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MIAMI UNIVERSITY - THE GRADUATE SCHOOL CERTIFICATE FOR APPROVING THE DISSERTATION We hereby approve the Dissertation of G. Todd Davis Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy __________________________________________________ Dianne F. Sadoff, Director __________________________________________________ Frank Jordan, Reader __________________________________________________ Laura C. Mandell, Reader ___________________________________________________ Michael Bachem, Graduate School Representative ABSTRACT "THE AGE OF ODDITIES": BYRONISM AND THE FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF BYRON by G. Todd Davis "'The age of oddities': Byronism and the Fictional Representations of Byron," examines the perpetuation of the Byron legend as a process of mythologizing by both Byron and later authors who alter, expand, or moderate this discourse. The dissertation examines not only the Byronic figure's constructedness but also how synchronic representations engender a literary history. Chapter 1 investigates how Byron's self-fashioning deflects a rabidly curious audience's awareness away from the poet to his performance and draws readerly attention to, as Judith Butler would say, a stylized repetition of acts. Chapter 2 examines how Hans Robert Jauss's horizons of experience and expectation and exploration of the author/text/audience triangle produce an historically emergent model for how these fictional representations proliferate. It then focuses on reception theory to explicate the construction and recurrence of the Byronic vampire, showing how the Gothic genre was altered and expanded by subsequent refigurings of vampiric representation by such authors as John Polidori, Miranda Seymour, and Tom Holland. Chapter 3 explores how Butler's performativity explains Byron's performances and poses, which appear as illusions based upon ostensibly stable identities. It then moves into the paranormal and the scientific realms, in which Byron becomes refashioned both as a supernatural entity, whose psychic exile from corporeal boundaries evokes images of the wandering ghost, and a disembodied spirit captured in a technological matrix and personified as a cyborg. Chapter 4 draws upon Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics to explicate Byron's interstitial position between sanity and madness, elucidating the identificatory myth that seduces subsequent authors and critics. Consequently, it examines how such authors as Lady Caroline Lamb and Percy Bysshe Shelley become ensnared in the interpretive circle, unable to see beyond Byron's pretense of madness, mistaking it for truth. "THE AGE OF ODDITIES": BYRONISM AND THE FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF BYRON A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by G. Todd Davis Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2003 Dissertation Director: Dianne F. Sadoff © G. Todd Davis 2003 Table of Contents Introduction: Byronizing the Byronic . .Page 1 Chapter 1: Byron (and the) Ism . Page 12 Chapter 2: Bloodsucking Byron . Page 44 Chapter 3: The Byronic Wraith . Page 78 Chapter 4: Interpreting Byron's Madness . Page 111 Conclusion: Towards a Literary History . Page 141 Appendix 1: "The Byromania" . Page 146 Appendix 2: Annotated Bibliography . Page 147 Endnotes . Page 203 Works Cited . Page 214 iii Acknowledgements My everlasting thanks to my indefatigable committee, loving family, and sensitive friends. To Dianne for her ceaseless and unflagging help, support, strength, comfort, and friendship. To Laura for her close reading and perceptive suggestions that more than once made me stop and think. To Frank for his mentoring and clarifying insights on Romantic literature and especially Byron. To Michael for his much needed sense of humor and constant encouragement. To Peggy for her unconditional support during those long days of writing into the void and long nights of despair and doubt. Finally, to my mom for her love, compassion, and resolute enthusiasm for my project when I hardly felt any. I would never have made it without each of you. iv Introduction: Byronizing the Byronic Perhaps, too, I might say of this, and of other novels of the same kind, that there is in them an unhealthy egotism; a Byronism of personal feelings. Blackwood Magazine, April 1846 Byronism, you're aware, is now a regular disease, expected in families. Blackwood Magazine, April 1851 Byronic, Byroniad, Byronian, Byronical, Byronish, Byronize, Byronist, and Byronite. What is it about Byron that so impels us to invoke his name repeatedly in noun and adjectival form? I would argue that this fascination bespeaks yet another term to which Byron has lent his name: Byronism, which I define as the production and reproduction of the Byron legend. The phenomenon incorporates, but also extends well beyond, Lord Byron the historical personage; this mythologizing has been effected by authors, critics, reviewers, and others who have found it necessary to read, mediate, or converse with the Byron myth. Byron uses it himself in his letter to Francis Hodgson dated May 12, 1821: "Moore wrote to me from Paris months ago that 'the French had caught the contagion of Byronism to the highest pitch' and has written since to say that nothing was ever like their 'entusymusy'" (BLJ 8:114). Like my epigraph's sentiments, Byron likens this effect to an infection or pollution that contaminates the French, producing a mania that propels them to "the highest pitch" of enthusiasm. In "The Byromania" (1812), Annabella Milbanke describes how this phenomenon "compels all hearts to love him and obey" (l. 6). Her poem addresses the pervading charisma that Byron's persona possessed for those with whom he came into contact and illuminates the near sycophantic fervor Byron's devotees expressed. Even in Byron's own time and immediately thereafter, Byronism had already gained a name for itself. In 1821, the London Magazine said of Byronism: "The personal interest, we believe, has always been above the poetical in Lord Byron's compositions; and, what is much worse, they seem to 1 have been, in almost every instance, studiously calculated to produce this effect" (qtd. in Rutherford 13). In 1868, Walter S. McCann declared in The Galaxy: No affectation in modern times ever raged with such fury and lived so long as did Byronism. It came up somewhere about the latter part of the life of the noble poet from whom it took its name, possessed more than a third of the young Englishmen then living, and it was fully a half-dozen years after the publication of Mr. Moore's Biography before it began to go down, and even as late as the commencement of the present decade there were quite a number of persons writing demoniac poetry and wandering about with the old misanthropic sneer. (777) In these two quotes, we see how Byronism was "more than the poetical," encompassing Byron's life and influence. This was a phenomenon that someone, ostensibly Byron, "studiously calculated to produce." Byronism is also portrayed as an "affectation" that began with Byron's life but then spread out to infect more than 1/3 of all Englishmen. Moreover, writers are even now producing and reproducing the Byronic effect. Byronism, per Judith Butler, creates the effect that it names. Consequently, I aim to expose the coalesced Byronic body performatively created by Byronism. Even the historical Lord Byron cannot definitively stand as its origin, since his performances carry with them their own past. In Byron and the Victorians, Andrew Elfenbein says, for instance, that such writers as John Edmund Reade or William Whitehead created a "trademark" that was "the Byronic hero, who quickly became a stock character; indeed, it was stock character even before Byron" (87). With this in mind, we can also well imagine that the mechanism for turning a man into a celebrity, for perpetuating a persona, and for generating a linguistic phenomenon that far outstrips its origins existed long before Byron's birth. I would suggest, however, that this forceful, audacious, and successful mechanism achieved (and continues to achieve) stunningly new heights with the advent of Byronism. 2 For many critics, reviewers, and biographers, Byron's allure strongly encourages intimacy and familiarity. As an example, Ethel Colburn Mayne has this to say of Byron in her biography: The paradox was part of the pose, using pose in its true sense of poise—the way in which you have to stand if you are to stand at all. We hear too much of his "chameleon" character. His character was not chameleon, but strikingly the reverse. Byron never changed; in all surroundings he remained the same. "Everything that he did is implicit in everything else that he did." I have written that elsewhere of him; and it is, in truth, from his invariability that the whole Byronic legend has grown. So far from not being able to guess what he will do, we know on the instant what he will do and—still more accurately—what he will say. We could not have imagined the words, but we can imagine the sense. Did he ever fail to say it? Not once. (xiii-xiv). Byronism thrives on exactly this intimacy, this awareness of "knowing" Byron as if he were one's best friend. If there is one explanation of the Byronic figure with which this dissertation disagrees, it is that Byron never changes, always saying and doing what one expects. I agree with Mayne that "the paradox was part of the pose," but I theorize that Byron's pose is all that we can ever know; performativity effaces any historical personage that might be knowable. Byronism engenders Byron as a continual diffusion, a "figure of fantasy" as Butler might say. By using her theories on gender performativity, I will show how Byronism is "performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results" (GT 25). The historical Lord Byron becomes effaced or even controlled by the figure that Byronism creates, protean in its ability to modify its appearance, engulfing the new and claiming it as its own.