
Keegan states that “it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple” (1).
Though no one would honestly deny that each person’s psyche contains
psychological elements of the opposite sex, those who strive to cultivate these
aspects in their lives are most often labeled as homosexual, and those who
explore these aspects in their writing are accused of reducing femininity to
literary devices or stereotypes. Undoubtedly many of these conclusions have
considerable merit, but they cannot be universally applied to all figures, fictional
or flesh and blood.
In her discussion of Gothic Masculinity, Ellen Brinks notices that
“concomitant with increasingly codified gender norms, both literary
30
representations of the period [late eighteenth-century], as well as historical
records, disclose a plethora of transgressive figures that manage to ‘escape’
these confines. And by virtue of its fantastic or non-mimetic mode, gothic
conventions accommodate powerful affective or erotic energies identified with an
‘unrepresentative consciousness,’ without undermining the ‘reality’ of the sexgender binarism expressed in dominant cultural ideologies of the time” (18).
Brinks uses this idea to identify representations of masculinity that question the
dominant views of gender during the Romantic Movement. She identifies a
number of poets, including Byron, who produce male characters in their work
who do not fit into the masculine paradigm and whose intention is to challenge it.
Yet in order to do this safely, the writers work within the Gothic topos to protect
themselves from censure. Incorporating the metaphysical or spectral creates the
“unreal” as a distancing agent from reality. If the audience finds the issues being
presented particularly disturbing, either they or the artist are able to dismiss the
notions as fantastical. The Gothic supernatural works in much the same way as
Hamlet’s mousetrap. Hamlet is free from judgment because the play is only
fiction. It is not his fault that Claudius reacted so strongly to the ideas being
presented.
Brinks continues on to say that “Gothic tropes and tableaux cross a range
of genres and perplex social and ‘natural’ distinctions concerning masculinity and
male sexuality to produce multiple, often contradictory, identifications” (11). The
brief exploration of Sardanapalus in the following paragraph clearly shows Brinks’
theory in action, though it should be remembered that Byron did, in fact, mask
many of his less than popular ideas in Gothic devices. Many of his more biting
commentaries were relegated to the world of codes and secrets, his preferred
method. One thing that is interesting to note is that Hoeveler presents what
appears at first to be an opposing position of the views expressed by Barbara
Judson below. Hoeveler suggests that Sardanapalus might be “an exploration of
the impossibility of androgyny in a society that ultimately values only the
masculine characteristics of aggression and power” (163). What we have to
remember is that both critics are looking at the text from a feminist perspective.
31
In that case both perspectives point out the failure of the masculine. It is just that
in Judson’s reading it is the hegemony’s failure, not the protagonist’s.
In discussing Byron’s play, Judson observes that “the play’s symbolic
world is haunted by such phantom formations as the testicular woman, the
hermaphrodite, and the queen who are duly conjured as soon as Sardanapalus
takes the stage, disporting in drag at the head of his harem’s chorus line” (248).
The feminization of the title character and the presence of the gender-neutral
specter have serious political implications. One could read that by putting the
“hero” figure in drag, Byron is attempting to effeminize patriarchal rule thereby
castrating the established ideology. However, there is another possibility which
moves away from the traditional psycho-feminist reading to one which Judson
points out: the burlesque chorus line scene could be viewed in a positive light as
a “prophetic vision of Sardanapalus as a messianic ruler—Prince of peace and
good will to men” (248). It is this reading that helps to redefine the role of the
androgyne both in Byron’s work and in his personality. Brinks states, “The
disruption of patriarchal culture’s symbolic order from a place seemingly out of
bounds—the place of the marginalized, effeminate male—instead of being a
liability or loss, ironically becomes a part of culture’s highest symbolic
functioning” (12). In this case it is the liberal counter-culture’s symbolic
functioning. Rather than lampooning the patriarchal order, Sardanapalus
presents an alternative social structure which proves to be as effective as the old
order.
One of the keys to this idea rests in the presentation of Sardanapalus.
The play is a tragicomedy that presents serious political issues such as the
present state of the ruling order in scenes of burlesque like the procession of
specters, yet the title character remains heroic throughout the text and his state
remains intact. It is possible to read the burlesque scenes as Byron’s way of
deeming that the commentary is unimportant and only serves as comic relief
between the scenes of true relevance. However Judson introduces the
possibility that Byron might have considered that any commentary on British or
continental European politics is “unworthy of tragic grandeur, subjecting it to the
rough handling of burlesque” (248). Though Byron may not have felt that British
32
politics was worthy of high tragedy, it seems that he did not underestimate the
importance of the issue. Instead, he presented marginalized political issues like
sexuality in the marginalized form of burlesque. We might even say that Byron
was attempting to add poignancy to the genre because of its treatment of the
serious issue of gendered sexuality. In the introduction to this work, I commented
that Byron lived his life of “deviance” openly; he flaunted his antics in the face of
the ruling order. If we combine that idea with the ideas of self-invention and high
burlesque and place them in the 1970’s, we can see how David Bowie continued
the pattern begun by Byron in the creation of Ziggy Stardust and became the
inheritor of this particular method of socio-political commentary. Hoeveler states
that “the androgynous has always been a self-consciously artificial image” (4).
As much as anything else Byron was a consummate performer. Though
his image perhaps spun out of control in the hands of the public, his eroticized,
self-referential poetry, and publicly displayed private life seem to suggest that
Byron approved of the persona being created, even though he wrote a few
unconvincing letters to the contrary. The more scandalous and arguably more
recognized element of Byron’s persona which made a splash with his fanatic
audience of youthful liberals was his apparent sexual magnetism which formed
out of gossip about his prolific sexual career. A career that was mostly built upon
relationships with women, according to his own statements and historical record,
but his same sex liaisons were also part of the rumor-mill and added a quality to
the rumors that his opponents called deviance and his supporters called sexual
openness. Beyond the genders of his partners, his nontraditional, socially and
sexually democratic audience also became attracted to the method of his
success, perhaps as much as the degree of it.
The rake was a popular literary character especially among Royalist works
of the Restoration and even later into Gothic fiction. Why Byron differs is that he
does not exactly fit into the rakish paradigm. He is a mix of traditionally
masculine traits with feminine sensitivity, flair, and fire, all of the character traits
he regularly performed for the benefit of his audience. Reverting back to gothic
terminology to describe Byron, his mythical persona became something
metaphysical, something transcendent of recognized gender and sexual
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description. Like the Martian, Stardust, Byron was something more than human.
Hoeveler states, “In the realm of images, the androgynous is unique in that it
attempts to meld masculine and feminine in a new and radically unique manner,
and yet it is founded on the very stereotypes it seeks to destroy. Hence, it is
inherently flawed and persistently fails in the poetry to translate successfully
humanity’s desire to escape the constraints of sexuality altogether” (7). Though I
do not disagree with the symbolic or imagistic functions and shortcomings of
androgyny in Romantic poetry, I do think that there is another facet of the
androgyne particularly at work in Byron’s poetry and in his mythic persona. The
function of this different androgyne is not, as Hoeveler theorizes, to portray “ideal
sexual equality” (7), which she calls a failure because of the negative stereotypes
attached to women from time immemorial, but rather to take up the position of
the enigmatic figurehead of sexual possibility wherein the stereotypes that
Hoeveler refers to are not the limitations of each gender. These traits that
Hoeveler regards as gendered stereotypes become gender-interchangeable
characteristics that liberate the youth and youthful from the yoke of conventional
sexuality, further weighted by traditional British propriety. In other words, the
androgyne represents sexual democracy. One of the pitfalls when exploring
androgyny is the continuation of talking about this new, less constrained third-sex
option which Leo Bersani calls “a radical open-endedness of being” (qtd. in
Hoeveler 16) in binary and juxtaposed terminology.
Though he was physically male and masculine in his mannerism (e.g.
vulgar, athletic, and often violent), Byron exuded a feminine yet powerful, sexual
presence, similar to Helen of Troy’s, which attracted both women and men who
were utterly consumed by the Byronic fantasy. For a burgeoning subculture of
social and sexual democrats whose agenda is to create true equality in all
sociopolitical arenas, such a character would have enormous marketability as an
iconic image for the movement. Hoeveler comments that “androgyny reemerged
in the late eighteenth-century England not simply as an abstract image, but as a
social, psychic, and political ideology that suddenly seemed within reach” (5).
James Soderholm, in discussing the appeal of Byron, demonstrates that “treating
of the poet as a cult object is not a particularly gendered phenomenon” (9). He
34
reminds us that Edward Trelawny slept with a copy of The Corsair under his
pillow and “absorbed and became” (9) the character, and that Coleridge
confessed to never seeing “so lovely a countenance as Byron” (9). The poet had
considerable sex appeal for both men and women.
When constructing oneself as an object of desire, building off of a
foundation of feminine sensuality is often cited as one of the most powerful tools
a woman possesses. The power of a woman’s allure has been the subject of
innumerable fables from Cleopatra and Helen to the bomb-shells depicted in film
noir. Men are portrayed as defenseless against someone practiced in
manipulating her own sensuality. With this power residing in a man such as
Byron, who also possesses a primal, dominant and masculine sexuality as well
as a highly praised poetic eloquence and cunning intellect, it is no wonder that
Byromania was and still is a powerful force in popular culture. He is Derrida’s
dream, a “sexual otherwise,” a powerful third-sex which defies the previous
definition of the androgyne as a weaker “other” whose foot in both male and
female camps denies it the power of masculinity while stereotyping or devaluing
femininity.
Not wanting to overanalyze the other worldliness of the mythical Byron,
one more comparison which has been made several times over deserves a brief
mention in the new context of androgyny. Thanks to the influence of the gothic
and the sexual frustrations of one particular physician, Byron has had a
connection with the paranormal long before my associating him with Ziggy
Stardust. Many critics like McDayter bring up the vampiric qualities of the Byron
legend but do so to point out the general feeling of contempt held by people who
aligned themselves with the conservative power structure whose goal in making
the monstrous connection was to demonize the poet. Other critics like Tom
Holland discuss the vampire as a contemporary incarnation of the Byronic
legend. In commenting on Byron’s allure which affects both sexes, McDayter
brings up William Polidori’s vampire tale and comments that the character of
Aubrey, who is victimized by Lord Ruthven (Polidori’s imaginative manifestation
of Byron), is a reflection of Polidori himself. As such, Polidori admits to his
susceptibility to “the absorbing charms of the vampire,” (55) or an attraction to
35
Byron. Making the close association between the vampiric and the Byronic is a
well-worn avenue in Byron scholarship. It begs mentioning here not because of
the critically perceived similarities in the condition of those unfortunate individuals
who come to cross paths with the vampire or Byron and find their life force
somewhat lessened after the experience, but because of the eroticism attached
to the vampire character in its most popular incarnation.
In being undead, the vampire loses its connection to humanity, not in the
sense of mannerisms but in its connection with being human. The vampire
becomes something another than human whose appearance marks the end of
the kinship. One distinct difference is the lack of sex. Most of the more
predominant vampire figures in popular media lack the ability and/or desire to
engage in physical sex. The desire for sex is replaced with a desire to consume,
but that is not to say that the act of consuming is not sexual. Most depictions of
the vampire’s embrace are almost overwhelmingly sexually charged. Most
importantly in this transformation of desire, the vampire’s old sexual orientation
(normally assumed to be heterosexual) is also transformed. It hunts for prey of
both sexes, and there is no marked difference in the levels of eroticism between
hetero- or homo-consumption. For the Vampire, too, at the point of
transmigration from the human to subhuman or extra human, the vampire also
loses its own gender. Linguistically, we refer to the vampire antecedent neutrally.
Though it may physically appear gendered, being relegated to an otherness has
effectively degendered the being; as such, homoeroticism becomes a
permissible plot element in the literature. Though they are neutered both in the
context of physical sex and gender, these figures possess a magnetism that
draws their victims, of both sexes, to them in figuratively sexual intimacy, as in
the case of Aubrey to Lord Ruthven or Lucy to Mina.
For Polidori and others who first began making the vampire/Byron
connection, they clearly saw more similarities between the two figures than the
drain that they felt Byron inflicted. It was a way to deal with their own desires of
an erotic encounter with Byron using many of the same Gothic devices to mask
such desires and relegate them to the realm of fantasy. Using the vampire,
however, does something else for the fantasy. For people like Polidori who
36
preferred to live within the normative society, such homoerotic fantasies run
counter to that society. Thus it is possible that he felt guilt for his own desires, so
he placed them in a monstrous setting as a sign of own feelings of monstrosity.
Such a reading is possible if Polidori could not reconcile his desires with his
English propriety. Part of the reason that the vampiric image of Byron was
sustained by his critics is because the image of the vampire invokes fear which is
supposed to lead to avoidance. These critics hoped that demonizing the poet
would counteract his growing popularity and break the spell he had over his
audience. It is obvious that the mainstream English sensibility recognized a
threat to its value system and felt a need to demonize Byron in the hopes that the
public would avoid him. Obviously, it did not work that way. The cult of the
vampire began to form during this period and is still a strong youth sub-culture
today, with images of the Byronic sensuality surging through it. Though Byron
does not exist by name in the modern vampire narratives, the characters are
infused with Byronic traits that start with the physical appearance of a being that
is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying who often wears flowing poet shirts
relaxed at the collar and yet are stylish and elegant. Tom Holland points out that
the vast majority of modern vampire characters in literature and film are not
patterned after the original legends or even Stoker’s horribly disfigured count.
The immense popularity of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the large
contemporary subculture of youths who pattern their dress and mannerisms after
her characters, who are very clearly derived from the Byronic vampire, are
testaments to the failure by Byron’s critics as instruments of the conservative
British establishment to counteract Byron’s popularity by marginalizing him.
Very little work has been done to survey Byron’s modern readership.
However, while his poems are still critically read in academia, his iconic image
survives strongly in the Byronic vampire. Holland’s essay “Undead Byron”
discusses this contemporary phenomenon. He shows how the modern image of
the vampire in popular movie depictions comes out of the Byronic legend. Even
the most famed creature, Dracula, did not retain the image he was born with.
Holland points out that Stoker’s description of an old man with bushy hair and
pointed ears was replaced by a younger more dashing Byronic figure (155). With
37
the vampire, just as with Byron, Dokou and others who have associated
androgyny with a weakened or impotent character through the workings of the
castration complex are not able to make the same case in this instance. The
legends of the gender-neutral vampire and the androgynous poet actually gain
powers of magic, seduction, and hypnotic manipulation as evidenced by the
tremendous sex appeal of both Byron and his poetic characters. This strength is
what led to the formation of the iconic androgyne in the sexual counter-culture of
both the nineteenth- and twentieth century movements.
Byron’s keen awareness of the social and political movement which
sought to equalize Britain’s social and political system, joined with his knack for
mythmaking and powerful writing set into motion the events that led him to be the
cultural icon of a youth-driven movement toward social liberty and democratic
sexuality. What remains is to look at how Byron implemented his poetic talents
to deliver coded socio-sexual/political messages to his audience in the know. By
looking at those poems already deemed important on issues of sexuality,
primarily within homoerotic discourse, we will be able to see the androgyne at
work in Lara, The Giaour, and Don Juan with the bulk of the chapter’s space
devoted to the latter.
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CHAPTER 3
THE REVOLUTION OF THE ANDROGYNE IN BYRON’S POETRY
As important as Byron’s persona was to the counter-culture movement it
was not the man alone who impacted it. A great deal of his poetry advocated
both social and sexual liberalism, so we must move beyond the man to look at
the poetry the man produced. Particularly in instances where Byron, himself,
becomes a character in literature or film, the authors decide to build the character
based on the mythic elements of his personality. In various literary and film
representations like Gothic and Haunted Summer, Byron’s more controversial
qualities, especially his arrogance, temper, and lascivious sexuality are
spotlighted at the expense of even the slightest hint that he ever put pen to
paper. Within the circles of literary scholarship, many Romantic academicians
are following Harold Bloom’s lead and devalue Byron’s literary importance in the
era. Irregardless of his aesthetic sense to write stylized poetry rather than
following the Wordsworthian idea of writing in a more naturalistic style, the
people, using the Marxist sense of the word, more readily identified themselves
in his work. Despite all their pretense of making their poetry more accessible to
the common man, the Lake poets still maintained an artistic distance from their
readership. One reason Wilson attributes to Byron’s academic disfavor despite
his wild popularity is that he “appeals to the unconscious and to the pleasures of
fantasy life before he is read for literary merit. Byron was a figure of identification
and desire in the public imagination in a way that Southey and Wordsworth
simply were not” (9-10). Perhaps in the eyes of some, his mythic persona
completely obfuscated his literary talent, but we must remember that he was one
of the most widely read writers of the Romantic era. Earlier I stated that hype
and controversy can catapult a career, but the continued success of his pieces is
a testament to the impact his messages had on his audience. Even many of his
staunchest critics were forced to acknowledge his success. He truly had a way
with words, and he used this gift to create beautiful poetry which housed and
promoted those liberal ideals that his persona embodied.
39
William Ruddick in his book Byron’s Cultural and Political Influence states
that “Byron’s most lasting benefaction to the English Liberal tradition” is perhaps
that his “poetry played a most significant part” in “helping to establish a tradition
of polemic in which skeptical analysis fulfills a purifying role in the service of an
underlying vision of society as it might be” (37). For his audience Byron’s poems
and plays addressed issues of social and sexual liberty and attacked traditional
ideologies that hampered those cultural ideals. Byron’s critics often failed to
grasp the political implications of his work, while they praised this talent and
scorned his lack of morality.
For his urban working class readers, the popularity of Byron’s poetry is
attributed more to what he said rather than how he said it. Even a negative
review of Byron’s work demonstrates how his poems were received. In 1832
Longfellow wrote an anonymous review of Byron’s work. From the negative
criticism Longfellow gives on the effect of Byron’s work, we can see that Byron’s
influence on his audience was felt even in America. Longfellow writes, “Minds
that could not understand his beauties, could imitate his great and glaring defects
. . . until at length every city, town, and village had its little Byron, its selftormenting scoffer at morality, it gloomy misanthropist in song” (Critical Heritage
18). Ruddick also pinpoints the effect that his writing had on his audience.
“Byron’s poetry often invites audience identification and the fact that his poems
brought to the surface so many of the concealed urges and pressures of the age
increased their appeal.” His poetry’s “amorous or erotic charge diverted Byron’s
readers from their own political frustrations to the consideration of frustrations of
a more directly personal kind” (29). Youth are naturally rebellious, and with
liberal social issues beginning to emerge at the same time, it seems that Byron’s
brazen efforts to bring personal, social issues to light in his poetry drew the
attention of his audience away from economic and political issues because of the
potential youth and the working class public saw in actually achieving success, at
least with its concerns for social democracy. Apparently someone else saw the
potential, too.
McDayter quotes from the poem, “Uriel,” published anonymously by a
contemporary of Byron, as evidence that identifies Byron’s primary and intended
40
sphere of influence. The poem also further articulates the fears of the
mainstream culture stemming from Byron’s influence.
You act the serpent’s part – you lead astray
Each unsuspecting youth, who urged along
By your too fascinating powers of song
Join inadvertently, the thoughtless, dazzled throng. (qtd. on 57, my
emphasis)
Gary Dyer pointedly states that “his [Byron’s] readers, he acknowledges, are not
an undifferentiated public but are publics---discrete if often overlapping
subcultures and counterpublics” (574). I have included the youth in all of my
descriptions thus far, but it behooves the argument, at this time, to qualify my
statement. History has repeatedly demonstrated that the vast majority of
counter-culture or rebellious movements were instigated and carried through by
youth. The Watts Riots, the hippie movement, the Kent State protests, and the
student uprising in Beijing all demonstrate the pattern, and the verse above is
evidence that Byron’s revolution in Britain was no different. The youth in Britain
and elsewhere throughout Europe turned the pages of Byron’s works looking for
the socially radical ideas that would confirm the validity of their beliefs.
For these youths Byron and the major characters in his poetry were
interchangeable. His audience looked for the appearance of that powerful third
sex in his work. They did not see themselves in these character creations. What
they saw was potentiality. They saw the epitome of their struggle. Their goal
was not for themselves to become androgynous, merely to become as sexually
free and powerful as their icon. Wilson explains that “Byron was seen as giving a
performance of himself in the persons of Childe Harold, Lara, Manfred, and Don
Juan. Byron colluded with the idea that his work was a continuation of his life
and he flirted with his readers, hinting at diabolical deeds in his past . . . whilst
furiously protesting against any identification which was made between himself
and his characters” (11). After all, his socio-political ideas were not for every
one. The criticisms of his immorality attest to that. Hoeveler rightfully reminds us
that “the androgynous is a myth, and therefore its use as a literary device is
limited to the parameters and ideological content of mythology itself” (17). As a
41
literary device Byron uses the androgyne to reflect his mythological self in his
characters, to exemplify sexual democracy and to attract an audience that is
keen to this ideology. While the androgynous in these circumstances is limited to
the Byronic mythos, that mythos is fluid and living on account of both public
myth-making and Byron’s own talent for defying accurate characterization.
Part of what made Byron and his poetry so popular with the radical,
sexually open culture is what I and others have explained as the audience’s
identification with the subjects and characters of the poems. A relatively recent
study in behavioral psychology looked
at television marketing and its overall
effectiveness among traditional and non- traditional viewers. One of the
hypotheses that Morrison and Shaffer were working with while performing the
study suggested that “participants with nontraditional gender-role orientations
(i.e. masculine women, feminine men, and androgynous individuals) should
respond more favorably to nontraditional gender-role portrayals in
advertisements” (268). In other words, a nontraditional audience will relate to a
nontraditional presentation. The results showed that societal conditioning of the
traditional gender roles through popular media contributed to a lower than
expected positive response to the non-traditional stimulus, but there was a
measurable receptiveness by the non-traditional audience to the non-traditional
advertisement. As this applies to Byron’s iconic status among youth culture in
nineteenth-century Britain, his sexual proclivities attracted an audience who
identified with his sexual prowess not only in his numerous female conquests but
the widely accepted rumors of an equally impressive number of male liaisons.
Byron commodified himself and his ideal through his poetry; they became
advertisements for the public.
Looking at his poetry, this project will primarily focus on Don Juan and the
depiction of the title character as androgynous, mainly as a way for Bryon to
attract the target audience to the piece. However, before that I want to briefly
look at both Lara and The Giaour to examine representations of androgyny
contained within, firstly, to acknowledge the work that has already been done on
androgynous representation as a political statement of same-sex sexuality.
42
Then, I want to focus on the importance of the Page character in both of these
texts as a demonstrative representation in the broader scope of sexual freedom.
Despite a number of places in these poems where one could find
instances of androgyny, I want to focus on the most blatant manifestations in
both of these plays. Likewise in both feminist and queer theory, the Page
characters receive the most critical attention because they represent the
reoccurring theme of gender revolution in both works. These two plays are
treated simultaneously because the character is utilized in the exact same
fashion in both productions. Brinks suggests that in both The Giaour and Lara
the “Page figures are particularly important because the attention of the audience
visually and psychologically shifts from the Byronic hero to them. They are the
figures through whom the male protagonist—and the community, via their
fascination with him—can project and measure the extent of his dispossession
from the masculine estate” (70). As much as this reading is accurate on one
level, the already attuned audience would find this idea a common place idea
that many other authors like Shakespeare and others have portrayed to an
inconsequential end.
The Giaour opens with a call to radical reclamation. Byron wants his
democratic audience to once again liberate itself from puritanical conservatism,
to live in the light of its own ideology, to bring back the Greek social ideals.
Arise, and make again your own;
Snatch from the ashes of your sires
The embers of their former fires;
And he who in the strife expires
Will add to theirs a name of fear
That Tyranny shall quake to hear,
And leave his sons a hope, a fame,
They too will rather die than shame:
For Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeath’d by bleeding Sire to Son
Though baffled oft is ever won.
Bear witness, Greece, thy living page! (115-126)
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For his counter-culture audience, Byron’s call to action is given a specific sociosexual direction with his reference to their Greek forbearers. Byron’s call is for a
return to the Grecian social values wherein sexuality was much more liberal than
in Britain and after the entrenchment of Puritan sensibilities. In another way, this
section of the poem becomes the cornerstone to understanding the social
implications of the whole text.
Byron’s living Grecian page marks Byron, the narrator, and the Giaour as
inheritors of Greek morality. However, the page is the prominent image to study
in this work as well as in Lara, for in both cases, the character that the audience
initially perceives as distinctly male becomes sexually involved with a heroic male
figure. The importance of the page figure is more pronounced in The Giaour,
while the similar circumstances in Lara only serve to emphasize the same idea.
In the former, the action of the story hinges on the page figure. The Giaour has a
sexual encounter with a girl from Hassan’s harem who disguises herself as a
page to escape the wrath of Hassan. Yet Hassan kills the page which raises the
fury in the Giaour for the loss of his love whose gender identity becomes
complicated at this point. Brinks explains that “the practice of cross-dressing at
(and as) the narrative’s critical moment succinctly aligns gender ambiguity with
the flight from patriarchal sexual norms” (75).
Beyond this the gender roles are further complicated when we remember
the call to action early in the play. The last line of the call addresses both ancient
Greece and the audience, and urges both to witness not only the events of the
narrative as they are about to unfold, but also witness that Byron, as narrator,
sets himself up as a page figure so when the audience encounters the
complicated gender identification of the page character in the story they carry the
confusion over to the narrator and Byron himself. To the audience who is
already looking for representations of Byron in the characters of his poems, the
sexuality of the narrator is as important as the Page or the Giaour. I submit that
Byron’s purpose is to convolute the sexuality of the principal characters to blur
binary gender distinctions. The Giaour and Lara then become love stories where
the sexualities of the protagonist and the love interest lose relevance.
44
In Lara, Kaled, the page, is introduced as male, and the charade is
maintained through the bulk of the work. However, Byron’s descriptions are
mismatched to a male character: “Light was his form, and darkly delicate / That
brow . . . “(I:vvvii.528), even more so his hands are described as “So femininely
white it might bespeak / Another sex, when match’d with that / smooth cheek”(
I:xxvii.576-78). Though the gender identity clues are not as complicated in Lara,
the message that love can exist without the binary constraints of sexuality, as
recognized by English social standards, is just as strong in this poem. The
scenes of loving, though not sexual, intimacy in Canto I, stanza xiv where Lara
rests his hand on the page’s as a comforting symbol of constancy helps to show
the beauty and purity of the relationship between Lara and the page. By this
point in the poem (nearly to the end) the true gender of the page is not revealed.
The audience, though aware of the reality, is invited to view the page at face
value. Even though Lara’s gender identity is not as confusing as that of the
Giaour, his effeminate name hints at the same lack of distinct maleness.
However, for both Lara and the Giaour being intimate with the page figure is not
a dispossession of their masculine strength. Rather the incorporation of the
feminine into their characters actually adds to their heroism. Thus, as the
audience identifies with these heroes, they must by association identify those
elements within themselves that do not fit into the stereotypes.
This self-identification of the audience with the principal characters in
Byron’s poems carries over into Don Juan, which was more widely accepted as a
work of sexual exploration. In discussing the breakdown of gender norms in Don
Juan, Brinks works off of a theory presented by Alan Richardson when she
suggests that “cross-dressing in Don Juan functions as a series of negations, the
evasion of ordinary gender norms: ‘not simply a temporary exchange of sexual
roles, but the vehicle of a more profound questioning of the grounds of sexual
difference’” (167). In this way, Don Juan works much the same way as Lara and
The Giaour.
Don Juan has probably received more critical attention than any other text
from Bryon. Scholars have cited it as a portrayal for everything from romantic
love and sexual promiscuity, to political subversion and homoeroticism. What
45
follows is to take up the tradition where Christina Dokou and others left off in
uncovering the workings of androgyny within the poem. In his book Romanticism
and Male Fantasy, Charles Donelan calls Don Juan “the Romantic period’s most
comprehensive defense of freedom of expression and liberty of the imagination.
The poem satirizes and resists the state-sponsored evangelical censorship of
popular culture” (1-2). He goes on to talk about how Byron’s mock-epic was on
the tournament field opposite “puritan aestheticism” fighting for the honor of an
“emerging hedonistic consumerism” (2). That the poem is a criticism of political
and social issues, specifically the conservative value system is nothing new.
What has received little attention is the idea that Byron had a much smaller
audience in mind when he wrote this and many of his other pieces. It is true that
the sheer popularity of the poem stands as evidence that it appealed to and was
at least partially understood by a large and diverse audience. But many people
have discussed the codified language that Byron uses in his writing to segregate
his audience between those who do and do not “get it.” Judson, in recounting
Freud, states,
The joke [satire disguised by coded language] . . . exploits
incongruity, but to a more aggressive purpose, seeking to
outmaneuver the many faces of repressive Power vested in
personal inhibition, social manners, or political oppression by
disguising the ‘offense’ of meaning in a witty or nonsensical form
that enables the speaker to slip subversive material past the censor
(or Cant), as Byron characteristically puts it. (247)
There are many levels of understanding in his work and a different set of
codes for each level, each tier becoming increasingly culturally specific.
Donelan’s subtitle to his work is “A Marketable Vice” reflecting the last
words of stanza thirty-four of Canto I and foreshadowing the direction that he is
driving his reading. He explains that one has to look at the whole of that stanza
and the one which precedes it to see Byron’s criticism of the conservative
aesthetic. These stanzas are not particularly codified. The poet’s criticism
seems fairly superficial, yet there are definite coded messages here. The
interesting thing to note here is that the coded message is almost identical to the
46
one easily read by the general public; what is different is who the poet is
addressing.
‘Tis a sad thing, I cannot choose but say,
And all the fault of that indecent sun,
Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay,
But will keep baking, broiling, burning on,
That howsoever people fast and pray
The flesh is frail, and the soul undone:
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.
Happy the nations of the moral north!
Where all is virtue, and the winter season
Sends sin, without a rag on, shivering forth;
(‘Twas snow that brought St. Francis back to reason);
Where juries cast up what a wife is worth
By laying whate’er sum, in mulct, they please on
The lover, who must pay a handsome price,
Because it is a marketable vice. (I:lxiii-lxiv)
The satirical criticism is easy to spot. From one stanza to the next we can see
the establishment of the “us vs. them” pattern. The question becomes who
comprises the “us?” A typical queer theorist reading will immediately identify the
sultry climates and sun as images of Mediterranean or “oriental” settings.
Keegan’s whole book is dedicated to how Byron staged the action of many of his
works in the Orient because of the ease in which it afforded the use of
homoerotic themes, hence the satirical “indecent sun.” Keegan explains that the
oriental heathen worked in much the same way as Brink’s Gothic specter. Both
served to create distance between the characters and audience thereby avoiding
any unwanted associations too close to home and alerting the censors.
However, there is more to identifying the audience of Byron’s works than
pointing to the homosexual, though he or she is surely part of it. What must be
remembered is Byron’s almost obsessive love for all things Grecian. He pored
47
over Plato and other philosophers. He makes numerous references to his
beloved Greece (which I will discuss shortly), and filled much of his musings with
Greek mythology. In Byron’s Mediterranean images, the sun works also to refer
to Greece specifically, also known as the island of the sun. Greece as a poetic
image often is a sign of homosexuality, as in Greek love, but the Greeks of the
Symposium did not simply advocate the love between men. Plato’s work
promoted the pursuit of happiness however that is best accomplished.
Hedonism, in its truest sense, is the indulgence in all of life’s pleasures, which
include but are not limited to sex. Such is the goal for the liberal youth culture of
nineteenth century Britain. Byron is not necessarily directing his commentary
only to the homosexual but to homosexuals as one group of people who are
looking for that sexual and social democracy.
By the time of Don Juan’s publication, the cult of Byron was in full effect,
as was his androgynous image. The androgyne attracted the audience to whom
Byron was aiming his message. Not only did the androgyne attract both freespirited men and women on a sexual level, the figure attracted liberal-minded
people who did not have their own personal struggles with sexuality, but were
drawn to Byron on the level of social consciousness.
While Gary Dyer explains
that “ the manner in which Don Juan slyly alludes to same-sex sexuality leaves
open the possibility of reading from a sodomite’s perspective,” he also includes,
“There were readers who were prepared to allow for a sodomite’s perspective,
either those who had heard rumors about Byron’s sexuality or, more interesting,
men who since school had relied on classical literature for a history of others
feeling as they felt and who now were ready to interpret Don Juan similarly”
(573). Then there were still others open to the sexual and social freedoms that
would equalize sodomy’s status within the dominant culture’s list of accepted
sexual practices.
The idea that Byron’s work served a broader purpose than the exploration
of homosexuality and actually endorsed all social freedoms requires a closer look
into the particular culture of homosexuality. One chapter in David Gross’ work in
particular stands out to help with this idea. The chapter looks at the “gay
narrator” at work in Don Juan. What are particularly important are his reasons for
48
choosing the term “gay” over homosexual and/or sodomite. Foucault explains
that the homosexual as a tangible, living thing is a modern construct, a
classification that serves to segregate one segment of the population because of
a sexual practice. Thus a homosexual is one who engages in the act of samesex intercourse. By the same token, sodomy denotes a sexual activity that is
politically and dogmatically illegal, and the label sodomite also ostracizes an
individual from the general population. The result of both of these epithets is a
limiting of people’s character. Not wanting to perpetuate this idea is the
reasoning for uncovering the gay narrator. He is using gaiety in its original
connotation, as a description of vibrancy. Gross still includes the homosexual
allusions made by the narrator, but such occurrences do not limit the
dimensionality of the narrator. Gaiety is not gendered or limited to sexual
practice; it is a characterization that is derived from a state of being, of openness,
a youthful vigor. Gross notices that “Byron’s gay narrator surveys both sexes
with an eroticized eye” (130). The result of this characterization is that Don Juan
“yields important insights into Byron’s vexed endorsement of political liberalism”
(129).
The most effective way to begin seeing Byron’s political liberalism is to
look at androgyny as it works in Juan himself. I briefly discussed earlier Dokou’s
feminist reading of Juan as a criticism of the masculine regime. What I want to
look at now is the eroticized androgyne who, like Byron, Stardust, or the vampire,
has the ability to draw in its audience, to tantalize the audience with a certain
mindset so that it may receive the messages already identified. By seeing Byron
in the character of Juan, the audience’s attraction for the one transfers over to
the other. In discussing the distinctions between Byron’s public and private
personae (the statement also applies to Byron and his literary characters), Peter
Graham concludes that the two are not easily differentiated, “Only when taken
together can the two translations encompass the range of Don Juan’s subjects
and perspectives. This blending of the private and public, of mystification and
revelation, is part of the method and myth of Don Juan” (34). The audience gets
its first taste of Juan’s purpose in the text early on. The first descriptions we get
49
of him (at least when he is of appropriate age to discuss him so) is purposefully
undecided.
Young Juan was now sixteen years of age,
Tall, handsome, slender, but well knit:
he seem’d
Active, through not sprightly, as a page;
And everybody but his mother deem’d
Him almost a man; but she flew in a rage
And bit her lips (for else she might have
scream’d)
If any said so, for to be precocious
Was in her eyes a thing the most atrocious. (I: liv)
The first thing to note here is Juan’s physical description. Attributing slenderness
to a male character is effectively effeminizing that character. Then we couple that
with the description of Juan being well-knit as opposed to being called strong; a
woman is more often referred to as being well put together. The caesura forces
us to pause unnaturally for the enjambment of the line. This technique shows
that “knit” was a specific word choice since he had to carry the line over to make
the rhyme. The continuation of the line throws a wrinkle into the fabric of the
description. It is not Byron’s intention to completely emasculate the youth, so he
only “seem’d” to be as the narrator described. He is not even sure.
From looking at Lara and The Giaour, we know the importance of the
Page image in Byron’s work as a symbol of androgyny. The fact that the Page
image is negated at this point is not a negation of Juan’s androgyny but rather, a
commentary on his sober mannerisms. Not being sprightly shows his lack of
gaiety, which will change as his role as lover is fully realized and life begins to
blossom for the youth. Donna Julia is the vehicle for his indoctrination into his
role in the world, and the audience begins to see the melding of the Don Juan
legend with the Byronic legend. Dokou observes that “Byron’s twist on the
legend is that his Don does not acquire his status through the seduction of
women, but through being seduced by and into femininity; that is, he displays
traits, such as sexual passivity and vulnerability, that are traditionally deemed
50
feminine” (1). Beyond this he is also seduced by women themselves, thus
reversing traditional gender roles in the rituals of love, mirroring much of Byron’s
sexual career where a majority of his female lovers like the Countess were the
sexual aggressors.
Having the target audience identify the hero with Byron and themselves is
only the beginning of the sexual counter-culture’s attraction to Don Juan. The
brief mention of codified language in Byron only paved the way to this second
degree of identification between the work and the audience. The two most often
talked about code words for deviant sexuality are “secret” and “knowledge,” both
of which are euphemisms for homosexuality, the former being the act itself and
the latter being knowledge of (participation in) the lifestyle. Byron’s particular
brand of using this coded language is a little more complicated than simply
substituting one word for another. Brinks comments that by employing secrets as
both a literary and language device, “Byron thus fashions a more extensive
intersection between the rhetoric of the secret and prevailing cultural
mystifications of homosexuality and non-normative gender identifications” (22).
Part of having his audience identify with the characters in his work is identifying
with what they say. Later in her work Brinks explains that Byron “displays the
fact that he is exposing a fascinated and complicitous audience to the secret,
which significantly, is not the same as revealing it. In doing so, however, Byron
critically ‘outs’ his audience to itself” (72, author’s emphasis). Those members of
the audience who understand the nature of the secrets do so only from
recognition of their own secrets; while those who are intrigued enough to search
for understanding come face to face with their own homoerotic curiosity because
of their attraction to the ideas being displayed.
Gary Dyer uncovers another level to this codified language in Byron’s use
of “flash” language. He maintains that since simple sexual ideas were codified,
the truly tabooed sub-sects of sexual practice and identity had to be further
camouflaged. As a result he states, “instead of sodomy’s standing in for secrets
in general, other secrets had to stand in for sodomy and other disguises for
sodomy’s disguises” (563). Dyer admits that the concept can get convoluted and
complex. Essentially, the standard code words were not sufficient to express the
51
various manifestations of sexual secrets. As a result, Byron borrowed the cant
from other socially unacceptable activities to stand in for specifically homosexual,
but generally other sexually deviant ideas that he wished to express. How this
idea benefits this investigation is that Dyer shows later that such codified
language advertises as much as it conceals (569). “Flash,” as it is termed, is
both a noun representing a kind of language of concealment and identification
and an adjective describing someone in the know. If someone is flash they are
privy to the true meaning of the jargon and are of that culture. Flash is very
similar to jive or other distinctive language patterns codified for the understanding
of a limited audience. In Byron’s case, he was concealing true meanings from
the censors and critics as representatives of the conservative, British hegemony,
while drawing in his target audience of the hip, sexually liberal counter-culture.
Dyer spotlights one episode in Don Juan to stand as the example of
flash’s usage throughout the text. In discussing the English Cantos of Don Juan,
his investigation into flash language comes from a note Byron gives on a
passage of flash that he writes in Canto XI, verse xix.
He from the world had cut off a great man,
Who in his time had made heroic bustle.
Who in a row like Tom could lead the
van,
Booze in the ken, or at the spellken
hustle?
Who queer a flat? Who (spite of Bowstreet’s ban)
On the high toby-spice so flash the
muzzle?
Who on a lark, with black-eyed Sal (his
blowing),
So prime, so well, so nutty, and so
knowing?
The flash of this passage draws heavily from the jargon used among participants
in boxing, and as some of the more popular fighting occurred in the underground
52
because of certain legal restrictions, flash was adopted by not only the
underground but also other marginalized subcultures.
Students of Byron commonly know that his explanatory notations within
his texts are all but useless. In the case of the note for the flash passage, it too
is designed to hide the true meaning from all but his intended audience. Dyer’s
article points out how that note’s intent is to explain the flash language as an
attempt to create authenticity in the mugger character by having him speak in the
manner of the English, criminal underworld and not to shed light on the sexual
implication of sodomy─essentially the one is a decoy for the other. Yet the
audience in the know reads the code for the poet’s true meaning, which does not
rely on the words written (even in translation) but on his use of flash at all
because if his persona had not done so already, Byron has now identified himself
as flash and therefore, an ally to the underground. Dyer also shows how the
note should be read as an autobiographical reference to the days of his youth
spent in boxing and other activities. He explains, “When Byron’s note refers to
boxing flash as a vestige of his ‘early days,’ . . . he implicitly distinguishes the
sodomitical Byron of 1806-12 from the Byron of 1822, who is in all appearances
monogamous and exclusively heterosexual” (571). Dyer is kind enough to go
through the trouble of translating the passage into standard English for the
benefit of his readers though he points out the meaning of the passages is not as
significant as the meaning of its inclusion.
Juan had removed from the world a great man,
who in his day had made considerable commotion. Who could lead the thieves in attack in a
fight, drink in the thieves’ hideout, or steal at
the theater as Tom could? Who could cheat a
fool as well or rob on horseback despite the
threat of constables? Who when out with his
girlfriend Sal, was so lusty, so well dressed, so
devoted, and so clued in? (564)
If his intention was really to make the distinction, why unearth that aspect of his
life again in the flash advertisements? One possible answer is that he is still
53
attempting to perpetuate those character traits that had become iconic by that
point in his life since he was not scandalized by rumors of sodomy by that time.
However more than likely he is using flash to make that connection to the socially
radical audience who is forced to live in the underground until the revolution is
won and the counter-culture’s idea of democracy becomes legitimized in the
mainstream.
54
CONCLUSION
Did Byron’s revolution succeed? William Ruddick states that “it has to be
admitted that while on the Continent Byron’s powerful scorn of oppression and
his lyrical celebrations of the inevitability and beauty of national regenerative
processes inspired by liberal forces in half a dozen counties, and while at home
his cries of impatience with the old and assertions of the need to change excited
young readers and put heart into struggling working class self-educators, the
majority of responsible people remained resolutely unconvinced by his words”
(25). In the short term, after his death, that may be true, because the Victorian
scholars and critics who followed either disavowed any knowledge of the poet
ever having existed or continually downplayed his popularity and/ or influence in
what Wilson calls “a feverish anti-Byronism” (1). Yet, in Gender and Citizenship,
Claudia Moscovici points out that
today, more than, ever, we appear to live in an androgynous age.
Women vote and hold office while also being maternal. Men are
masculine yet sensitive. What seemed to be an impossible
combination of masculine and feminine characteristics has become,
through historical and dialectical development, simply a new
definition of sexual identity. (111)
I might add that even more recently the popular revolution of the metrosexual to
challenge masculine stereotypes is another indication of Byron’s success. So if
our society is a reflection of his efforts that blazed the trail for other
revolutionaries like Ziggy Stardust, what prevented a more immediate and
palpable change in Britain at the time?
By looking at sales figures of his Byron’s work, the demand to have his
work translated into French, Italian, and German, and other evidence, scholars
commonly know that Byronmania was a stronger force in continental Europe than
in Britain. Goethe once commented on the immense popularity of Byron among
youths in Germany. Some of this could be attributed to continental Europe being
more liberal in general, but Byron also spent most of his career living on the
continent in exile from Britain. Perhaps his absence as the living embodiment of
55
his sexual politics weakened the icon in Britain. Camille Paglia believes that
“Byron was full of political ideas, which led him to sacrifice his life in the cause of
liberty. But he was an Alcibiades whose glamour was too intense for his own
society. England could not tolerate Byron’s presence and convulsively expelled
him” (363). The connection that she makes from Byron to Alcibiades is
surprising, but the comparison works on both a social and political level. By
historical accounts, both Alcibiades and Byron had similar characters. In fact,
when Alcibiades enters The Symposium he is seen wearing garlands made of ivy
and violets. If we remember that ivy is associated with Dionysus and violets with
Aphrodite, then it can be argued that Alcibiades is presented as an androgyne. I
am not suggesting the Byron patterned his persona after Alcibiades, but we do
know that The Symposium was highly influential for the poet. The Roman
biographer Cornelius Nepos was one of many who wrote on the legend of this
amazing man who changed the face of the Peloponnesian War. He did not
accomplish such a feat by his military efforts, though he was a gifted general, but
by his social character. The first lines of Nepos’ biography describes him thusly,
Alcibiades the Athenian was the son of Clinius. In this man, nature
seemed to have tried all possibilities, for it is agreed by all who
have written about him that no one was more exceptional than him
in both virtues and vices. He was born in the most distinguished
city, of the highest family, and by far the most beautiful of all the
men. Of his age, he was qualified for any occupation, and he was
full of good counsel (for he was the greatest commander on sea or
land); he was eloquent, so as to produce the greatest effect by his
speeches. For such indeed was the persuasiveness of his looks
and language, that in oratory no one was a match for him. He was
rich, and when occasion required, laborious, patient, liberal, and
splendid, no less in his public than in his private life. He was also
approachable and courteous, most shrewdly adapting to
circumstances, but when relaxing, and no reason offered why he
should endure the labor of thought, he was seen to be extravagant,
dissolute, licentious, and self-indulgent, such that all wondered that
56
there should be such dissimilitude, and so contradictory a nature, in
the same man. (16 my translation)
He was a companion to the greatest men and women on both sides of the
conflict, and his seductiveness gave him considerable power over these men.
Paglia has a much more poignant summation than I could possibly come up with.
“Alcibiades helped bring down the Athenian empire. . . . Byron, the Romantic
exile, did England a favor” (364).
57
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
William M. Lofdahl earned his Master’s degree in 2005 and is continuing
to focus his research on British Romantic Literature, particularly the work of Lord
Byron. Currently, he is a doctoral student at Marquette University where he
investigating Byron’s early translations of Horace and other Roman poets in an
attempt to discover word choice patterns in his translations which may provide a
psychological pattern reoccurs in his later work. Such work may uncover the
poet’s predilections for hedonism.
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