The Reinvented Libertine in the Nineteenth

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Willard Marriott Digital Library TWICE BORN GODS: THE REINVENTED LIBERTINE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY by Tina Maria Dyer A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English The University of Utah May 2015 Copyright © Tina Maria Dyer 2015 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Tina Maria Dyer has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Matthew Potolsky , Chair 06 March 2015 Date Approved Therese De Raedt , Member 06 March 2015 Date Approved Scott Black , Member 06 March 2015 Date Approved Howard Horwitz , Member 06 March 2015 Date Approved Vincent Pecora , Member 06 March 2015 Date Approved and by Barry Weller , Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School of English and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT The claim has been made that the nineteenth century’s interest in libertine fiction is merely “archival.” This dissertation seeks to contest that claim by examining the reuse of certain well-known, if not notorious, characters from European seduction narratives of the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—Valmont, Don Juan, and Tannhäuser—in the work of George Gordon, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Swinburne, and Aubrey Beardsley. It finds that these seducers are not static characters deployed for the purpose of allusion or critique, but heroes, reworked and rehabilitated as the central figures of literary seductions intended to entice and control the reader and address the perceived inequities of nineteenth-century morality or politics. By applying a four-phase framework for seduction derived from canonical seduction narratives, the argument demonstrates how the reinvented seducers have been stripped down, personalized, redressed, and recontextualized in narratives that seek to compel through seduction and educate through experience. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………. v INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………... 1 Chapters 1. SEDUCTION………………………………………………………………… 14 2. A PRACTICAL EDUCATION: BYRON’S DON JUAN AND THE INGENUE’S JOURNEY….…………………………………………………. 36 The Birth of Don Juan…………………………………………………… 38 The Cuckoo in the Harem……………………………………………….. 63 The Harrowing of London………………………………………………. 71 3. ASTRIDE THE WORLDS: BAUDELAIRE AND THE REINVENTED VALMONT…………………………………………………………………... 81 Obscenity and the Curriculum of Vice…………………………………... 83 The Eighteenth Century………………………………………………….. 87 The Object: Valmont as Dandy………………………………………….. 91 The Agent: Valmont as Satan……………………………………………. 99 4. SWINBURNE’S “LAUS VENERIS” OR THE NIHILIST TRIUMPHANT.. 110 The Tradition……………………………………………………………… 111 The Innovation……………………………………………………………. 116 The Lesson……………………………………………………………….. 142 5. THE INTENTIONAL TOURIST: BEARDSLEY’S THE STORY OF VENUS AND TANNHAUSER……………………………………………… 145 CONCLUSION: REBORN, REFASHIONED, REBOOTED, REPEAT……………………………………………………………………… 169 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my chair, Dr. Matthew Potolsky, and my committee, Dr. Therese de Raedt, Dr. Scott Black, Dr. Howard Horwitz, and Dr. Vincent Pecora, for their endless patience; my first reader, Dr. Jeffrey V. Yule, for his enthusiasm and encouragement, and my family, for their extraordinary tolerance through this process. INTRODUCTION Ian Kelly prefaces his biography of Giacomo Casanova with a brief anecdote retelling Casanova’s reaction to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. “Seen it?” Casanova is thought to have responded to the inquiry, “I’ve practically lived it” (1). It is a moment that underscores Casanova’s habitual wit and approachability, but it also says a great deal about the essential relevance of Don Giovanni. By the time of the opera’s Prague premiere in 1787, the tragi-comic antihero Don Juan had been going to his sticky supernatural end for more than 150 years,1 his cosmopolitan adventures advancing posthumously to occupy stages all across Europe. Yet Don Giovanni is not merely the subject of revival, like a Mirabeau perpetually parroting the same witticisms decade after decade in the same drawing room. Don Giovanni—or Don Juan, or Don John, as aliases vary according to the preferences and prejudices of the audience which consumes him— gets rewritten. He is tragic; he is comic; he is villain; he is hero; he is a killer, a rapist, a lover, a philosopher… He is, in short, an endlessly reconstitutable archetype. But it was not just the eighteenth century that had such a lust for recycling the classic heroes of dirty didactic tales; the nineteenth century also revived Don Juan— among others—with gusto.2 As we will see, the Spanish seducer was taken to the English everyman’s bosom along with the dame and the devil of pantomime, before being elevated into something uncommon again in Byron’s Don Juan; Valmont was promoted from subject of moral outrage to subject of analysis in Baudelaire’s “Notes sur Les Liaisons dangereuses”; Tannhäuser was retrieved from medieval German obscurity and 2 adopted as a subject by everyone who was anyone, at least in Aesthetic circles, becoming a sort of variorum edition of himself. That these characters are both popular and persistent is obvious; what is less clear is why the nineteenth century should have turned to this kind of morally dubious character in particular, and renovated their stories. One of the ways this question has been resolved critically is by discounting the immediacy of the nineteenth century’s interest. In Schooling Sex, James Grantham Turner traces the lineage of a particular genre of libertine discourse—the erotic-didactic text, in particular the predecessors and variants of Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica,—through its sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early-eighteenth-century evolutions. Any nineteenth-century engagement with the type is confined to an epilogue subtitled “Afterlife and Retrospect.” Though the epilogue nicely balances the prologue, which considers Chorier’s formative impact on the adolescent Casanova, by noting the text’s place on the shelves of the imaginary aesthetic libraries conceived by Baudelaire and Huysmans and its role as a foundation for Forberg’s taxonomy of sex, the epilogue’s treatment of these occurrences emphasizes their archival, rather than practical, deployment. The paragraph that briefly considers Chorier’s reuse in Baudelaire’s “Femmes damnées: Delphine et Hippolyte” and “Les Bijoux” lingers over the moments of direct translation, but appears to consider Baudelaire’s reinventions of the source material half measures rather than valid evolutions: the first poem becomes “something doom-laden and infernal” (393) because of Baudelaire’s inability to sustain true amorality; the second transforms “erotic metamorphosis into the detached, voyeuristic mode of the ‘Museum’” (394)—it becomes a retrospective allusion rather than a contemporarily reinvention. In Turner’s defense, his argument is heavily self-limiting from the outset—focusing only on the eroto-didactic 3 trope, the feminine point of view, and the early-modern timeframe—so it is reasonable that, as the fashion for the trope peters out, so does his interest. He also positions himself openly and aggressively in reaction to previous collections of libertine scholarship, those of Lynn Hunt and Catherine Cusset in particular, that seek to connect libertine literature with modernity. In spite of their “modern moments,” Turner contends “my hard-core texts…have been weakened by anachronistic assimilation into genres like ‘pornography’ and ‘the novel’” (395). This, I believe, underestimates the tenacity of such texts. Mere allusion may be chalked up to only a fashion for decadence or subtle intellectual aggrandizement, an erudite wink on the part of an author to a coterie of readers in the know; reinvention, however, in the manner of Baudelaire’s poems, speaks to the kind of ongoing relevance to the nineteenth century also seen in the lineage of Don Juan— immediate, contemporary, and practical. The intention of this argument is to demonstrate that nineteenth-century revivals of certain seduction narratives are more than just “archival” manifestations; they are eroto-didactic texts themselves, true to the tradition that Turner explores, but elevating the didactic effect outside the narrative itself, replacing the libertine instructor and the novice instructee of the seventeenth-century tradition with libertine text and novice reader of the nineteenth-century transformation. These texts are less about seduction than they are seductions themselves, and my intention is to treat them as rhetoric, to analyze their methods and, wherever possible, divine their aims. The seduction narratives in question are those concerning the characters mentioned earlier—Don Juan, Valmont, and Tannhäuser—and the focus of inquiry is into the manner in which they are redeployed in the works of four of the enfants terribles of the age—Byron, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and 4 Beardsley. These authors would have known libertine literature intimately—it occupied their bookshelves, is mentioned in their diaries, and headlined their theater programs and their opera nights. They would have been readers, just as cognizant of the means and methods of seduction as any of the previous century’s consumers of Molière, Mozart, Choderlos de Laclos, or John Cleland.

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